Don't say he was opposing capital punishment when he ruled against it. Why, no, not at all, His Honor Wendell Griffen explained. Kind of. According to him, he was only deciding a dispute over property rights--even if the property in question happened to be one of the drugs that the state of Arkansas would use to empty death row by the simple expedient of putting its occupants to death one after the other or, when rushed, in pairs or even threesomes.
The picture in Arkansas' Newspaper showing Judge Griffen prone on a cot surrounded by signs protesting the death penalty would seem to have conveyed the right impression about what this case and Judge Griffen's ruling on it were all about. Despite his profuse protestations. For his conduct on the bench and at public demonstrations grows less and less admirable and more and more impeachable. Like all of us, he's forgivable, but he's also proving incorrigible. Maybe his is a case not so much for legal analysts but psychological ones. Because a man's got to be more than a little obsessed to claim he was deciding a case about property rights when the effect of his unceasing actions is to halt or at least delay the state's rush to execute the condemned.
To argue otherwise, as the judge does, is to reduce a matter of life and death to just another dispute in chancery over the estate of the deceased. He might as well have claimed that the Crucifixion was only a dispute over who would get the dead man's cloak. Or as George Orwell put it, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." And there's no doubt that The Hon. Wendell Griffen aspires to be an intellectual in the worst way, and all too often succeeds.
"Whether I attended the Good Friday vigil or not does not change property law. Whether anyone approves or disapproves of me attending the Good Friday vigil does not change property law. Whether I support or am opposed to capital punishment does not change property law. I am entitled to practice my religion--whether I am a judge or not--even if others disapprove of the way I practice it." But whether he can sound like a solemn ass infatuated with his own mischievous pronouncements grows less and less debatable, and makes him a fitter subject for impeachment than for admiration.
The jurisprudence of Judge/Reverend Griffen has come to resemble less a body of law than a chain of legal train wrecks in the making. Turnabout being unfair play in his case, he filed a complaint against all seven members of the state's Supreme Court plus its attorney general for bad measure. He and his distinguished counsel claim that all of these jurists ganged up on him when they noted his obvious prejudice in such cases and disqualified him from ruling on them. Is this the law in its usual, slow-grinding operation or just a persecution complex grown ungovernable? At this rate, the whole show could go on as long as Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the classic example in literature of a case in chancery that never ends but just runs out of steam, any benefits having been eaten up by legal costs.
The philosophical case of We the People versus Wendell Griffen grows less debatable the more he orates from the bench or pulpit, which he seems to consider interchangeable. What a sad sight--to see all that obvious intelligence wasted on the kind of legal gamesmanship Judge Griffen practices as a legal specialty. So he mounted his charger and rode off in all directions, filing a complaint about the ethics of the state Supreme Court and demanding that all its members, plus the state's attorney general for bad measure, be hauled into court to answer for their impudence in daring to challenge the one and only (thank goodness) Wendell Griffen.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 05/03/2017