Interpreter in the Front Line
JUDGES
(See Cover) Every major confrontation imprints names and images on the minds of those who witness it, and the struggle for civil rights has left deep imprints, especially in the South. There were the marchers streaming over Selma's Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, Ala., after having been stopped by tear gas and cattle prods the day before. There was the blank puzzlement on the faces of Collie Leroy Wilkins and his two accomplices after their conviction for violating the civil rights of Selma Marcher Viola Liuzzo, after they had been previously acquitted of murdering her. There were the pictures of Negro voters forming a long line outside an Alabama coun- try store to vote for the first time; of Governor George Wallace "standing in the school-house door"; and of a younger Martin Luther King (before his Nobel Prize) organizing and leading the Montgomery bus boycott through to success.
Millions of Americans know these names and remember these scenes. Yet few know the name of the man central to them all, Frank Minis Johnson, the U.S. district judge for Alabama's 23 southeastern counties. At 48, Johnson has established an impressive record of calm and considered judgment that has stamped him as one of the most important men in America. In 11 1/2 years of inter- preting and enforcing the U.S. Constitution, he has wrought social and political changes that affect all of Alabama, all of the South, all of the nation.
The Man Who. It was Frank Johnson who applied the school-desegregation decision to the Montgomery bus system-- and thus helped speed desegregation of all public facilities in the South. It was Frank Johnson who ordered both marchers and police to halt their confrontation at Selma, and then-- although he disapproves of most demonstrations-- gave the marchers permission to go ahead.
It was Frank Johnson who sat as a member of the three-judge court that abolished the Alabama poll tax; that handed down the first order requiring a state to reapportion its devised by judges. It was Frank who so inspired an Alabama with a sense of responsibility that it was able to convict the three Ku Klux Klansmen who gunned down Viola Liuzzo on the road back to Montgomery from Selma. It was Frank Johnson whomustered the three-judge court that has just ordered desegregation of all of Alabama's 118 school districts next fall--the first such statewide ruling in the nation, and perhaps the most important school order since the Supreme Court's school decision of 1954.
Vision & Conscience. Johnson's record is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that federal district judges--314 of them in 97 U.S. district courts throughout the country--are more vulnerable to local pressures than any other members of the federal bench. Not only is a district judge drawn from his locality; he almost always owes his job to his state's dominant politicians--particularly the U.S. Senators. Chosen by men committed to local interests, he is then sworn to uphold national principles that may conflict with those interests.
Alabama-born and bred, Johnson could not be more sensitive to his state's cherished traditions and prejudices. His courtroom in Montgomery is only seven blocks from the statehouse, where a band played Dixie while Jefferson Davis was sworn in as Confederate Presi- dent, and where Lurleen Wallace now sits as Governor. Yet for Johnson, a rare Republican in, a Democratic state, legal vision and the dictates of conscience have always outweighed local pressure. He rejects labels--liberal, conservative or any other. His sole cause is not civil rights but the law. "I'm not a segregationist," he says, "but I'm not a crusader, either. I don't make the law. I don't create the facts. I interpret the law."
Such dispassion is all the more impressive now that the steam has gone out of the civil rights movement. Johnson could easily soft-pedal equal rights--many of the Confederacy's 70 U.S. district judges have done just that. But he goes on applying the law to the facts in every case. Says he: "I don't see how a judge who approaches these cases with any other philosophy, particularly if he was born and reared in the South, can discharge his oath and the responsibility of his office."
Questions & Answers. Unmentioned in the Constitution, that office goes back to 1789, when U.S. district courts were set up with jurisdiction limited largely to maritime cases and suits between citizens of different states. But as federal law grew after the Civil War, so did the need for U.S. trial courts with broader scope. In 1875, district courts were given jurisdiction over a wide range of federal questions. District judges now handle every sort of lawsuit under the federal sun--including antitrust cases, bank robberies, bankruptcies, draft evasion, obscenity suits, patent infringements, railroad disputes, tax dodging and habeas corpus petitions from state prisoners (up 36% since 1963). Also copyright infringements, kidnaping, moonshining cases, compensation for injuries at sea and auto accidents involving citizens of different states (20% of all civil cases), and such federal misdemeanors as trapping migratory birds, concealing letters in parcel-post packages. And a lot more.
