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Sam Ervin IV Lucy Noble Inman
February 2, 2022 Political Note #443 North Carolina Supreme Court
2022 General election
The United State Supreme Court interprets statutes and governmental actions based on the United States Constitution. State Supreme Courts interpret state statutes and state governmental actions based on state constitutions. State Supreme Courts make important decision.
Here is an instance. The US Supreme Court has said that it would not address political gerrymandering by a state legislature if the Gerrymandering is not explicitly for the purpose of discrimination against members of a protected category or group of people – those of a particular race or religion, for instance. A state supreme court might find that the state legislature’s gerrymandering is inconsistent with a state statute or constitution and, therefore, invalid. In taking such an action, a state supreme court could affect, say, the composition of Congress.
In 2018, Ohio amended its constitution. This January, the Ohio Supreme Court considered the districts created for the state legislature and Congress in the light of that amendment. The Court rejected the districts created by the legislature and sent them back to work.
Prior to the 2020 election, the North Carolina Supreme Court planned to hear a case about Congressional redistricting. To avoid a North Carolina Supreme Court decision (The Court then had a 6-1 Democratic majority), Republicans offered a compromise, which Democrats accepted. The legislature revised Congressional districts so that what had been a 10-3 Republican Congressional delegation became an 8-5 Republican Congressional delegation. (Remember, Democrats have a five-vote majority in the House of Representatives.)
With the 2022 election, North Carolina’s Supreme Court could change dramatically. Before the 2020 election, the Democrats had a 6-1 majority on the Court. Two seats were up for election in 2020. After the election, the Democrats had a 4-3 majority.
The election was close. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Cheri Beasley, lost her race by 401 votes out of a nearly 5.4 million total. She is now running for US Senator. The Appeals court judge Lucy Noble Inman lost her race for the Supreme Court by more than 60,000 votes, still only a difference of 1.34%. She is running again for the North Carolina’s Supreme Court.
In 2022, two more Democratic members of the North Carolina Supreme Court are up for election. If one Democrat loses, the Court becomes 4-3 Republican. If both Democrats lose, the Court becomes 5-2 Republican. The 2022 election is likely to be as close as the election of 2020. Will the outcome be the same?
Both of the 2022 candidates for the North Carolina Supreme Court have pedigrees. Lucy Inman https://www.lucyinmanforjustice.com is running for a vacant seat. The Democratic incumbent for Seat 3 is not running for reelection because she is close to the mandatory retirement age. The Democratic incumbent for Seat 5, Sam Ervin IV https://www.ervinforjustice.org is running for reelection.
North Carolina Supreme Court Seat 3
Lucy Noble Inman’s grandfather was Josephus Daniels. He was the owner of North Carolina’s largest newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, when he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson. He was an advocate of public ownership, for defense purposes, of armor plate manufacturers and telephone and telegraph companies. He was an advocate of public education and anti-child labor laws. He was also a determined opponent of sin – alcohol and prostitution, for instance. He was also anti-Catholic and an ardent segregationist, an opponent of Blacks voting and among those who supported the overthrow of the Wilmington city government led by Blacks.
Lucy Noble Inman’s mother, Lucy Daniels, was a best-selling novelist in her twenties. She stopped writing after she had children and studied to be a psychologist. She wrote memoirs. After she was psychoanalyzed, she returned to writing fiction. She founded the Lucy Daniels Center, a comprehensive agency serving North Carolina which describes itself as promoting and supporting emotional development of young children and their parents. Their website describes the Center’s opposition to racism and appreciation of the extent to which racism produces anxiety, depression, and behavioral issues among its victims.
Lucy Noble Inman was born in Indianapolis where her father was a journalist, but grew up in North Carolina to which her father returned. She graduated from North Carlina State in 1984, worked as a journalist, and then went to the University of North Carolina Law School, graduating in 1990. After law school, she clerked for the North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Exum. She and her husband practiced law in California from 1992 to 2000 and then returned to North Carolina. Lucy Noble Inman developed a practice representing victims of sexual abuse and fraud. She has been an advocate for mental health services, services which, it turned out, her son, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was in need of.
In 2010, Lucy Noble Inman was appointed a Superior Court judge and was elected to the Court of Appeals in 2014. In 2020, as mentioned above, she ran unsuccessfully to be an Associate Justice of the state Supreme Court. She also serves on boards – among them the Lucy Daniels Foundation and North Carolinians Against Gun Violence.
