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This Community Newspaper is a publication of the Escambia-Santa Rosa Bar Association
S E RV I N G T H E F I RS T J U D I C I A L C I RC U I T Vol. 23, No. 15
April 12, 2023
MY JUDGE By Timothy J. Inacio
J
udicial law clerks are a little odd and quirky in that we tend to refer to the judges we work for as “our judges.” I don’t know of any other industry where the employees refer to their bosses in such a uniquely personal and possessive way. I am not going to buck the tradition today, however, as I am here to say a few words and share a few stories about the man I was privileged to call “my judge” for the last 17 years, the late Honorable C. Roger Vinson. Everyone knows he was a great judge, but fewer people know he was—more importantly— a great man. Voltaire once said: “We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.” The truth is I did not like Judge Vinson when I first met him at my job interview. I found him to be aloof and impersonal. I did not think he had liked me either, so I was surprised when he offered me a two-year clerkship in his chambers. It was not long after I joined his staff that I learned my initial impression of him could not have been more wrong. He turned out to be a kind and thoughtful man who I quickly grew to respect and admire like a father. After I completed the first year of my clerkship, he asked if I would stay on as his permanent law clerk, and I gladly accepted. There were only three of us in chambers—the judge, his longtime administrative assistant Val Harmon, and me—and we had a near perfect working relationship. We started as co-workers but became a family, and I was fortunate to be with him until the end. But I will begin at the beginning. Clyde Roger Vinson was born on February 19, 1940, in Cadiz, Kentucky, a small town with about 1,000 residents. He was raised on a farm, the youngest of five children. He spoke to me often and fondly about his early years on the farm, including during one of our very last visits after he entered hospice. He told me about the demanding but rewarding chores he had to perform. By the time he was 12 years old he could, among many other things, tear down and repair the tractor; plow the fields; feed all the animals; and even deliver baby lambs. He attended school in a small one-room schoolhouse without electricity or running water. Despite these limited educational resources, he applied the same work ethic that he had cultivated on the farm to his academic studies, and it served him well. After graduating high school and spending a year at the University of Kentucky, he received a Congressional appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. He served as an aviator at the Naval Air Station in both Pensacola and Whiting Field
from 1962 until 1968, after which he attended Vanderbilt University Law School. He received his J.D. in 1971 and returned to Pensacola to join Beggs & Lane, where he practiced law for the next 12 years. President Reagan appointed him to the federal bench in 1983, a position he held until his death. Judge Vinson was born to be a judge. During his 40-year judicial career, he was well known and highly respected for being a methodical, extremely smart, and meticulous jurist. His written decisions were well researched and painstakingly crafted, and reversals were rare. An Eleventh Circuit Judge once remarked that he enjoyed reviewing Judge Vinson’s cases on appeal because he was “an easy judge to affirm.” Of course, to say that his decisions were legally correct most of the time is not to say that he liked how all his cases came out. The Bayview Cross case is a prime example. As a personal matter, he did not want the cross removed. To be sure, he was not only a devoted Christian, but he once served as president of the organization that had installed the cross, the Pensacola Jaycees. Nevertheless, Supreme Court case law in effect at that time suggested that it violated the First Amendment. To avoid a result he personally disliked, he could have attempted to get around the inconvenient precedent—he was probably smart enough to have pulled it off—but he didn’t even try. He ordered the city to remove the cross, and he concluded his written opinion by encouraging the Supreme Court to reconsider its Establishment Clause jurisprudence. But unless and until that happened, he wrote, his hands were tied. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed his ruling, after which the Supreme Court did in fact change the law and the cross remains standing to this day. He was pleased with that outcome, and it was a rare occasion where he was glad to be reversed. The important takeaway from the case is not that his personal views and desires were vindicated, of course. What matters is he took his judicial oath seriously and did his job despite those views and desires. The 26-state challenge to “Obamacare” provides another good example of his willingness to faithfully apply the law, regardless of his personal feelings. For this, I would like to share a private anecdote. Within minutes of being assigned the case, he came into my office and closed the door. He told me there were going to be a lot of eyes on the case and pressure from both sides, but he wanted to stress that we were going to follow the law wherever it took us. He said: “We’re going to read every case and
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consider every argument. If the statute is Constitutional, we’re going to uphold it. If it’s not, we’re going to strike it down. We will ignore all the political noise and do whatever the Constitution requires.” By that point in time, I had been working with him long enough (and knew him well enough) that it was unnecessary for him to say what he said. But I have never forgotten and have always respected that he did. All judges (and their law clerks) enjoy that sort of big, high profile case, but Judge Vinson applied the same work ethic and commitment to getting it right in all his cases. He recognized there were real people and real stakes behind every case, so he took each one seriously, whether it was a slip-and-fall in a grocery store or a case like Obamacare that dealt with issues affecting the entire country. As he once wrote in an opinion, not every federal case is independently significant, but “every case is important to the litigants involved.” This across-the-board commitment to fairness, impartiality, and judicial excellence solidified his reputation among other judges and attorneys in our community and beyond. And this reputation, in turn, led to him being asked to participate in scores of activities outside his busy district court docket, including serving on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Committee
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on Bankruptcy Administration. He served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court in Washington, D.C., and he spent seven years on the Eleventh Circuit’s Judicial Council and 18 years on its Pattern Jury Instruction Committee. He was a co-author of Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts, and he was regularly invited to sit on Courts of Appeals around the country. I traveled with him to 16 of those sittings, and I have great memories from each one. Unfortunately, despite that he was a fair, reasonable, and impartial judge, that was not his reputation in all quarters. Indeed, there was at times a disconnect between the type of judge he was and the type of judge that some (quite wrongly) thought him to be. For example, he was once referred to in the press as a “Tea Party Judge.” That was nonsense. When it came to deciding a case, he strove to be apolitical and non-ideological, which is why his rulings did not consistently fall on one side of the fence. A political judge adhering to a traditionally conservative ideology would not have struck down both Obamacare and the Bayview Cross (or the ordinance banning the film The Last Temptation of Christ, which he also did). It was also said of him that he was a “hanging judge” who always sentenced criminal defendants to the harshest sentences possible.
Wikipedia describes him as “a hardline judge who refused to depart from maximum sentences in spite of their severity.” Calling Judge Vinson a “Tea Party Judge” was nonsense, but calling him a “hanging judge” was nonsense on stilts. He received countless letters from former criminal defendants over the years—I know, because I opened and read many of them, including one from just a few weeks ago—thanking him for the mercy he showed at sentencing and crediting him with turning their lives around. At times, he was required by the law to impose harsh sentences due to mandatory minimums, but he was critical of those sentences and his criticisms were a matter of public record. As he told the New York Times in 2012: “The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, but when a legislative body says this is going to be the sentence no matter what other factors there are, that’s draconian in every sense of the word. Mandatory sentences breed injustice.” Many times over the years— far too many to count—I saw him struggle in sentencing criminal defendants. Sentencing a defendant was a responsibility that he took very seriously, and it weighed on him. He would sometimes cry back in chambers after imposing a sentence. On rare occasions he would let the mask slip in open court.
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