Boyce F. Martin, Jr.

[http://history.circ6.dcn/Circuit/bfm-bio.htm Judge Martin's Biography on the 6th Circuit website]

Boyce Ficklen Martin Jr. (born October 23, 1935 in Boston, Massachusetts) is the most senior active judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Appointed by President Carter in 1979, Judge Martin has served as Chief Judge of the circuit and has written more than 1100 opinions during his tenure. Judge Martin lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Early career

After graduating from Davidson College in 1957, Judge Martin first worked in banking. Later, while serving in the Army Reserve, he went to the University of Virginia School of Law and received his LL.B. in 1963. Immediately after graduation he served as a law clerk to Judge Shackelford Miller, then Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit – a position he would later hold himself. In 1964 and 1965, Judge Martin served first as an assistant United States Attorney, and then as the United States Attorney. He left for private practice for a short time, but was soon appointed by the Governor of Kentucky to fill a vacancy on the Jefferson Circuit Court in early 1974. In the November 1974 elections he was endorsed by the Louisville Courier-Journal which praised him for his “innate fairness, temperament, experience, and training necessary to become an outstanding circuit judge.” Louisville Courier-Journal, Oct. 26, 1974 at A-10. He won by a landslide. Louisville Courier-Journal, Nov. 6, 1974, at A-6.

Kentucky Judicial Reform Efforts

In the 1970s, Judge Martin worked hard behind the scenes lobbying to reform the Kentucky Judiciary. Louisville Times, Mar. 28, 1979, at A-16. The Kentucky court system had been little changed since 1850, and it had a host of problems. “Kentucky had a multiplicity of misdemeanor courts that were presided over, for the most part, by non-lawyer judges. There were county courts, magistrate courts, municipal courts, and police courts. It was not uncommon for the judges of these courts to be totally untrained in the law, politically partisan, and, in some cases, of dubious literacy.” Kurt Metzmeier et al., United at Last: The Judicial Article and the Struggle to Reform Kentucky’s Courts 9 (2006). Appeals from these courts went to the Kentucky Court of Appeals whose decisions were of high quality, but could take two or three years to be handed down. Id. The reform efforts bore fruit on November 4, 1975 when an amendment to the state constitution was passed by 54%. The amendment cleared the way to create a unified court system with a new intermediate Court of Appeals and the Kentucky Supreme Court replacing the old highest court.

As a reformer and the first Chief Judge of the newly created Court of Appeals, Judge Martin quickly got the new court off the ground and cleared the backlog of cases that had developed under the old system. Id. at 45. Judge Martin’s goals at the time were to speed up the appellate process, reduce cost, and create an efficient chain of justice, while maintaining a high level of conscientious decision-making. The Louisville Courier-Journal, Feb. 14, 1977 at B-4. These goals were accomplished and the Court of Appeals was generally viewed as an unequivocal success. United at Last, at 45.

Appointment to the Sixth Circuit

Judge Martin was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in the spring of 1979 by President Carter and was confirmed in the fall. He served as Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit from October 1, 1996, until September 30, 2003 and is now Chief Judge Emeritus. During his tenure as Chief Judge steered the Circuit through a turbulent period when up to seven of the sixteen judgeships were vacant due to an impasse between Congress and the President over judicial nominations. As the longest serving active member of the court, he is its most senior active judge.

Judge Martin’s style both on the bench and in written opinions is characterized by “no-nonsense jurisprudence,” clear and concise writing, and a focus on common sense. The Federal Lawyer , January 1998, at 18. He has been cited as an example of how common sense helps “sustain the law, not destroy it.” The Louisville Courier-Journal, Mar. 20, 1996, at 2. The purpose of an opinion is to provide justice to the parties and explain the law to the lawyers and the public. To this end, he quickly publishes opinions so that the disputing parties need not wait longer than necessary. He is also known to liven his opinions with the occasional quote about ostriches or Homer Simpson. See Mortensen v. C.I.R., 440 F.3d 375, 385 (6th Cir. 2006); Seawright v. Amer Gen Fin Serv, 507 F.3d 967, 980 (6th Cir. 2007) (dissenting).

