Legal News

Judge Explains His Decision to Order Whites Out of Courtroom

By Dan Slater

I came out and saw the defendants, and it was about 99.9 percent Afro-Americans, and at some point in time, I excused some lawyers — most of them white — and said to the young people in here, ‘What in the world are you doing with your lives?’ — Judge Marvin Arrington on CNN

That decision — in which Arrington, a Georgia judge and the first full-time African-American student at Emory law school, ordered white lawyers to leave his courtroom so he could lecture black defendants — led Arrington to apologize on television recently.

“In retrospect, it was a mistake,” Arrington told CNN. “Because my sheriff said to me, ‘Judge, that message should be given to everybody’ — ‘Don’t violate the law, make something out of yourself, go to school, find a role model, somebody that will help you advance your life.’”

According to the report, Arrington said he was fed up seeing a parade of young black defendants shuffle into his courtroom. “I didn’t want them to think I was talking down to them; trying to embarrass them or insult them; be derogatory toward them,” said Arrington, explaining his decision to send the white lawyers out of the courtroom, “and I was just saying, ‘Please get yourself together.’”

On CNN, Arrington told Anderson Cooper that seeing the same faces walk in and out of his courtroom year after year takes its toll. “I ask them all the the time, ‘What progress are we making with you?’ And sometime they cannot answer.” He said he would open his court doors to everyone on Thursday and “I am going to give the same identical speech: ‘You’ve got to do better.’”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 31, 1969 (boomark / email).