Courting the pandemic: Arkansas Supreme Court chief’s travels spotlight importance of state’s judiciary system

March 14-20, 2022

SHERIDAN, Ark. — Feb. 25, 2022 — More than two years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Dan Kemp is still quietly traveling around the state to make sure that the wheels of justice keep turning in Arkansas.

On a recent visit to the Grant County District Court in Sheridan, Kemp visited with a roomful of county judges, prosecutors and attorneys and their staff that practice in the Seventh District. Introduced by District Judge Billy Jack Gibson, Kemp said he set a goal after becoming Arkansas’ chief justice in 2016 to visit every judicial district in Arkansas.

“COVID kind of slowed things down, but I think this is the 26th district that I have visited,” said Kemp, whose recent Grant County trip included Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) Director Marty Sullivan and Tim Holtoff, director of AOC’s court information systems. 

In Arkansas, state district courts exercise territorial authority within judicial districts established by the General Assembly. Jurisdiction for those courts may be city-wide, countywide, or may combine more than one county into a judicial district.

As of March 4, 2022, there were 41 State District Court Judicial Districts covering 66 counties with full-time state district court judges that serve these courts. Under the state’s plans, additional state district courts will be created by 2025 for the nine remaining counties, including Pike, Sevier, Howard and Little River, Monroe, Arkansas, Fulton, Izard and Stone counties. 

Kemp said the primary reason for visiting each district is to thank local judges and their staff for the work they do. The Arkansas chief justice also said he uses his trips to encourage members of the Arkansas judiciary and answer any questions they may have about the administration of Arkansas courts.

“You are on the frontline of the judicial system. You see a lot of people and the impression they are going to have on our court system is the impression they get when they go to court and how they are treated,” Kemp said.

Elected as the state’s chief justice in 2016, Kemp formerly served as a circuit court judge for the Sixteenth Judicial District in north Central Arkansas that covers Independence, Cleburne, lzard, Fulton and Stone counties. He also was a delegate to the Arkansas Constitutional Convention of 1978, which produced a proposed state constitution defeated by voters in 1980.

Kemp said in his most recent visit to a rural community about 40 minutes south of Little Rock that the Arkansas judiciary has faced a myriad of challenges to keep state courts in operations over the past two years. As chief justice, Kemp said the first time he saw the state’s Continuity of Operations plan in 2017, it included guidelines for operating during disasters such as storms, fires, tornados, floods and pandemics.

However, the Mountain View native said he first downplayed the possibility of a pandemic in Arkansas, noting that the last one that occurred was the Spanish flu in 1918. 

“Little did I know that we’d be facing at about two years now a pandemic,” he said. “It’s been quite an experience because the Supreme Court [has] the superintending control over all the courts in Arkansas, and under our Constitution those courts have to stay open, and people have to have a right to redress their grievances.”

COVID-19 order in the court

After COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, Kemp said he issued a temporary order suspending jury trials and non-essential hearings until April 3, 2020. Under that order, courthouses across the state remained open except to anyone with symptoms of the coronavirus or who had been exposed to COVID-19.

In addition, a notice was placed on courthouse doors across the state instructing those who couldn’t attend court on how to contact local judges and administrators. Kemp said when he issued that original temporary order that was scheduled for less than a month, little did he know that it would last nearly two years. Since then, that order was extended on several occasions as the pandemic worsened.

“We had to suspend jury trials and limit the number of people that could attend court hearings to ten people,” Kemp explained. “But we were kind of naïve because we thought it wasn’t going to last too long. We made that order to last three weeks but things drug on and we had to extend the order and extend it, and extend it, and extend it again.”

Earlier this year, however, Kemp sent a letter to circuit and district court judges that allows them to decide how to run their own courts on a case-by-case basis. In addition, the state Supreme Court chief said the current plan is to have in-person oral arguments in state courts again on March 10.

“We just decided to leave it up to the discretion of the judges. We provide the tools for [them], and they decide whether to suspend jury trials, hold virtual hearings, continue cases, and otherwise determine how to handle your court,” said Kemp. “Those are some of things that we’ve been facing and will continue to face. Hopefully, we are getting close to the end of this pandemic or whatever the next phase is going to be.”

