The lovely history of justice in Iowa is well-documented and often-chronicled. Iowa had its Miss Coger 82 years before the nation had Rosa Parks. Iowa had young Susan Clark 90 years before the nation had Little Rock. The very first case the Iowa Supreme Court decided stopped bounty hunters from spiriting back to Missouri a slave who was buying his freedom on the installment plan -- and ruled that slavery would not exist in Iowa. Then, in 2009, Iowa’s Supreme Court ruled that under the Equal Protection clause of the Iowa Constitution people of the same sex had a constitutional right to marry one another.
That history is something every Iowan should be proud of -- a history that regularly gives life to the state’s great motto, “Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.”
But every Iowan, too, should be proud of the state’s court system for other reasons as well. Those reasons were brought home last Wednesday when Chief Justice Mark Cady delivered the annual State of the Judiciary speech in the crowded chambers of the House of Representatives in the Capitol, just upstairs from the historic courtroom where the Supreme Court met for more than a century.
Softly, and almost lyrically, Justice Cady talked of compassion for those who find themselves in the court system, of concern for the children caught up in the system -- caught in it by their own misguidance or by the neglect or abuse from their parents -- and of inequality and racial disparity in the system.
He talked of business as well -- about how Iowa within two years will have the first totally paperless court system in the nation, about the supreme court’s travels around the state so that everyone can see the justice system close at hand, about openness and transparency, about experiments with new specialty courts.
But he talked most movingly of justice and fairness and about how Iowa’s courts are working not to sentence young criminals but instead to help young people before they become criminals. He told how “meaningful court intervention guides [delinquent children] towards productive lives as adults” (and, perhaps for the benefit of the Governor, who was sitting behind him, how that saves “taxpayers the cost of paying for future incarceration or treatment of more serious conditions that too often occur without such intervention”).
The “goal of protecting Iowa’s children is within reach,” he said. “We are committed, in every individual case, to break the cycle of juvenile delinquency that leads to broken homes and adult incarceration.”
He talked of his own experience as a young judge 30 years ago, of when he would terminate parental rights and of how he “saw firsthand how addictions can destroy families.” He talked about “the tragic cycle created when destructive conduct by parents is imprinted on children and then repeated when those children become parents.”
The problems are old, he said, but the solutions must be new. Then he talked about the state’s “new and innovative courts” -- drug courts and mental-health courts and family-treatment courts -- and the successes they are having. And he has the statistics to prove it.
“We must give hope to every child,” he said. “Success comes one family, one parent, one child at a time.”
It was a truly remarkable speech by a man who even before he became Chief Justice had left his mark on the court and the state with his eloquence in the Varnum same-sex marriage case, the unanimous decision that reaffirmed the state’s commitment to equality for all and its equal commitment to freedom of worship for all.
That decision showed Chief Justice Cady has a passion for the law. Last week’s speech showed he has a compassion for the people.
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