The following article was released by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. For more information please contact John Lynch.

The guilty plea is a legally prescribed ritual in every Arkansas courtroom, but Pulaski County Circuit Judge Marion Humphrey made it his own during a career spanning two decades.

First there are the ceremonial demands required by state law, including a recitation by the judge of the defendants’ rights to stand trial, to challenge their accusers and to force prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The judge questions the defendants about their literacy and education, whether they’re satisfied with their attorney and whether they know what they’re giving up by pleading guilty, such as the right to appeal their conviction. He asks them twice if they are guilty, making sure they understand the prosecu- tion’s description of the crime and their right to challenge the state’s assertions.

With those legal demands satisfied comes the part that makes both defense attorneys and prosecutors nervous. Humphrey has his own questions, asked of defendants regardless of whether they are murderers, rapists, petty thieves, hot-check writers or drug addicts: Why did you do this? Didn’t you know it was wrong?

A plea agreement can be as fragile as a soap bubble, a product of intense, sometimes protracted, negotiations with defendants reluctant to take responsibility and accept punishment, a defense attorney anxious to provide the best representation and advice for a client, and a prosecutor hoping to see justice done.

A defendant’s answer to the judge can lead to more questioning, with Humphrey leaning forward, turning his head lionlike toward the defendant and peering over his glasses: Do you want to go to prison? Why do you behave this way? Didn’t you think about your family? What about the people you’ve hurt?

And sometimes the answers to Humphrey’s questions — when they show the defendant actually has a defense to the accusations or denies wrongdoing — can prompt the judge to throw out the guilty plea and set the case for trial. It can be a bad sign if the judge takes off his glasses and rubs his hands across his face.

But no more. The 61-yearold Humphrey has retired, leaving the bench to a protege who will establish his own rites, beginning today. After 22 years on the bench, four as district judge and the past 18 in circuit court, the man who has asked a thousand questions and heard as many answers says he leaves with questions of his own, still puzzled by the petty motivations that can drive people, particularly young men, to hurt one another.

“I honestly do not understand all of this violence among young people … particularly all of these gangs. I think it is such a waste of potential, it’s a waste of lives, it’s a waste of lives … money and energy,” Humphrey said. “That is something I leave here sad to behold because it continues. It hasn’t stopped.”

Society needs to find a way to reach these younger generations, he said, and teach them not only to make better choices, but to want to make those better choices as to how they live their lives. Too many young men have been overly influenced by a culture that teaches respect is something that is coerced, rather than earned, Humphrey said.

“It bothers me that so many of these murder cases that someone loses a child through utter nonsense … and it bothers me that someone else loses a child that has done something wrong and is deservedly put away for a long period of time,” he said.

And those answers he pursued — sometimes relentlessly — were never for himself, Humphrey said, but were sought for the defendant’s sake. Only by fully admitting what they’ve done wrong, he said, can defendants hope to learn from their mistakes.

“I want them to articulate it. They don’t want to stop and think about what they’ve done,” he said. “They don’t want to acknowledge that they have harmed someone else, they’ve done something that they’ve known better than to do. They just don’t want to go through that process. I’m not really trying to put them on the spot. I’m trying to make them address the situation.”

Raised poor in Pine Bluff by his mother, aunt and grandmother, Humphrey took advantage of programs for “disadvantaged” youth that took him north to New Hampshire, New Jersey and Massachusetts for an academic career at Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and Harvard Divinity School. But he always planned to come home, returning to graduate from the University of Arkansas School of Law, with an eye on public service.

With his future up in the air, Humphrey said he takes satisfaction that his replacement will be longtime friend Leon Johnson. Johnson, Humphrey’s first law clerk, has served as a regular substitute for Humphrey and came to public attention in 2000 when, as a gubernatorial appointee to the bench, he handled former President Bill Clinton’s disbarment case after four judges recused, each citing the appearance of conflicts because of ties to Clinton. A similar 2002 appointment as interim attorney general lasted only 11 days, but made Johnson the first black man to hold a state constitutional office.

Johnson said he’s learned a lot about his new position from watching Humphrey both in the courtroom and outside.

