by Joe Sullivan

The importance to a community of capable judges and prosecutors is hard to overstate. Any tendency Knox Countians might have to take these capabilities for granted or to make light of their importance should be dispelled by the stark choices posed in the August 4 county election.

Incumbent Circuit Court Judge Wheeler Rosenbalm, Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner, and District Attorney General Randy Nichols are each thoroughgoing professionals in their fields. The respect that they command within the legal community is both a testament and a contributor to their effectiveness, which turns in no small part on maintaining the trust of other lawyers with whom they deal. The same goes for Daryl Fansler who is seeking a vacant post on Chancery Court and whose services are already widely sought as a mediator of the extensive range of disputes on which a chancellor must rule.

Each of their opponents in the August election is poorly qualified, and the quality of justice and criminal prosecution in Knox County will suffer mightily if any of them gets elected.

It has become fashionable in some lay circles to view the work of lawyers and even the courts themselves with derision. The common perception is that they make life a lot more complicated (and expensive) than it ought to be by thriving on controversies that only legal practitioners spouting what seems like mumbo jumbo can resolve for the payment of hefty fees. But the truth is that the law is complex because the society we live in is enormously complex and would become totally chaotic without standards governing every facet of human and organizational conduct. Most lawyers are bent on the avoidance and resolution of disputes within this legal framework, and they in turn depend on the courts to uphold it in a knowledgeable and predictable manner.

Thus, when the members of the Knoxville Bar Association are polled on the qualifications of judicial candidates, the exercise is not some kind of popularity or political preference contest. Just as basketball players are in the best position to judge the competence and fairness of referees, so are lawyers in the case of judges and prosecutors with whom they deal professionally every day. And this analogy holds true in other ways as well. Mastery of the rules, the ability to control a game unobtrusively and to make decisions impartially even under the pressure of crowd favoritism are the hallmarks of a good basketball official. The same holds true judicially.

The results of the Bar Association poll shown in the table in this column say tons about which candidates can be trusted and which can't. Indeed, lawyers would be prone to say that they would rest an open-and-shut case on them. But for benefit of the electorate at large, some amplification is in order on the roles of each of the offices covered in the poll and what contributed to the evaluations of the candidates.

Circuit Court Judge [BF]

Circuit Court is where liability is determined for everything from personal injury and property damage to product liability and malpractice. Wheeler Rosenbalm has served with distinction as a judge of this court for the past eight years following 25 years in a wide-ranging private practice as a civil law trial attorney. He gets the highest marks of any candidate for a contested judgeship in any court in the Bar Association poll.

His Democrat opponent, Donald Overton, is a lawyer who also holds a civil engineering degree and has specialized in land use and construction law matters. His range of experience is far narrower than Rosenbalm's, and he gets the lowest marks of any judicial candidate in the Bar Association poll.

Chancellor [BF]

Chancery Court's jurisdiction is so diverse as to almost defy description. Just about any type of legal issue that doesn't involve a crime or monetary damages comes here. These range from contractual and property disputes to the intricacies of corporate and environmental law to challenges to governmental decisions (or between governments) over issues such as annexation, condemnation, and zoning.

In his 15 years of private practice, Daryl Fansler has not only acquired the breadth of experience but also demonstrated the acuity to rule on this array of complex matters (which a chancellor does on his own without a jury). As mediation has become increasingly favored by many lawyers as a less costly and more expeditious way to resolve such disputes than litigation, Fansler has become a favored mediator.

His opponent, Wayne Houser, has spent the past five years as a court appointed referee making interim decisions on child custody and child support in pending divorce cases. He won the Republican nomination with a good ol' boy style that featured door-to-door campaigning and lots of yard signs. But in the judgment of most of his peers, as reflected in the bar poll, he'd be a lost ball in high weeds as a chancellor.

Criminal Court Judge [BF]

Presiding over criminal trials is becoming an ever-more-complex responsibility. It requires a mastery of thousands of statutes, volumes of procedural standards, and sentencing guidelines along with an intense commitment to stay abreast of evolving constitutional interpretations of defendant's rights and technological developments that bear on issues such as the handling of DNA evidence.

During his six years on the bench, Richard Baumgartner has gained respect on all these counts from prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. He's also noted for his civility, diligence, and unflappable courtroom presence.

None of the above can be said for his opponent Gail Harris Jarvis. During her eight years as a judge on General Sessions Court (which has jurisdiction over small claims and misdemeanors), Jarvis has gained a widespread reputation for being erratic, intemperate, and sometimes downright crude. Her penchant for denying bail (and thus forcing the incarceration) of defendants for nothing more than delinquency in paying claim or court costs flies in the face of a state constitutional prohibition against denial of bail except in capital cases.

Perhaps the worst possible outcome in a criminal case is a conviction that is overturned on appeal because of trial court error. A retrial means lengthy delay, more overload on the judicial system, more anguish for victims and their families—and it can mean that justice is denied altogether because of an erosion of evidence with the passage of time.

Baumgartner can be relied on to play virtually errorless ball. Jarvis is sure to muff.

District Attorney General [BF]

Prosecuting crime in Knox County is big business. More than 25,000 criminal charges are entered in a year—on the order of 20,000 misdemeanors (for theft, vandalism, and the like) and upwards of 5,000 felonies for everything from grand larceny, drug dealing, and sexual assault to homicide.

Managing this caseload is the responsibility of District Attorney Randy Nichols, who gives direction to a staff of 60 including 31 attorneys involved in prosecutions. Since he assumed the post in 1992 (after serving as a Criminal Court judge), Nichols has gone a long way toward reducing a huge backlog of cases that were clogging up the courts and toward closing new cases on a more current basis. Through judicious use of plea and sentence bargains, with special emphasis on probation for first-time, nonviolent offenders, he's managed to concentrate his prosecutorial resources on the most serious crimes. (If every indictment handed down in Knox County went to trial, it would probably require about a 10-fold increase in the number of criminal courts [presently three] and prosecutors at a cost to taxpayers in excess of $10 million a year.)

It's hard for anyone who's not intimately involved with the process to assess the merits of Nichols' disposition of individual cases. But it's easy to adjudge the respective capabilities of Nichols and his opponent Jimmy Kyle Davis for giving direction to the process.

Nichols is a thoroughgoing professional who brings to the post both executive leadership and the legal grasp needed to make prosecutorial judgments on a case-by-case basis. Davis has no experience in running an operation of this scope and even his legal credentials are suspect.

While Davis purports to be a criminal defense lawyer, he has never tried a case in criminal court; and several other members of the criminal bar contend he is not competent to do so. "He'll plead a client blind rather than go to trial," says one.

It is ironic that Davis has made the central issue in his campaign against Nichols the elimination of plea bargains—which he subsequently confined to plea bargains for violent offenders. This kind of ploy may appeal to the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" mindset of many voters. But it is totally impractical and, coming from Davis, totally hypocritical.

It would be a travesty of justice to put someone as poorly qualified as Davis at the helm of criminal prosecution in Knox County.