The civil case load rises relentlessly over the years. From 58,293 cases in 1961, it climbed to 79,906 last year. One reason is that many lawyers prefer federal to state courts on the ground that the judges are abler, the jurors brighter and the rules fairer. It has not done any good to hike the minimum dollar amount involved in many federal suits to $10,000: lawyers simply sue for more. Though Congress has added 73 district judges since 1961, almost 10% of all civil cases still take more than three years to settle.
Power & Prestige. None of this discourages lawyers from seeking district judgeships; for the last 63 appointments, 800 volunteered their services. Away from the urban anonymity of such hydraheaded courts as New York's 24-judge Southern District, a local U.S. judge may control a federal fiefdom that makes him a prime public figure. The $30,000-a-year salary may seem low viewed from Wall Street or Chicago's LaSalle Street, but it goes a long way in most areas, and the status is unbeatable. Appointed for life (barring misconduct), district judges are untouched by re-election pressures and are subject to no real discipline save a higher court's reversal. Kings of their courtrooms, they can set the whole constitutional tone in their areas. They can speed up or delay cases, comment on trial evidence, discipline lawyers, hold gadflies in contempt, and try many matters without a jury.
In many cases, the country's lowest-ranking federal judges can overrule the highest state judges. In 1908, district judges acquired wide-ranging power over cases in which state laws and actions are challenged as unconstitutional. If they so choose, federal judges can sometimes make litigants go to state courts first--a handy delaying technique for segregationist Southern judges.
Senatorial Courtesy. Indeed, the whole selection system may produce judges more attuned to local prejudice than to national principle. By law and by custom, the President appoints federal judges with the Senate's advice and consent. But if one of the state's Senators protests that the judicial nominee is "personally objectionable" to him, the whole Senate usually honors his veto. A lawyer's best route to the bench, therefore, is electioneering for Senators and the President. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the chief enforcer of "senatorial courtesy" is Mississippi Segregationist James O. Eastland. If he disapproves, a President's nominee may never make it unless he is "traded out" for one of Eastland's own favorite candidates for another judgeship.
In this situation, Southern Democratic Senators have managed to load the Southern bench with segregationists. Having no Southern Republican Senators to contend with, President Eisenhower managed to appoint some first-rate Southern Republican judges--notably, Elbert Tuttle and John Minor Wisdom of the trail-blazing U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has often kept the Constitution alive in the South. But Ike also had to trade with Eastland for several segregationists, and John Kennedy recoiled from offending Southern Democrats whose Senate votes he needed. Of Kennedy's eight Deep South appointees, four verge on racism.
Among the Kennedy appointees entrenched for life in Southern district courts: Mississippi's Judge W. Harold Cox, 65, who once called Negro would-be voters "chimpanzees"; Louisiana's Judge E. Gordon West, 52, who called the Supreme Court's 1954 school ruling "one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time"; and Georgia's Judge J. Robert Elliott, 57, who once said: "I don't want these pinks, radicals and black voters to outvote those who are trying to preserve our segregation laws and traditions." Little can be done about such Jim CroMagnons short of impeachment--a tactic used successfully only four times since 1789.
Shotgun in Bed. In the interests of constitutional government, other judges have stood fast against angry Negroes, Northern militants, Southern thugs, canny state lawyers and waves of state laws designed to perpetuate segregation. Many judges have been ostracized by old friends, abused by nocturnal phone callers, wiretapped by state agents, threatened with death. So hounded was South Carolina's Judge J. Waties Waring in the early 1950s that he retired and moved to New York. Refused local police protection in 1955, Alabama's Judge Hobart Grooms slept with a shotgun for months. But slowly, because of such dogged constitutionalists, the pall of segregation is being lifted from the South--from the schoolhouse to the bus station, from the jury box to the ballot box.
Boldly facing down the entire state legislature, Louisiana's Judge J. Skelly Wright desegregated New Orleans schools in 1961. With devastating dignity, Florida's Judge Bryan Simpson quashed bloody disorders in St. Augustine in 1964. By holding Bogalusa's do-nothing police in contempt, Louisiana's Judge Herbert Christenberry prevented a bloodletting among rights workers in 1965. Even rigidly segregated Plaquemines Parish fell to Christenberry's school-integration order in 1966, and Mississippi's foot-dragging Judge Cox now concedes that "segregation is completely out the window."
