Page 77 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

We have among us a gentleman who was raised in the panhandle of Oklahoma. His dad was a rancher and his mom worked in the local court and also for a few attorneys in town. And he thought, as a young kid, “I guess I have to pick between being trampled and kicked by large animals or working in air conditioning,” and so he chose the latter and he became a trial lawyer.
I was struck by the service of this class of inductees to fostering the guiding prin- ciples of the Rule of Law, transparency in the courts, and access to justice. One inductee has traveled around the entire world throughout his career as a federal prosecutor and federal judge.
We have an inductee from Missouri who has served with others in the selection of a third of all the appellate and superior court judges in that state and half of the judges in the Sixteenth Circuit.
One inductee is a member of Minnesota’s Exoneration Compensation Panel, ap- pointed by the Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court to determine com- pensation for exonerated and wrongfully incarcerated people.
And we have a number of career prosecutors who have dedicated themselves to try- ing not to incarcerate the wrong people and only prosecute the right ones, which I think is a good quality in a prosecutor. One of them gave such a good opening statement in a homicide case that just on his verbal description alone, one of the jury panel members fainted.
We have the former national director of the DRI, the largest civil defense attorney organization in existence. And this inductee also received the DRI’s award for the
SUMMER 2024 JOURNAL 76