Word: districts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even in the 75% of his cases that resemble any other district judge's-from bankruptcy to counterfeiting-Johnson is a judge of rare innovation. Before handing out sentences in open court, for example, he follows the unusual practice of inviting all defendants and their families to discuss presentencing reports in the privacy of his chambers. His compassion is evident in even the most minor cases-many of which inevitably involve race. In one, a white man had allegedly hired four Negroes to help him steal peanuts from a federal warehouse. The jury acquitted the white man, convicted...
...Free State of Winston." It remains independently Republican. At one point, Johnson's father was the only Republican in the Alabama legislature-a situation that is now an ironic impossibility, since Johnson reapportioned the state. Combined by the judge with a more populous Democratic county, the Winston district now elects a Democratic legislator...
...impressive. In one of the few such cases since Reconstruction, for example, Johnson won a peonage conviction against two Alabama planters who had paid Mississippi jailers to bind Negro prisoners over to them. In 1955 fate intervened with the death of the U.S. judge for Alabama's Middle District. Johnson drew up a modest resume, won the support of state G.O.P. leaders, met Ike in Washington and got the job one week past his 37th birthday...
...younger than most new district judges (average age: 51), Johnson quickly made a name for himself in 1956 by extending the Supreme Court's school decision to Montgomery's segregated buses...
Much of this plan for Alabama, notably the school-choice system, was echoed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month in a no-nonsense decision ordering "affirmative" desegregation next fall in all grades in seven school districts in Alabama and Louisiana. The Supreme Court has refused to stay that order. District courts are now obliged to apply it throughout the Fifth Circuit's territory: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi...