IN A SLEEPY primary election season with virtually no contested races on the ballot, an outsize amount of attention in the Boston area has been paid to the race for an office most people have never even heard of, whose duties even fewer people could enumerate.
With the retirement of Maura Doyle, who has served as clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County for nearly 30 years, the campaign to fill the post has suddenly become the hottest race in town. Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy is going up against veteran public defender Allison Cartwright in the September 3 Democratic primary – an election that will effectively settle who wins a six-year term in the office, with no Republican running in the November general election.
The race has become something of a proxy battle between Boston’s progressive and more centrist Democratic camps, with Mayor Michelle Wu, US Rep. Ayanna Pressley, state Sen. Lydia Edwards, and a laundry list of leading liberals getting behind Cartwright, while Murphy has the backing of US Rep. Steve Lynch, City Councilor Ed Flynn, and other moderate Dems.
Layered over the ideological divide has been a debate over qualifications. Cartwright and her allies have said a lawyer should fill the post. Murphy, a former Boston school teacher, has argued that a capable manager can do the job. The clerk serves an administrative role, handling the flow of cases heard by single justices of the court, including those related to attorney disciplinary matters and other issues that go before the full seven-member court.
Lost amid the back and forth over qualifications and the ideological battle lines has been a much more basic question some might wonder: Why in the world are we electing someone to this obscure, behind-the-scenes administrative court job in the first place? And why do only voters in the four communities of Suffolk County – Boston, Revere, Winthrop, Chelsea – get to choose the person who fills this statewide role?
The answer, it turns out, starts with a Black man who escaped slavery in Virginia more than 170 years ago and hoped to find freedom in Boston.
Shadrach Minkins, enslaved in Virginia, had escaped in 1850 and made his way to Boston. He was working as a waiter there in 1851 when he was arrested by federal marshals under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which provided for the return to the South of anyone caught who had escaped slavery, even in so-called “free” states that had abolished slavery.
An outpouring of support for Minkins quickly arose in Boston, a center of the abolitionist movement. A team of lawyers, which included one of the first Black attorneys in the US, Robert Morris, sought a writ of habeas corpus – a judicial order for him to be brought to court to determine whether his detention was lawful.
They hoped for a sympathetic ruling from the chief justice of the SJC, Lemuel Shaw, a distinguished jurist who had been instrumental in an earlier 1836 ruling that a slave brought voluntarily into a free state, even temporarily, was freed forevermore. But he was not disposed to challenge the federal statute by extending that principle to someone who had escaped slavery. The petition on Minkins’ behalf “met with a cold rebuff from Shaw,” wrote Gary Collison, a professor of American studies at Penn State University, in a book chronicling the case, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen.
After Shaw denied the petition, Black abolitionists overwhelmed armed guards and freed Minkins, who eventually made his way to Canada.
Outrage in Boston over the court’s unwillingness to challenge the Slave Act led to growing calls to elect judges who would be more accountable to the citizens. Such a change was proposed in a constitutional convention, but rejected by the Legislature. But as part of a compromise aimed at quelling the movement for judicial elections, the Legislature moved to grant a degree of citizen voice in the judiciary by making the SJC clerk’s post an elected position.
The change coincided with a push for broader judicial reform to create a system of superior courts in counties through the state to try cases; until that time, the SJC justices took turns traveling across the state to sit as trial judges in cases involving more serious crimes.
That change explains the quirk today of having only Suffolk County voters elect the SJC clerk. Prior to the establishment of a superior court system to handle the caseload of a growing Commonwealth, SJC justices on the “riding circuit” to oversee trials were aided by clerks in each county. Thus, there was a clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Worcester County, an SJC clerk for Essex County, and so on.
Those terms became a misnomer with the advent of superior courts as SJC justices ended their dual roles of sitting as trial judges across Massachusetts in addition to serving as the statewide appellate court, based in Boston. Except, that is, for the SJC clerk for Suffolk County.
While the clerks in other counties were tasked with aiding the new superior court judges appointed to the trial courts there, the position of SJC clerk for Suffolk County was retained to oversee the court’s appellate functions in Boston. (New positions were created to handle trial cases in Suffolk County, with separate clerks for criminal and civil cases.)
In a further twist of the tale, in 1859, the SJC’s clerk’s duties were divided into two positions: an appointed clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for the Commonwealth, who is responsible for the cases heard by the full seven-member court, and the elected SJC clerk for Suffolk County, who coordinates matters handled by single justices.
It makes little sense today, but history at least explains what feels like a classic only-in-Massachusetts story of why voters in four communities are tasked with electing a person to a little-known administrative office serving the entire state, the existence or duties of which many people are completely unaware of.
The post Why do we elect a Supreme Judicial Court clerk anyway? The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.