Catfish Row. Since 1955, one of the principal battlegrounds of the law has been the district courtroom on the second floor of Montgomery's post office, a federal outpost that flies the Stars and Stripes rather than the Stars and Bars that top the statehouse. Frank Johnson's courtroom is stylishly WPA, a towering place with ornate ceiling beams, a gallery, and a bench that stands before a blue wall studded with gold stars. Through a door in the starry wall strides the judge, lean and tanned in his unvarying crisp black suit, white shirt and black tie. He usually shuns robes: "If a judge needs a robe and a gavel, he hasn't established control."
Control was the word for Johnson in the recent trial of Harvey King Conner, a former Elmore County deputy sheriff charged with beating a Negro motorist to death last November. A county grand jury refused to indict the 200-lb. Conner, although two state troopers had seen him hitting the 155-lb. Negro with a blackjack. He was therefore tried in Johnson's court on the federal charge of having denied the victim's civil rights.
On the bench, Johnson perched half-moon spectacles on his patrician nose; his brown eyes scanned a document in the Conner case. He peered up from under bushy brows; a hush fell. The room was jammed with veniremen: Negroes as well as whites, women as well as men--a Johnson jury. Only one Negro survived defense challenges--an elderly Negro brickmason who later voted for conviction--but that might have happened in northern Maine. At one point, a defense lawyer mocked a Negro witness in the patronizing accents of Catfish Row. Objection by the prosecution. "Sustained," snapped Johnson. "Such remarks have no bearing on this case." At another point, a Government lawyer thudded to the floor in a dead faint. Pandemonium. Unfazed, Johnson intoned, "The other lawyers will carry on." They did. Conner was acquitted with all the fairness that can be wrung out of the jury system in Alabama.
Mutual Bell. One civil rights lawyer says that Johnson "runs his courtroom like a ship in the old tradition, like an English man-o'-war. He is about as good as a trial judge can.be." Another rights lawyer calls Johnson "entirely fair. You can never tell whether he's going to rule for you or against you." Even lawyers on the other side of the civil rights fence cannot restrain themselves. Adds one:
"He's the quickest at grasping points of complicated cases of any judge I've ever seen." Says another Alabamian: "He gives 'em all hell."
The classic example occurred in 1961 after Montgomery police watched idly as Freedom Riders were beaten. Sternly enjoining all parties from further action and reaction, Johnson limned a segregationist's nightmare: "If there are other such occurrences, I'm going to put some Klansmen, some police officials and some Negro preachers together in the U.S. penitentiary."
Republican Island. Johnson's austere impartiality is a family trait. As the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, Great-Grandfather James Wallace Johnson was so fair that people called him "Straight Edge." Frank Johnson grew up in northern Alabama's non-Negrophobe Winston County. Because it had few slaves in 1861, Winston refused to secede in the Civil War (Johnson's forebears fought on both sides) and stayed neutral as "the Free State of Winston." It remains independently Republican. At one point, Johnson's father was the only Republican in the Alabama legislature--a situation that is now an ironic impossibility, since Johnson reapportioned the state. Combined by the judge with a more populous Democratic county, the Winston district now elects a Democratic legislator.
Johnson's mother was born Alabama Long. His father was once elected Winston County probate judge, and young Frank loved to hang around Daddy's courtroom listening to lawyers arguing cases. (Johnson's only child, Johnny, 18, does the same today.) All the same, Johnson did not decide to become a lawyer until he had graduated from Mississippi's Gulf Coast Military Academy, worked as a surveyor, spent a year in business college and, at 19, married a Winston County girl named Ruth Jenkins. Both worked their way through the University of Alabama.
Ruth graduated first and helped the family finances by teaching speech at nearby Tuscaloosa County High School. One of her ace pupils was Lurleen Burns, now Governor Lurleen Wallace. One of Frank's law classmates was George Wallace, a sometime bantamweight boxer and big man on campus. Even then, recalls Johnson, Wallace had "an uncanny ability to sense moves and determine an effective appeal."
George courted Lurleen at a local dime store, where she was a 16-year-old clerk, then went off to World War II service as a B-29 crewman (nine combat missions in the Pacific). The war also separated the Johnsons. Ruth served as a WAVE lieutenant in Washington, editing secret papers for an admiral on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An infantry lieutenant in Patton's army, Frank won a Bronze Star in the Normandy invasion, was wounded twice and sent back to England as a legal officer.
Activist Opener. Back home in Alabama, Trial Lawyer Johnson discovered the sometime profit of being a Southern Republican. Though Stevenson swept Alabama in 1952, Johnson served as one of Eisenhower's nine state campaign managers. His reward: appointment, at 34, as U.S. attorney for northern Alabama. His two-year record: impressive. In one of the few such cases since Reconstruction, for example, Johnson won a peonage conviction against two Alabama planters who had paid Mississippi jailers to bind Negro prisoners over to them. In 1955 fate intervened with the death of the U.S. judge for Alabama's Middle District. Johnson drew up a modest resume, won the support of state G.O.P. leaders, met Ike in Washington and got the job one week past his 37th birthday.
Far younger than most new district judges (average age: 51), Johnson quickly made a name for himself in 1956 by extending the Supreme Court's school decision to Montgomery's segregated buses. In Browder v. Gayle, Johnson joined with Circuit Judge Richard T. Rives (a Truman appointee) on a three-judge panel to hand down a decisive majority vote to desegregate the buses.
More Than Peanuts. The result not only vindicated Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycott--it also keyed Johnson's whole judicial development. If a right applied in one area, he quickly applied it in another--always in spare, lucid opinions based on rock-hard facts. Thus, in 1963, Johnson broadened the Supreme Court's famous Gideon right-to-counsel decision (1961) by ruling that court-appointed lawyers must be paid for their services because the Constitution requires "effective" counsel. Congress soon followed with a law requiring payment in federal courts everywhere in the U.S. Conversely, last year Johnson condemned another kind of legal pay: the fees for convictions that Alabama justices of the peace had long pocketed as their only income. That ruling, faithful to a widely ignored 1927 decision of the Supreme Court, may kill the archaic j.p. system all over the South. "If a judge has a financial stake in the outcome," says Johnson, "he's disqualified."
Even in the 75% of his cases that resemble any other district judge's--from bankruptcy to counterfeiting--Johnson is a judge of rare innovation. Before handing out sentences in open court, for example, he follows the unusual practice of inviting all defendants and their families to discuss presentencing reports in the privacy of his chambers. His compassion is evident in even the most minor cases--many of which inevitably involve race. In one, a white man had allegedly hired four Negroes to help him steal peanuts from a federal warehouse. The jury acquitted the white man, convicted the Negroes. Poker-faced, Johnson dropped a balancing thumb onto the scales of Alabama justice as he handed down the Negroes' sentence: 30 minutes in the custody of the U.S. marshal.
Happy Reversal. In 1957, in another balancing problem--inequities in voting--Johnson's hewing to the law earned him his only civil rights reversal by the Supreme Court. In Tuskegee, where Negroes outnumber whites 4 to 1, the state legislature had gerrymandered the city in a 28-sided figure that barred all but four Negroes from voting in municipal elections. Citing Supreme Court precedents, Johnson held that he had no power over that particular kind of state action. By disagreeing, in Go-million v. Lightfoot (1960), the Supreme Court took the crucial step toward its historic "one man, one vote" decision in Baker v. Carr (1962). Not unhappy with the reversal, Johnson then restored the boundary lines in Tuskegee, where Negroes were soon elected to office.
Since then, the Supreme Court has sustained Johnsonian opinions all the way. After Baker gave U.S. courts power over state voting districts, Alabama tried to base apportionment of the legislature's upper house on geography rather than population. A three-judge court including Johnson voided that idea in Reynolds v. Sims (1962), which produced the first court order for reapportionment in U.S. history. After that, Alabama tried to bar Negro legislators by combining white and Negro counties. In voiding that scheme in Sims v. Baggett (1965), the judges reapportioned the legislature themselves--another national first.
Freezing Formula. Johnson has long been the foremost champion of voting rights on the Southern bench--even though he was temporarily stymied in the early stages of U.S. v. Alabama, launched in 1959 as the first major test of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. In Macon County, 97% of eligible whites were registered to vote v. 8% of eligible Negroes--the familiar result of intimidation and tricky tests applied only to Negroes. To avoid giving the federal courts a target for injunction, the Macon registration board periodically resigned. The tactic worked; Johnson found that the 1957 rights law authorized suits only against "persons." When the registrars resigned, there were no persons left to act against. The Justice Department could not sue the Governor, since he does not exercise direct control of registrars; Johnson therefore had to refuse an injunction plea against "the registrars of Macon County."
