NAWJ Monthly Update March 2015
Written by National Association of Women Judges|March 01, 2015|Monthly Update Archive
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Greetings,
February and March are significant months in bringing to the forefront the importance of addressing issues of equality in our ongoing national conversation. They are the months designated to observe, remind and educate us about Black History (February) and Women's History (March) in our country. We both pay tribute to significant accomplishments, and honor pioneers and those who dedicated their lives in an effort to realize equality, and at the same time express acute frustration bordering on outrage at that which remains the same. It is at this time we take particular note of the recent fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and of the March on Selma, and of the sixtieth anniversary of the landmark desegregation case, Brown v. The Board of Education. It is the time we pause to take note that three of the nine members of the U.S Supreme Court are women, including the first Latina Associate Justice. It is these ongoing moments of taking stock that underscore the importance of the NAWJ's mission-driven goals to further justice for all, which is at the foundation of this year's theme - Voices of Justice: Keeping the Promise of the Rule of Law through Enhancing Diverse Judicial Leadership. It is these very topics that dominate our upcoming NAWJ Midyear Meeting and Leadership Conference in Chicago at the historic Palmer House Hotel, April 23-25.
While attending the Commission on Women meeting at the ABA midyear last month, along with our former presidents and NAWJ representatives, Nan Duffly and Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, I once again witnessed the vehement call to action to end discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, and condemnation of human trafficking by former ABA president, Laurel Bellows. We are privileged to have Laurel, a longstanding ardent advocate for women's rights, as our Chicago conference opening keynote luncheon speaker on April 23rd. Additionally, the milestone work of researching, collating and analyzing the current status of women in the legal profession by another lead NAWJ conference presenter, attorney Stephanie Scharf, was repeatedly referenced by this august gathering of national women leaders.
The 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was quietly signed into law in 1920, after fifty-two years of an unrelenting campaign of meetings, marches and repeated attempts at state ratifications, using the same draft by Susan B. Anthony that had been first introduced in 1878. The first woman to sit on a State Supreme Court was Florence Ellenwood Allen in Ohio in 1923. Born the following year in 1924 was NAWJ's pioneer, the Hon. Joan Dempsey Klein, who gathered together with her African American colleague, the Hon. Vaino Spencer, a hundred 'intrepid' women to found the National Association of Women Judges.
Cheryl Brown Henderson, the daughter of Oliver Brown - the plaintiff in Brown v The Board of Education, and the director of the Brown Foundation, is the Chicago conference keynote on Friday, April 24th. Ms. Henderson will address issues of poverty, education and race in our country, incorporating the past with ongoing present day challenges, including overrepresentation and other significant concerns in our criminal justice system, and will be a catalyst for confronting the difficult issues that lay endlessly in our future as a society and country. Later, panel presentations on Access to Justice through Diverse Leadership and Restorative Justice will continue these discussions and exchanges with attendees.
A glimpse into where we have come and how far we have yet to go on issues of gender and racial equality was provided when I was invited as the NAWJ President to attend the annual meeting in January of the Conference of Chief Justices. I was pleased to note that 19 of the 50 states and D.C. have a woman Chief Justice, many of whom are active committee chairs including our former president, Hon. Dana Fabe and former board officer Hon. Barbara Madsen. At the same time, I continue to be extremely concerned about the tactics that are being utilized to unseat a number of our leading jurists, clearly motivated by other than the assessment of judicial qualifications. I was privileged to spend time with the exceptionally wise Hon. Shirley Abrahamson, Wisconsin's first woman Chief Justice who, after nearly forty years on the court, and almost twenty years as Chief Justice, is witnessing a movement fueled in part by outside donations to amend her state's constitution as to how the chief justice is determined.
Another remarkable judicial leader I had the honor of getting to know far better at the CCJ conference is the Hon. Bernette Joshua Johnson. No more evident is the challenge of assuming the position rightfully earned in this 21st century than the contentious battle which worked its way through the courts last year in order for this very well respected appellate judge to be named Louisiana's Chief Justice, becoming the first black woman chief in Louisiana, almost a decade after the 2005 ascension in Georgia of the nation's first black woman jurist to the position of a state Chief Justice.
