Keith's Real World Wisdom

Last updated Monday, November 17, 2008 3:25 PM CST in News

By Robin Mero
The Morning News

Through the years, he’s made thousands of heartbreaking, swift and sure decisions. He won’t hesitate to put a criminal away for life — or to shave a few years off a sentence the jury agonized over for hours if he finds it excessive or inconsistent. On a rare night that he lay awake with a nagging doubt about a ruling, he isn’t afraid to change his mind.

Warm chocolate-colored eyes, gesturing hands, a hearty laugh.

“I’m not afraid of people, of the press. I genuinely love people, and I’ve not kept myself aloof,” he said.

Attorneys said he’s so friendly and approachable one might miss the intellectual intensity.

His lectures can be stern and before he announces a sentence he often shuffles papers, creating a long, agonizing pause.

“He’s the fairest judge I’ve ever tried a case in front of,” said Fayetteville attorney Tim Buckley.

Humble Roots

Tommy Jack Keith was born Nov. 12, 1938, in Yell County, about 15 miles west of Danville on what’s now Arkansas 80. His parents’ marriage was arranged the year before — she was 13, he 17.

Elaine and Wesley Keith would be married just shy of 60 years before her death in 1996. She was lively, somewhat a tomboy. Her oldest child was athletic, a deep thinker and admittedly stubborn.

As a young man, Keith grew angry with a fundamental unfairness in the world — such as families with money and advantages. He disliked when people were categorized.

When he made a mistake, Elaine would ask a dreaded question, “What are you going to do about it?”

“Oh, I hated it,” he says of that inquiry. Yet, it reverberates now through his own courtroom.

“It’s what you do to deal with your mistake that shows what your character is,” he’s known to say.

This judge has seen it all.

A father who let his baby suffocate to death in a hot car, her fist clutching clumps of hair. A mother who shook her baby in frustration, causing irreversible brain damage. Lawsuits about road taxes. A sheriff accused of racketeering. A bailiff whose work and home computers were infested with child pornography. A coroner who stole drugs from homes of the dead. A mother who smothered her baby in a fog of depression. Two men who murdered a father of four on his way home from work.

“There are times it’s so painful, I want to go back in chambers and cry. One man I knew had been through hell, and I had to send him to prison. The fact that it’s right doesn’t make it easy,” he said.

Keith’s family went to California when he was five. After he spent three years in the Marine Corps in the late 1950s, he settled back in Northwest Arkansas. He married and found himself selling vacuum cleaners door to door. This was no proper way to support a family, he decided, so he enrolled in Fort Smith Junior College in 1961. He joined the college newspaper staff and won an award the next year in editorial writing, for opining on subjects ranging from student council elections to the cafeteria’s coffee.

Keith was 21, married, with a child on the way when he saw an ad for a newspaper reporter at the Southwest American in Fort Smith.

He said he found direction and fulfillment in the newspaper business.

“I was ambitious but not necessarily for money. I was driven to learn,” he said.

Keith returned to California in 1962 for a newspaper job at the Oroville Mercury, then the Chico Enterprise. In 1966, he returned to Arkansas with wife and a new daughter, Lynn, to operate a newspaper in Paris. The next year, he enrolled in the University of Arkansas and took a Northwest Arkansas Times job.

His work felt meaningful, powerful. By exposing certain conditions, he saw results in the community.

Keith worked full time, studied part. During law school, he was an investigator in the Washington County prosecutor’s office. After graduating in 1973, he began practicing law in Rogers at Croxton, Boyer and Keith.

Keith expected to become a prosecutor. But he felt a nagging concern for poor people and whether they were adequately represented in court. In 1978, he took the county’s full-time public defender job.

When the opportunity came in 1981 to run for Rogers Municipal Court, he hesitated.

“I’ve always been an advocate for something, and I didn’t realize as a judge I’d still be: for fairness, the rule of law,” he said. He took the bench in 1982.

“For a lawyer to accomplish things is a long, slow process. As a judge, I found you can accomplish things quickly,” he said. He was known as the “yes sir, no sir” judge because he “wanted people to leave with more respect for the court and for their community.”

After four years, he ran for circuit judge, famously switching from the Democratic to Republican party at the last minute, after the advice of others.

“I’ve always been in that nonpartisan zone, anyway,” he said.

Keith took that bench in 1986 and realized a large gulf between judging misdemeanor and felony cases.

“It’s more serious. Everything is recorded, and the consequences are so much greater. When I became a circuit judge, I thought, I haven’t felt this powerful since I was a reporter,” he said.

“I think the reason I’ve been a good judge is because I’ve always recognized humans have a dual nature, a split personality. It causes them to be good, to do positive things. The other is for evil. All are capable of great good and evil, depending on the circumstances,” he said.

Yet he has no sympathy for what he terms the “totally depraved person, who deliberately inflicts pain on someone else. It’s not as common as people might think. Many of the people I’ve sentenced as sex offenders have been victims themselves. But, I have a real problem with a streak of real cruelty, and people who take pleasure in hurting others.”

