Wendell L. Griffen may have outdone even his litigious self by now, with the result that Arkansas' whole judicial system is caught up in litigation while the matter of Griffen versus everybody else in the judicial branch proceeds. Or maybe doesn't while the cross-complaints between the judge and the state's Supreme Court are untangled. If they ever can be. For ever new and more exasperating Wendell Griffen has managed to raise an ordinary legal snafu to the grand--well, grandiose--level of fouled up beyond all recognition.
Thank God for Mississippi, which has dispatched Rachel Michel to help J. Brent Standridge of Benton sort things out. Or try to. Good luck to both, for they'll need it. There are enough questions involved here to cross any counselor-at-law's eyes. On the surface, Wendell L. Griffen seems to have won only time in which to argue his expanding brief. But just give him still more time, he seems to be saying, and he will be vindicated yet again, even against all odds, and show why he's been right all along.
They tell a story in the old country about a condemned man who promises the king that, if the crown will only delay his execution, he'll show how he's taught a horse to talk. His friends were incredulous, but he replied: Every day gained is a victory. Yes, maybe his plea might be rejected and he'd be executed. Or maybe he'd put off his execution for another day this way. Or, who knows, maybe the horse would talk.
Lesson: It ain't over till it's over. Where there's life, there's hope--even for the most ridiculous of arguments. Which brings us back to Wendell Griffen's kind of jurisprudence, however dubious.
Last month, both David Sachar, who directs Arkansas' judicial commission, and his deputy director, Emily White, recused themselves from the Griffen case on the advice of Professor and once Chief Justice Howard Brill, who said their participating in it might represent a conflict of interest. Why's that? Because the state's judicial commission tends to confer with the state's judges about ongoing cases. Brother Griffen's cases aren't just going on; they show not the slightest sign of ever abating.
Howard Brill concluded his three-page letter to Director Sachar and Deputy Director White by telling them: "It is my belief that both of you are caught in an unacceptable dilemma with these allegations" made by Wendell Griffen against their law, impartiality and maybe the way they part their hair. Which is why we turn to Mississippi of all places.
It's all enough to bring back the long-ago case of a reporter for the New York Times who, when he heard that a grand jury in Arkansas was on his trail because he'd shown an interest in how this state's prisons were being run, threw all his belongings in his car and sped off to the all-too-sovereign state of Mississippi, where he would become perhaps the first man in recorded history ever to take refuge there.
Anybody looking into Wendell Griffen's ever more convoluted law can expect to find irony piled atop giddy irony, and now the whole of the Arkansas judiciary has sought a measure of refuge, assistance and comfort in the Magnolia state. History's wonders never cease. And neither, it appears, does Brother Griffen's capacity both to trouble and, we've got to confess, delight our all too conventional expectations from the law. For why settle for mere law when Wendell Griffen's variety of it continues to entertain even as it bedevils us ordinary mortals?
Editorial on 07/12/2017