As a direct result of this adverse ruling, the 1960 Civil Rights Act authorized voting suits against states and state governmental groups as well as persons. In 1961, Johnson duly rapped the Macon board's "puny excuses" and enjoined its assorted subterfuges. Most important, he ordered the board to register any Negro whose qualifications equaled those of the "least qualified white." Called the "freeze doctrine," that rule for righting imbalances became the Fifth Circuit's standard formula in voting cases, and was substantially incorporated into the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Reflex Anger. Before the passage of that act, militant civil rights leaders descended on the Dallas County city of Selma in March 1965. They delighted at the reflex anger of Dallas Sheriff Jim Clark and his mounted "posse men," his electric-shock cattle prods, and forced marches of Negro children. After the inevitable clash on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when 650 Negroes met tear gas and clubs, Judge Johnson enjoined both Governor George Wallace and Martin Luther King from further action. Then he pondered a tough issue--whether to let the Negroes cross Pettus Bridge, march on Route 80 to Montgomery, and petition Governor Wallace for their voting rights.
Johnson permitted the march in an opinion holding that "the right to assemble, demonstrate and march peaceably along the highways and streets in an orderly manner should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested against. In this case, the wrongs are enormous."
He has also ruled in the other direction. In 1966, he refused jurisdiction in a school-desegregation case after finding that Negroes had assaulted the principal and become a "hysterical mob." Also rebuffed: 167 persons who disobeyed police while picketing the state capitol. As Johnson saw it, civil righteousness is no excuse for lawlessness.
Last-Ditch Verdict. Soon after Selma came Johnson's finest hour of putting down lawlessness: the trial of the three Klansmen for gunning down Detroit Housewife Viola Liuzzo on Route 80 after the march. A Lowndes County jury had acquitted Collie Leroy Wilkins, though an FBI informant testified that he saw Wilkins commit the murder.
The case then moved to Johnson's court. In a 30-page charge to the jury, Johnson painstakingly discussed the American trial system as "a beacon of hope and a last resort for the protection of individual citizens." Solemnly, he called for a verdict that "rests completely upon the proposition of justice rendered by an impartial court and rendered by twelve impartial jurors."
After 24 hours' deliberation, the jury reported back "hopelessly deadlocked." Coolly Johnson replied: "There is no reason to assume that the case will ever be submitted to twelve more intelligent, more impartial or more competent men to decide it, or that more or clearer evidence will be produced on one side or the other." He sent them back. After three more hours, the jury reached a verdict: guilty. Johnson sentenced all three Klansmen to the maximum ten years in prison.
Positive Clout. Predictably, Johnson's bold blows for justice have triggered an increasing number of collisions with George and now Lurleen Wallace. Johnson's current battle with the Wallaces grows out of a 1963 case in which he ordered twelve Negro students admitted to all-white Tuskegee High School. After the whites switched to a private school, receiving state tuition grants of $185 a year, Governor George Wallace sent 216 state troopers to bar the Negro children from the high school. In the ensuing struggle, Wallace mobilized the Alabama National Guard, President Kennedy federalized it, and Wallace closed the school. Johnson put the Negroes in other white schools--and a five-judge court convened at Johnson's request ordered Wallace to quit sabotaging desegregation.
This March that order was given the most positive clout in Southern school history. Invoking the 14th Amendment, a three-judge court mustered by Johnson ordered Alabama to "take affirmative action to disestablish state-enforced or -encouraged" segregation across the state. Wallace & Co. could no longer pin the rap on individual school boards, said the court. By all evidence, the state itself controls all public schools and most state colleges. As a result, Alabama has the lowest percentage of Negro integration of any state (2.4%). More than 25% of Negro high schools are unaccredited, compared with 3.4% of the white schools. School spending is $607 for each white student, only $295 for Negroes. Of the state's 28,000 teachers, only 76 teach students of another race.