Her career has reflected her great grandfather’s intentions to do good without his prejudices and narrow mindedness. Her career also reflected her mother’s concerns with mental health.
North Carolina Supreme Court Seat 5
Sam Ervin IV’s grandfather was US Senator Sam Ervin Jr. Ervin Jr. described himself as a “country lawyer” and was on the national stage for his “country lawyer” skills several times. Here are three: His success in 1954 as a freshman member of the committee that considered censuring Joe McCarthy, his success in 1966 preventing a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in school, and his success in 1972 leading the Watergate (or Ervin) Committee that forced Richard Nixon to choose between resignation and impeachment.
In the Senate, Sam Erving Jr. relied on his knowledge of constitutional law to lead southern Senators in their support of segregation and Jim Crow. Before he was in the Senate, he advised his local county sheriff. In at least one instance his advice led to an accused at-large Black man being shot and killed, lynched, in effect.
The shift from the bifurcated Sam Ervin Jr to Sam Ervin IV as a liberal lightening rod to North Carolina conservatives was gradual. It began with Sam Ervin Jr. acknowledging, when he was no longer a Senator, that the Brown v Board of Education decision requiring the integration of schools was correctly decided. It continued with Sam Ervin III, the most important part of whose career was in the federal appeals courts. The transition of Ervin III was particularly visible in his attitude. change In an oral history, Sam Ervin III, Sam Erving IV’s father, described his experience with Blacks and how he came to realize the extent of the obstacles to success that they faced.
The North Carolina Supreme Court continues to deal with complaints about legislative and Congressional gerrymandering. Because the Court has not acted and both candidates and constituents need to know who is running for what seats, the Court was asked to and overruled a lower court’s rejection of a proposal to postpone primaries. The North Carolina Supreme Court voted to delay the primaries from early March, 2022 to late May, 2022.
Republicans had demanded that Sam Ervin IV recuse himself from that decision because he was among the people up for election. Had he done so, the Court would have considered their decision as a 3-3 body and would probably have deferred to the Appeals Court’s decision to proceed with the March primaries. Sam Ervin IV refused to recuse himself. Similarly, two Republican justices were called upon to recuse themselves from a case addressing new Voter ID requirements and a state income tax cap. Whatever conflicts of interest those two justices may have had, like their Democratic counterpart, they did not recuse themselves.
The North Carolina Supreme Court clarified the recusal rule. On January 3 of this year it issued an order which said, in effect, that the decision to recuse is solely the decision of an individual Justice.
In the November election, the people of North Carolina will decide what the North Carolina Supreme Court will be like. North Carolina conservatives are looking forward with some glee to that election. They have a poll that suggests the two Republican challengers have double digit leads. Those leads, they say, are tied to the unpopularity of President Joe Biden.
We’ll see. Let’s raise enough money so that Lucy Noble Inman https://www.lucyinmanforjustice.com and Sam Ervin IV https://www.ervinforjustice.org get enough votes to retain the Court’s 4-3 Democratic majority. Donate to their campaigns.
2022 State Supreme Court Elections
Alabama 2 seats Partisan Election November
Arkansas 3 seats Non-Partisan March
Georgia 1 seat Non-Partisan May
Idaho 2 seats Non-Partisan May
Illinois 2 seats Partisan November
Kentucky 3 seats Non-Partisan November
Louisiana 1 seat Partisan December
Michigan 2 seats Non-Partisan November
Minnesota 1 seat Non-Partisan November
Montana 2 seats Non-Partisan November
North Carolina 2 seats Partisan November
North Dakota 1 seat Non-Partisan November
Ohio 3 seats Non-Partisan November
Oregon 1 seat Non-Partisan November
Pennsylvania 1 seat Partisan November
Tennessee 3 seats Partisan November
Texas 5 seats Partisan November
Washington 2 seats Non-Partisan November
State Supreme Court Retention Votes
Alaska 1 seat November
Arizona 3 seats November
California 3 seats November
Colorado 1 seat November
Florida 3 seats November
Indiana 1 seat November
Kansas 5 seats November
Maryland 1 seat November
Missouri 1 seat November
Nebraska 4 seats November
Oklahoma 3 seats November
South Dakota 3 seats November
Utah 1 seat November
Wyoming 1 seat November
