Nothing in the official online biography of Judge John O. Craig III screams "activist."
Married. One son, two stepsons. Methodist. Falconry. Enjoys flyfishing, baseball and reading historical fiction. (OK, so falconry is a little out of the mainstream.)
Yet some of his rulings -- including two which led to convicted killers being removed from death row and another in which he set aside a guilty verdict against a High Point woman convicted of murder by a jury -- seem to indicate otherwise.
The latest evidence of that is in Yadkin County, where Craig has been pushing commissioners since 2006 to build a new jail in order to be in compliance with state law.
"He does not have the authority, the way I look at it," resident Larry Long told the Carolina Journal, a conservative publication, earlier this month. "If he has this authority, then every county in the state is in trouble. I think he stepped way out of line with what he can do."
Feeding the mill
On two occasions, once in Guilford County in November 2004 and again in Stokes County in July 2005, Craig stepped in to rule in capital-punishment cases.
In the Guilford case, convicted killer Charles Walker eventually won a new trial after Craig's determination that he shouldn't have faced the death penalty because his conviction was based solely on testimony of co-conspirators --not enough in the eyes of the law to justify an execution.
Walker was sentenced in 2007 to 30 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and accessory to murder.
The judge made another tough call in July 2005 when he vacated convictions against Rex Penland, a Forsyth County man who had been sentenced to die after being convicted of raping and killing a Winston-Salem woman in 1992. Craig said at the time that new DNA evidence mandated a new trial.
Penland struck a deal two years later in which he basically was sentenced to time served in exchange for an Alford plea, an agreement under which a defendant doesn't admit guilt but acknowledges that there was enough evidence to convict.
Those decisions started the murmurs that Judge Craig, a Democrat from High Point, was an activist, and worse, liberal.
More grist for that mill came in November 2007, when Craig set aside guilty verdicts against Mary Elizabeth Roach, who'd been convicted by a jury of killing a 3-year-old girl she had been baby sitting. Craig's ruling said, in effect, that the state didn't prove the child suffered her injuries while in Roach's care.
Roach was freed, and can't be retried unless a higher court determines that Craig was wrong.
The N.C. Court of Appeals in November unanimously upheld his ruling, a decision that the attorney general's office appealed to the N.C. Supreme Court. The high court has not yet ruled.
Do the right thing
If Yadkin commissioners hadn't blinked last Monday and voted to finally begin construction on a new jail, Craig likely would have taken the most obstinate among them to the legal woodshed Friday morning.
His options included fines, jail time, removing them from office or a combination of any of those -- extraordinary actions by any measure.
"Too often when someone uses the phrase ‘activist,' they use it when judges don't rule the way a person wants them to," said Suzanne Reynolds, a law professor at the Wake Forest University who pondered the proper role of judges when she ran unsuccessfully for the N.C. Supreme Court in 2008. "It's not being an activist to take a stand that is compelled by the facts in the law."
Reached after the showdown over the Yadkin Jail had been averted, Craig -- who's running for re-election in Guilford County later this year -- said that he's unconcerned about whether his decisions are popular.
"Being human, you are aware that certain things are going to be controversial," Craig said. "But you have to do what you feel is the right thing regardless."
ssexton@wsjournal.com
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