“He’s not a man who pretends to be one thing for some people and someone else for others,” Johnson said. “The one thing he impressed upon me is that you may not get a chance to do this again so you do this right the first time. You don’t do the popular thing, you don’t do the political thing. You do the right thing.”

Humphrey was successful on the bench because he always treated others with respect, even when they disagree, said Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley. The men have been at odds over the years, perhaps never more publicly than when Humphrey jailed two of Jegley’s prosecutors on a contempt charge 10 years ago.

“While we have really butted heads … I think we’ve become and will remain friends,” said Jegley, the circuit’s top prosecutor since 1997. “We’ve had intense disagreements, but I think it’s a tribute to his character that he has never translated that into anything personal or vindictive.”

That kind of respect extended to everyone in the courtroom, said Chief Public Defender Bill Simpson who appeared before Humphrey every day of the judge’s circuit career and said the judge set an example for others.

“It made me a better person,” Simpson said. “He was a man of integrity, honesty and faith … a role model.”

Humphrey’s courtesy included the small touches of remembering the names of law students who worked in his courtroom, Simpson said. The judge presided with an innate sense of fairness that impressed even the defendants, he said.

“He wanted to hear everything from both sides,” said Simpson, a public defender for more than 30 years. “I never had a defendant complain about the judge. They knew they were getting a fair trial … a fair hearing.”

Fellow Judge Alice Gray said Humphrey embodies the spirit of the judiciary.

“To me, he’s always been the judge,” she said at a recent reception to honor Humphrey. Humphrey has a talent for seeing people’s true character, no matter who they are. “Judge Humphrey is the kind to see the good instead of the bad,” she said. “But there were young men he couldn’t and they’re in the pen.” It was at his and Johnson’s encouragement that she first ran for office alongside Humphrey in 1992, Gray said.

“He saw something in me and he chose me to run his staff,” she said. “They saw something in me I didn’t see in myself.”

Humphrey’s departure leaves Gray as the last of the Pulaski County judges to be first elected under the Hunt Decree, the 1992 court settlement from a federal Voting Rights Act lawsuit intended to expand black representation in Arkansas’ judiciary. The agreement requires five of the 17 circuit judges in the 6th Judicial Circuit of Perry and Pulaski counties to be elected from 37 predominately black precincts out of the 136 precincts in Pulaski County, comprising the southern and eastern portions of Pulaski County. Humphrey said the arrangement is still necessary to protect guaranteed fair representation by blacks on the judiciary.

Not all of Humphrey’s accomplishments have been in the courtroom. He and his wife, Vernita, are parents of 22-year-old Marion Andrew Humphrey Jr. and celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary two days after Christmas. A former assistant attorney general and assistant Little Rock city attorney, Humphrey, who is also a Presbyterian pastor, said his future plans are undecided, but include a private law practice. His future also likely holds a place somewhere in partisan politics, he says, a role forbidden to him for a third of his life because of judicial ethics rules.

That’s hardly surprising coming from a man who’s worked for trail-blazing black New York Congressman Shirley Chisholm and Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, campaigned for Jesse Jackson and Al Gore, run unsuccessfully for a state Senate seat representing his hometown of Pine Bluff and considered a run for the U.S. Senate to replace David Pryor.

Whatever path he chooses, Humphrey will surely continue to be an advocate, predicted an old law school classmate recently.

“I know you’re not retiring. I know you’re not going to stroll off into the sunset,” said Circuit Judge Vann Smith, the circuit’s administrative judge. “I know if you don’t like what we’re doing, you’ll let us know.”

Friends look forward to seeing what Humphrey will do next.

“I think he’s going to catch his breath,” said Democratic consultant Bill Paschall who, with the Rev. William Robinson of Hoover United Methodist Church, orchestrated Humphrey’s first successful race for a city judgeship that saw Humphrey defeat three other candidates. The men remain close friends to this day. “He’s valuable to the community. He’s got a good mind. He cares. I believe there’s some advocacy role for him out there in the future. Hopefully, he’ll find something that will keep him in public view and be an advocate for those who need help.”