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No Time Like The Present (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

Every time there’s a mass shooting in America, it’s “too soon” to talk about finding ways to prevent more of them. But they are so frequent that it’s always too soon, which is handy if you are satisfied with the status quo.

Similarly, people satisfied with the status quo seem to think it is “too close” to the judicial elections to actually talk about judicial elections or the people standing for election in them.

As soon as our incomparable Senior Editor Mark Friedman outlined in a Dec. 14 article the new strategy being used by certain lawyers — notably John Goodson of Texarkana — to avoid federal court scrutiny of class-action settlements, I started hearing that the story was politically motivated. Not that the story was wrong, mind you, just that it was unfair to publish it about 10 weeks before Goodson’s wife appears on the March 1 ballot for election to chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Actually, the timing had nothing to do with the election and everything to do with a hearing that was scheduled in Polk County Circuit Court. The story was what we call an “advance” — a story designed to prepare readers for an upcoming event — and Friedman had to hump it to get such a complex story in print before the Dec. 16 hearing. It would have been much easier on him to wait until closer to the election, had that been our primary concern, but it wasn’t.

Our primary concern was the fact that John Goodson and a group of lawyers that he often works with seem to have found a new way to work the system for their own benefit just three years after the U.S. Supreme Court found that their old class-action strategy was against the law. For Arkansas Business, this is a story about the business of law.

Unfortunately for Justice Courtney Goodson, who wants a promotion, U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III, the Western District’s chief federal judge, thought her husband’s new strategy was just as curious as we did. He’ll be holding a hearing next week, less than two weeks before the election, to consider whether to sanction her husband and more than a dozen other lawyers for abusing the federal court system.

Still, that’s all about her husband, not about Justice Goodson personally, right? Not exactly. As an enlightening series of articles in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette outlined, Goodson’s husband and his class-action clique were the biggest donors to Courtney Goodson’s campaigns and to the campaigns of other justices with whom she shares the bench.

Those stories, too, have been criticized as politically motivated. I’m certainly not privy to the decisions being made at the statewide daily, but campaign contributions are a standard topic for political reporting — and political coverage is how the D-G approached its reports on judicial contributions.

Was the series timed for maximum impact before the election? Gosh, I hope so. Judicial candidates are allowed to say very little as they run for the longest elected terms in the state — eight years — so I applaud the Democrat-Gazette for giving hapless voters something to consider besides the feel-good advertising that their donors pay for.

That advertising can sometimes leave a false impression, you see. When Justice Goodson ran for her current seat in May 2010, voters thought they were electing Courtney Henry, an experienced appeals court judge, wife and mother supported wholeheartedly by her campaign manager/husband, Fayetteville lawyer Mark Henry, and his politically connected parents, Dr. Morriss and Ann Henry.

But, as the Democrat-Gazette reminded in its recent series, Mark Henry filed for divorce a month after the election and, after one more month, was granted the divorce and primary custody of their three kids. When Justice Henry filed her required financial statement for that year, nearly $100,000 worth of gifts that began in June forced her to acknowledge that John Goodson had at some point become her boyfriend. They married in 2011.

Arkansans may not mind at all that their chief justice left her husband for the campaign donor who showered her with expensive gifts. A messy personal life doesn’t mean she’s incompetent as a judge. Voters may not mind that the new husband just keeps getting called on the carpet for using the class-action process in ways that seem to benefit him and his chums more than their clients.

But at least they have the opportunity to know those things before they vote for her rather than after it’s too late.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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