No Whining

Keith follows the law but doesn’t always agree with it.

“It’s hard for people to imagine how difficult it is for you to remain objective about the case, but not the person. That’s how being a newspaperman helped me. Your objectivity is at issue with everything you do. As a judge, your impartiality is always in question.”

He finds judging to be instinctive.

“You may have so little evidence. So often, it’s the gray you have to work yourself through. You have everybody shouting, ‘Send him away,’ but, sometimes, something gives you second thoughts,” he said.

Prosecutors respect him, though they sometimes “passionately disagree” with his rulings, as put by Bob Balfe, U.S. prosecutor for the Western District of Arkansas and former prosecutor in Benton County. “He’s not afraid to make people pay the price, and he’s always taken crimes against children seriously,” Balfe said.

Defense attorneys say this judge doesn’t rush them and sees their clients as human.

“This judge gave you a fair forum, a level playing field. The courthouse will not be the same without him,” said Eric Hagler, a former local defense attorney, and now a partner and general counsel for a California investment bank. “I’ve never had a client coming out of that courtroom feeling like it was unfair — win, lose or draw.”

Hagler considers Keith one of two role models in his life, next to his father.

“I’m not saying he’s perfect. He’s constantly pointing out his flaws: ‘Make sure you don’t do this, fight the predisposition to be this way,’” Hagler said. “If he respects you, he’ll open the vault to all his life lessons.”

The judge sees many “repeat customers,” Bennett said.

“On occasion, you will see him converse at the bench with career criminals, calling them by their first names, showing he knows them and has some interest in their welfare,” Bennett said. “He provides a certain respect that some men might not otherwise receive anywhere. And this from a judge who will be potentially sealing their fates.”

Keith abhors self pity and warns defendants if they don’t take responsibility for actions he’s sure to see them again soon.

“You make the decision whether the gift of life to you is wasted or not,” he’ll say.

Attorneys note his kindness on a personal level.

Tim Hutchinson of Rogers recalled getting a page during a murder trial that his wife was pregnant with their first child. The judge took a break “so he could take a moment to share in my happiness. I’ve never told him how much that meant to me.”

Keith once noticed another attorney wasn’t well and called him in chambers. The attorney explained he didn’t have insurance. Keith picked up the phone, called his personal physician, and got the man in for a checkup immediately. A genetic condition was diagnosed that could have been fatal.

It’s tough to shed a robe, but after retirement Keith plans to hang a shingle at his son Sean’s law firm: Keith, Miller, Butler, Schneider and Pawlik in Rogers. He’ll focus on civil law and may occasionally serve as a special judge.

He lives in Bentonville with wife, Henri, whom he married in 1994. The home is filled with natural light, and they love to sit on the back deck overlooking a heavily wooded backyard. A favorite room is a small office in the back — not cluttered, but packed with books, software, compact discs. On a bulletin board hangs a library card, a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon. There’s a hum from an air filter, modems, a laptop and two desktop computers — his and hers. The judge is fond of technology.

He also loves to read history, especially constitutional law — the 100-year period from 1750 to 1850. He reads the western novels of the late 1800s and early 1900s era. He and Henry read many books on Kindles, and he reads newspapers online.

He has a few close friends and breakfasts with them at Wesner’s Grill in Rogers, since the closing of Freddy’s, an old hangout.

“They like to critique me after a decision,” he said. “Many people do get confused between you and the position. Nobody wants to say anything to hurt your feelings or make you mad.”

Henry said they can’t go anywhere where people don’t approach him.

“The other day it was a woman in Walmart. I went looking for him and she had him cornered. She was saying, ‘You saved our marriage. The last time you sent my husband to prison, you gave him that talking to and he was never the same,’” she said.

Friend and neighbor Marsha Haines said, “We’ll go out to eat, and invariably someone will come up who he’s sent to prison, and they’ll start off, ‘Even though I don’t like what you did ...’”

The judge admits he doesn’t usually know how life turns out for those who come before him, but often says that all face a final accounting, and even he will for his rulings.

“If I didn’t hear from time to time from family members and friends that people do put their lives back together, I wouldn’t know,” he said. “The toolbox never has enough tools in it. I’m always wishing I had alternatives to prison, probation. Some people have developed awfully bad habits. I’m a great believer that people who work do better in this world — and I’ve always wished I could require people who aren’t working to check in with probation department at 7 a.m. Part of the problem is just getting them out of bed.”

Keith showed a photo of his mother’s mother, standing before a crude cabin propped by rocks on dusty soil, back in Yell County.

“I’ve been blessed with a willingness to listen to people. That’s why people don’t harbor resentment toward me, even though I hammered them,” he said. “Before I accept that any one man should be above the law, or be treated any differently than any other, I’d go back to live in this house.”

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