Jackson Jambalaya

When President Ronald Reagan appointed Tom Stewart Lee to the federal bench some 42 years ago last week, the usual national advocacy groups that spar over federal judicial appointments were hard-pressed to generate much opposition or support for the nomination. That’s because most of his judicial experience came in rural Scott County, Mississippi, as a county prosecutor, youth court judge, and municipal judge.

He also served as a U.S. Army Reserve captain in the Judge Advocate General Corps from 1965 to 1973. He earned his undergraduate degree from Mississippi College in 1963, where he was a star athlete, and his law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1965. At MC, Lee, in 1963, was the starting point guard for the Choctaws’ basketball squad, which averaged 114 points per game. He was also an excellent tennis player. At Ole Miss, he was a law school classmate of Thad Cochran. Both Cochran and Lee married New Albany natives and friends – Lee wed Norma Ruth Robbins while Cochran wed Rose Clayton, the daughter of nationally prominent New Albany attorney Hugh Newton Clayton. Clayton was president of the Mississippi State Bar and a member of the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association, the first president of the Ole Miss Law Alumni Association, and a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

More to the point, Clayton was active and influential in local and state Democratic Party politics and served on the National Democratic Committee from 1956-60. Clayton’s Democratic connections helped Cochran when he later switched parties to run for Congress in the 1970s.

The Lees had carved their own sphere of influence in Mississippi politics and jurisprudence. Judge Lee is the scion of a family of distinguished Mississippi jurists from Scott County. His brother, the late Roy Noble Lee Sr., was appointed to a vacancy on the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1976 and served until 1993, serving as chief justice from 1987 to 1993.

The Lee brothers’ father, the late Percy Mercer Lee, preceded his sons as a lawyer, district attorney, Circuit Court judge, and later as a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court from 1950 to 1965 – serving the final two years as chief justice.

Lee’s appointment reflected a number of Cochran-backed judicial appointments as the state’s senior senator, which brought dignity and enlightenment to Mississippi’s federal bench.

Judge Lee, from the very beginning of his federal judicial tenure, has been called upon to render judgments in difficult, sensitive cases. Less than a year into his tenure, Lee heard the case of veteran State Sen. Tommy Brooks of Carthage, who was convicted after an 8-day trial of trying to extort $50,000 from the Mississippi Horse Racing Association for his legislative support on a bill to make pari-mutuel betting on horse racing legal in Tunica and Jackson counties.

Later in his career, Lee would oversee a Mississippi voting rights case that drew international headlines. In 2007, Lee ruled that activist Ike Brown, then the Noxubee County Democratic Party chairman, had violated the Voting Rights Act by engaging “in improper, and in some instances fraudulent conduct, and committed blatant violations of state election laws for the purpose of diluting white voting strength.”

Brown appealed the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a three-judge panel later affirmed Lee’s ruling in 2009, making the Brown case the first time that the Voting Rights Act was used to allege voter discrimination by Blacks against whites successfully. But Brown’s legal team called the prosecution a “concerted effort by the Bush Administration to interfere with the ability of Black voters to elect Black officials.” The Fifth Circuit Court panel ruled Brown’s “conduct was undertaken with discriminatory intent: Brown’s statements indicate that he was primarily motivated by race.”

Lee’s sentences in the “Goon Squad” were tough but fair and sent a long overdue message to the small segment of law enforcement officers who thought a badge shielded their kind of “law enforcement” from punishment.

Anyone surprised by Lee’s steady, even dispensation of justice in the “Goon Squad” cases has not observed the judge’s four decades of federal judicial service. Regardless of the complexities of the cases, Judge Tom Lee, for some 40 years, has followed the law and let the chips fall.

Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.