It's 2009

Old English drinking song

It is now 2009.

While for the most part, my life continues relatively normally, the new year does bring the occassional bump.

I happened to realize on Jan. 2 that we had a new circuit judge in Carroll County, so I made a call to his office to request the customary docket call sheet which I have been getting like clockwork from his predecessor.

I got a slight feeling that the message taker was not real familiar with the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, as she told me that she would call me back. But that never happened, and within an hour or so I had the sheet -- all one page of it with eight defendants in 11 cases.

That few number of cases is abnormal, but then there haven't been many arrests in the last month of so, and a large number of the cases are appeals of Berryville District Court cases, which bypass the customary arraignment step.

Those appeal cases come from Berryville District Court. Considering that Judge Kent Crow was the judge there and is now the county's circuit judge, and that Alan Epley now serves as a judge to fill in for circuit judges who have conflicts in cases, I figure I haven't seen the last of Judge Epley yet.

Looking through my records I found that each of the cases for Jan. 5 involved drugs, that is, methampehtamine or marijuana -- again fairly abnormal.

Perceived abnormalities aside, I was struck by the fact that felony criminal case did not set any records in 2008. The economic hardt imes that have hit the nation have not seemed to have much, if any, effect on the local crime rate.

But that seems to bear witness to the folk wisdom on my father, who used to say that northwest Arkansas is the last place to see an economic boom in good times, and the last place to see a depression in bad times, and when we do experience a boom or bust, its never as extreme as it is in other parts of the country.