As evidenced by the struggles that these and other accomplished women Chiefs have endured to obtain or retain their positions, the struggle for equality and merit-based recognition for women of all backgrounds is far from over, and we may in fact be confronting familiar challenges of days gone by resurrected in a more sophisticated approach. It is all our responsibility to commit to work against this turning tide - and that is a primary reason NAWJ continues to exist and be an active and strong voice, together with our numerous justice partners
Sincerely,
Judge Julie E. Frantz
President's Calendar:
Megan Rice celebrated her 85th birthday last week - in a high-rise detention center in Brooklyn. The Catholic nun is serving nearly three years in prison for evading security and painting peace slogans on the walls of a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Sister Rice is far from the only religious figure to run into legal trouble. There's a long tradition of Catholic clergy protesting nuclear weapons, from the Berrigan brothers in the 1980s to the fictional nun Jane Ingalls, featured in the series Orange is the New Black.
(Photo caption: Sister Megan Rice ahead of her 2013 trial in Washington, D.C. In 2012, she and fellow anti-nuclear activists successfully broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to draw the world's attention to the danger of nuclear weapons.)
Sister Rice, a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, spent decades working and teaching in Africa. She too has a long history of protest, even before she allegedly joined two men to throw human blood and write slogans on a building that houses enriched uranium in 2012.
Now, from inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Sister Rice is continuing her own brand of activism. With the help of friends and advocates including the National Association of Women Judges, Sister Rice is drawing attention to conditions inside U.S. corrections facilities.
She and a few hundred others had been set to live in a women's prison in Danbury, Connecticut, the same one that served as a model for Orange is the New Black. After authorities decided to overhaul that facility, the Catholic nun was sent to what was supposed to be a temporary holding center.
Hon. Brenda Murray, a federal administrative law judge, has been closely following Sister Rice's case because one of her friends entered the convent at the same time.
"It seems ridiculous to put somebody like that long term on the ninth floor of a high-rise building," Murray says. "I mean, that was supposed to be a temporary situation 'til we resolved Danbury, and it isn't been temporary. And it just is unfair."
A high rise might sound luxurious. But in this case, friends say, more than 100 women share six bathrooms.
A study by the Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School says the detention center in Brooklyn has much less to offer than the one in Connecticut.
Pat McSweeney, a retired ninth-grade English teacher, knows that firsthand. McSweeney befriended Sister Rice years ago at a protest. She describes the Brooklyn holding center as "like a big cement box, huge." McSweeney visits when she can, and keeps in touch by phone or e-mail. "When I've asked her a couple of times if she can go outside, no she can't," McSweeney says.
Sister Rice insists she's fine, but friends say conditions in the Brooklyn facility are taking a toll on her. For one thing, the cap came off her front tooth months ago. "There was a long time when she was carrying the cap around in her pocket," McSweeney says, "and then I think she did see someone and it was on, when her niece from Boston visited her, but it must have come off again."
Things are even more complicated when it comes to women's health care behind bars. That's because advocates say every facet of the Bureau of Prisons system was designed for men, even though women are very different. "The majority, the vast majority of women in federal prisons, are not violent offenders," says retired federal appeals court judge Hon. Pat Wald. Judge Wald says research demonstrates that incarcerated women need time with family members and friends, and special programs to help them get ready to leave prison. She says those are programs that seem to be unavailable for Sister Rice and others locked up in the Brooklyn facility.
Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik has been studying prisons for more than 30 years. She says the best solution is for authorities to look, case by case, at the inmates holed up in Brooklyn.
"A national review of those incarcerated with the end state of asking who need not be here or who could be in a less secure facility would be the desired end state," Resnik says. For Megan Rice, that question could be moot by November. That's when the Bureau of Prisons web site says she's scheduled for release.
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