As chief justice, Kemp also learned from AOC Director Sullivan that the Arkansas Supreme Court did not have a strategic plan like other states. In late 2018, Kemp and his colleagues on the state’s highest court unanimously approved a long-term strategic plan that was submitted by its Strategic Planning Committee, a group of 24 people representing the state’s judges, court staff and legal community.

The plan, Delivering Justice: A Vision for 2025, is the first of its kind for the State of Arkansas, which was one of only 11 states that had not adopted a strategic plan. The plan lays out six goals: fostering judicial independence, improving access to justice, communicating effectively with the public, improving educational opportunities available to the judiciary, embracing technology and enhancing security.

“We met for almost a year and came up with a strategic plan for our judiciary,” said Kemp. “We wanted to do things with judicial education, meet certain goals we set for technology and having e-filing by 2025. People sometimes forget that we, as the judicial branch, are a separate co-equal branch of government along with the executive and legislative branches. And we wanted to emphasize that in our strategic plan.”

Kemp also brought up struggles that members of the judiciary are experiencing during the pandemic. Under his guidance, the Arkansas Supreme Court assembled a “Well-Being Task Force” in late 2018. The task force met and worked throughout 2019 and presented its report later that year on its website here: https://www.arcourts.gov/sites/default/files/task-force-on-lawyer-well-being-report.pdf.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the task force met again in late 2020 to discuss implementation of recommendations in the Arkansas report. The Arkansas Judges & Lawyers Assistance Program (JLAP) has begun to implement a few of the recommendations, including creating and hosting well-being CLEs for Arkansas attorneys.

“The pandemic created a lot of different stressful situations for us. You know there is social isolation because we are seeing as many people as we normally do before the pandemic. There’s also a different way we are practicing law and holding court,” said Kemp. “There’s Zoom, telephone conferences and other virtual means of holding court rather than doing it in person. So, there are different things that are going on that are stressful, so we have to learn these things.”

According to the 29-page report, the legal profession has known for years that many of its students and practitioners are languishing but far too little has been done to address it. The report also highlights a 2016 study by the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation found that between 21% and 36% of nearly 13,000 currently practicing lawyers surveyed had drinking problems. Another 28%, 19% and 23% are struggling with some level of depression, anxiety and stress, respectively. 

Other workplace difficulties noted by the study include suicide, social alienation, work addiction, sleep deprivation, job dissatisfaction, a “diversity crisis,” complaints of work-life conflict, incivility, a narrowing of values so that profit predominates, and negative public perception. Notably, the task force’s study found that younger lawyers in the first ten years of practice and those working in private firms experience the highest rates of problem drinking and depression.

Kemp told the Grant County judges and attorneys to look after themselves and their staff. “I want to encourage the judges and lawyers present to take care of yourself. Do an inventory to look and see how you are doing, not only physically, mentally and socially, but there are all different aspects of well-being.”

Kemp ended his 30-minute informal talk at the Sheridan courthouse by quoting 2020 testimony to Congress by one of his counterparts, Michigan Chief Justice Bridget McCormack. In her testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts in June 2020, McCormack said the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed for more change in three months than in the past three decades.

“She said, ‘the pandemic is not what we wanted, but what we needed.’ By that she meant that the pandemic is what we needed to go to different methods of addressing our judicial system, expanding on technology, expanding access to (courts) by other means other than in-person court hearings,” said Kemp. “So, it helped us to advance a lot quicker than we anticipated into this electronic and virtual hearing age.”

After Kemp’s informal update, Holtoff also informed the Grant County officials on upgrades to the state’s e-court filing system and case management system. AOC holds a statewide license for the Contexte, a web-based case management system that oversees all aspects of court cases, including judge assignment, parties, violations, docketing, hearings and accounting.

Holtoff said the AOC is on target toward implementing a statewide electronic filing system in all 75 counties by 2025. Holtoff said his staff is now building a cloud-based case management system to replace CourtConnect, the online public access portal that allows the public to find court cases by searching for a party name or by entering the case number.  

Photo Caption:

1. Grant County District Judge Billy Jack Gibson (left) and Circuit Judge Stephen Shirron listen as Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Dan Kemp (far right) speaks to judges, attorneys and staff for the Seventh Judicial District of Arkansas, which covers Grant and Hot Springs counties. Kemp has traveled statewide during the pandemic to make sure Arkansans have access to state courts.