With the Dec. 31 retirement of First Division Circuit Court Judge Berlin C. Jones, voters in parts of Jefferson and Lincoln counties will select a new judge for the first time in many years this November.
There are two very qualified candidates for the six-year position: current Pine Bluff City Attorney Althea Hadden-Scott and attorney Alex Guynn.
The Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts, an arm of the State Supreme Court, requires each judicial district in the state to submit a plan laying out the role each judge is going to play in administering justice, be it criminal or civil. The plan for the 11 West Judicial District, which is made up of Jefferson and Lincoln counties, shows that Jones currently handles 54 percent of all criminal cases in the district, while judges Jodi Raines Dennis and Robert Wyatt handle smaller percentages.
Jones is also in charge of drug court, which began with only a small number of individuals and now has numbers exceeding 60 to 70 participants.
Whomever is elected will be very busy from the word go.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
While Hadden-Scott is the more seasoned of the two (her words), having been a practicing attorney for 17 years and serving as both a deputy prosecutor and city attorney, as well as being in private practice and in the military, Guynn’s resume is equally as impressive.
Now in private practice, he formerly worked in the legal and ethics departments for Walmart in Bentonville, served as a clerk for Chief District Judge Robert Dawson in the Federal District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, and the list goes on and on.
He also worked as the assistant case coordinator for Jones from 2001 to 2002, is a member of the Drug Court Outreach Foundation and, most interestingly, was a law clerk for former Pine Bluff attorney Don Warren, who was for several years Hadden-Scott’s partner in private practice.
A product of schools in Pine Bluff and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, he left a high profile job with Walmart to come home and, in his words, “try to make a difference.”
At a recent Coffee the Chief’s, Guynn said, if elected, he would fast-track cases involving domestic violence and believed in holding violent offenders accountable.
Although we place a high value on experience, we also believe that sometimes the best candidate is not always the most experienced. We believe Guynn is the best choice for the job.