Affirmative Precedent. To right the wrongs, Johnson's court issued a top-to-bottom desegregation plan that allows every student to designate the school of his choice. Choices must be made during the current school year, with no second guesses permitted when the new year begins. If overcrowding results, students will be assigned to the schools nearest their homes, without regard to race or color. The state is enjoined to foster integration in all other areas of public education: the location of new schools, faculty assignments, bussing, and spending per pupil.
Much of this plan for Alabama, notably the school-choice system, was echoed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month in a no-nonsense decision ordering "affirmative" desegregation next fall in all grades in seven school districts in Alabama and Louisiana. The Supreme Court has refused to stay that order. District courts are now obliged to apply it throughout the Fifth Circuit's territory: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and
Texas. After 13 years of deliberate delay, 77.5% of the South's Negro pupils are still segregated; now they may get a crack at equal education.
The "affirmative action" precedent may some day be used to attack de facto segregated schools in the North as well. Not that Northern judges are yet obliged to follow the precedent: its applicability depends on proof that a segregated system is the result of unconstitutional state action. Meanwhile, the Wallaces are apparently determined to stage a dramatic happening in Alabama next fall--a confrontation between state and federal forces comparable to Little Rock. George has already declared: "You know what we're goin' to tell them when they ask us to give 'em more in the schools of Alabama this fall? I'll tell you what we'll tell 'em: 'Goddammit, we jus' ain't."
Toward that end, Lurleen delivered a TV speech in March invoking the discredited doctrine of interposition--the notion that a state government can halt any federal action it deems unconstitutional. Conjuring up visions of parents being jailed wholesale by federal agents, Lurleen asked the legislature to hire more state troopers. Not only must all Alabamians resist desegregation "in every possible way," cried Lurleen, but "the entire nation is the battlefield! This is what Hitler did in Germany!"
The argument failed to impress a group of three Southern Governors convened by George and Lurleen to map strategy against the integration order. But it was bound to go down well in Alabama, where State Education Superintendent Austin R. Meadows said last summer: "Segregation is the basic principle of culture. The good segregate themselves from the bad." Avoiding euphemism, Alabama's Chief Justice J. Edwin Livingston says plainly: "I'm for segregation, and I don't care who knows it. I would close every school from the highest to the lowest before I would go to school with colored people."
Unlisted Number. Judge Johnson pays no attention. Two boys once burned a cross in his front yard, but to Johnson it was just a prank. After anonymous callers threatened to bomb his family, he simply got an unlisted number; federal agents have periodically guarded his comfortable ranch house ever since. He keeps a current file on all active Alabama Klansmen. Asked whether his wires are tapped, Johnson lights up another Home Run cigarette (a brand that makes Gauloises seem bleu by comparison) and noncommittally drawls: "I've made a studied effort to avoid areas of paranoia."
It takes an effort. When the judge's son Johnny was attending a private school in Montgomery, George Wallace chortled that Johnson was evading desegregation, and state agents descended on the school to investigate alleged "Communist overtones." No clues have yet led to the persons unknown who set off a bomb outside the Montgomery home of Johnson's 69-year-old mother two weeks ago. The Johnsons have lost friends, though "none we wanted to keep." They belong to Montgomery's handsome country club, but the judge confines his avid golfing (mid-80s) to a few open-minded military partners at nearby Maxwell Air Force Base, where "it's easier to be just Frank Johnson." He is not about to defend his decisions by writing articles or giving law-school lectures. "Judges make their decrees," he says. "They can't sell 'em."
One of Johnson's rare lapses into the luxury of legal lecturing comes each May 1--declared Law Day by President Eisenhower in 1958. Johnson regularly schedules naturalization ceremonies for that day to emphasize the supremacy of the law. Last week Johnson assembled 41 new Americans in his Montgomery courtroom to make points not only about the law in general, but about the law as it pertains specifically to the Alabama and the U.S. of 1967.
"It is necessary," he said, "now more than ever, that the responsible American citizen realize and discharge his obligation constantly to support and defend the proposition that our law is supreme and must be obeyed. This means that irresponsible criticism--by those who can hardly read the Constitution, much less study it and interpret it--must not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
"When those who frustrate the law, who undermine judicial decisions, run riot and provide uncurbed leadership for a return to nothing more than medieval savagery, for the responsible American citizen to remain silent is tantamount to cowardice; it is a grievous injustice to the proposition that in America the law is supreme."
On or off the bench, Judge Johnson has rarely been silent.
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