Remembering Jack

It’s axiomatic to most doctors: best to leave the treatment of kin to other physicians. In the practice of medicine, professional courtesy helps enable professional detachment. Emotion can color judgment. In the practice of journalism there isn’t a parallel standard, though the concept applies: Don’t get personally close to the people about whom you’re reporting.

Ordinarily in this trade it’s easy to avoid any temptation to friendship. Jack Holt, Jr. made it difficult.

He was 93 at his death, Jack Holt, Jr., his heart — it was a large one — having told him it was time to go, no matter the protestations of his family and legion of friends. He believed he had given them, and his state and his country, all that he could, resolutely but cheerfully, even when the task at hand taxed his patience, which seemed unending, or his sense of fairness, which was boundless.

As my career was only beginning, Jack’s was well underway. After leaving active Air Force duty (he would remain in the reserve, rising to colonel in the Judge Advocate General corps) he had been, by gubernatorial appointment, state attorney general. Perhaps genetics played a role. Jack hailed from a family of politically active lawyers. His father had been a prosecutor, a circuit judge and Arkansas attorney general; a campaign for the U.S. Senate and two runs for governor were unsuccessful. Jack’s uncle Frank had a similar resume, having been a prosecutor, attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, though his quest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1966 fell short.

By the late 1960s Jack already had earned a reputation as among the ablest trial lawyers in Arkansas, his skills demonstrated in our initial encounter. A woman accused of fatally poisoning her husband, a prominent physician, seemed destined for conviction until an evidentiary hearing. A rookie reporter, I watched in chambers as Jack dismantled the state’s case, mandating its dismissal.

Over the decades our paths kept crossing, never unpleasantly, even when unpleasant matters took us to the same venue. Such as another storied homicide case, the 1974 killing of a well-known Searcy doctor’s wife. Three people were charged including the victim’s husband and his paramour, who became Jack’s client. Jack reviewed the state’s evidence and quickly concluded that the young woman had best cooperate with the prosecution lest she spend untold years behind bars. She followed his counsel, and the capital felony murder charge was reduced to manslaughter.

A decade later Jack was among the attorneys who helped rescue a colleague from the machinations of a rogue Pulaski County sheriff. The man had murdered his wife, the lawman claimed, and, by the way, tried to kill him — the sheriff — too. The allegations collapsed.

Jack’s contribution to a broader constituency — the state — had already begun. He was among the fact-finders appointed by a federal district judge to assess the Arkansas prison system. Their reports detailed what the judge eventually described as a “dark and evil world,” demonstrably inhumane and patently unconstitutional. A decade of prison reform began.

Public office beckoned. In 1984 Jack ran for chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court and won handily. He would serve a decade, during which the state judicial machinery underwent an enormous overhaul, largely at Jack’s instigation. There was a consolidation administrative functions and a reordering of the layers of courts. Municipal judges were authorized to handle comparatively minor complaints that previously had helped crowd circuit court dockets. A commission was created and staffed to investigate allegations of judicial misconduct or disability. And a major reform: Jurisdiction over youthful offenders was finally, mercifully, taken from county judges — in Arkansas they are managers, not truly judges; few if any have spent a day in law school — and routed to juvenile courts.

As a private citizen Jack had helped raise money for who knows how many friends seeking one or another office, but he dreaded asking for dollars for his own campaigns. He was of a Democratic bloodline and ran for chief justice as a Democrat, but after stepping down he stumped tirelessly for a constitutional amendment that made judicial races officially non-partisan. Jack’s hope for judicial elections free of any partisan association has since been dashed. Candidates for the courts now routinely appear at political party events and their campaign materials make plain their affiliations. You can’t win them all. Jack won enough, his share and then some.

It is customary in America for public figures to retain their titles upon leaving office, so the honorific “Judge” was his due. To some of us, more than a few, he was Jack.