Selected Opinions

The Death Penalty

While remaining true to his oath to uphold the law, Judge Martin has written forcefully about the many failures in the American system of capital punishment. In one case involving a debate regarding a jury’s decision to sentence a defendant to death while a co-conspirator was not sentenced to death, Judge Martin dissented from the majority holding that the principle of proportionality did not apply. He wrote,

“Jason Getsy and John Santine are not hypothetical players in a criminal law final exam. They are real people who committed real crimes, indeed, the same crimes. That Getsy will be put to death while Santine will be spared, and that the law (at least according to the majority) actually sanctions this result, makes it virtually impossible for me to answer in the affirmative what Justice Blackmun viewed as the fundamental question in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141, 1145 (1994)-namely, does our system of capital punishment “accurately and consistently determine” which defendants “deserve” to die and which do not?” Getsy v. Mitchell, 495 F.3d 295, 327 (6th Cir. 2007). “This state of affairs I find unconscionable, even as I remain bound to apply the laws of this court and of the Supreme Court.” Id.

In a much-noted dissent in Moore v. Parker, 425 F.3d 250, 268 (6th Cir. 2005), Judge Martin forcefully objected to the current administration of the death penalty:

“I have been a judge on this Court for more than twenty-five years. In that time I have seen many death penalty cases and I have applied the law as instructed by the Supreme Court and I will continue to do so for as long as I remain on this Court. This my oath requires. After all these years, however, only one conclusion is possible: the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.”

After discussing many of the studies and cases that have noted the numerous flaws in our system, he concluded,

“As noted above, while the system suffers from many flaws, much of the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty stems from the exceedingly distressing fact that during all my years on the bench, the quality of lawyering that capital defendants receive has not substantially improved. In many cases it has deteriorated. In fact, one of the most clear examples of the arbitrariness of the death penalty is the common knowledge that those defendants with decent lawyers rarely get sentenced to death. Death has more to do with extra-judicial factors like race and socio-economic status than with whether death is deserved. A system, whose basic justification is the interest in retribution and general deterrence, is not served when guided by such irrelevant factors. Nor should a system of life and death hinge on the proficiency of counsel.I have no delusions of grandeur and I know my place in the judiciary. My oath requires me to apply the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States. I will continue to do as I am told until the Supreme Court concludes that the death penalty cannot be administered in a constitutional manner or our legislatures abolish the penalty. But lest there be any doubt, the idea that the death penalty is fairly and rationally imposed in this country is a farce.”

Affirmative Action

Judge Martin authored the seminal affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger, 288 F.3d 732 (6th Cir. 2002), which held that the University of Michigan Law School could take into account an applicant’s race in making admission decisions. Grutter, and its sister case, Gratz v. Bollinger, which challenged the University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action plan, eventually were appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court affirmed Grutter and the Law School’s affirmative action plan, while reversing Gratz and finding the undergraduate plan unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, the Grutter case was surrounded in controversy. Conservative judges on the Sixth Circuit claimed that then-Chief Judge Martin had improperly steered the case to a more liberal panel. They also claimed that the en banc review of the case was tainted because it was delayed until two conservative judges of the Sixth Circuit had retired, giving the court a liberal majority. Judge Boggs took the unprecedented step of filing a “Procedural Appendix” as part of his dissent from Grutter, in which he explicitly accused Judge Martin and the rest of the majority of improperly tampering with the case. The majority took umbrage with Judge Boggs’ decision to publish his diatribe, and as Judge Moore eloquently put it, the fact that Judge Boggs,

“did not raise any complaints with the composition of the en banc court when the en banc petition was circulated, when the case was argued before the en banc court, or even in the first circulated draft of Judge Boggs's dissent. The lateness of [Judge Boggs’] complaints suggests that [his] primary complaint is with the outcome of the present case rather than with the procedures that were followed in arriving at that outcome. But unhappiness over the outcome of the case cannot justify the dissenters’ ‘Procedural Appendix.’ Judge Boggs’s opinion marks a new low point in the history of the Sixth Circuit. It will irreparably damage the already strained working relationships among the judges of this court.”

Judge Martin was eventually exonerated by both the House Judiciary Committee, which formally closed its investigation of Judge Martin in 2006, and by the 2006 Breyer Committee’s Report. The Breyer Committee concluded that the Sixth Circuit’s internal investigation into Judge Martin’s alleged actions in handling the Grutter case was inherently flawed. The Breyer Report found that the investigation did not allow Judge Martin an opportunity to defend himself, and the investigation itself was conducted in a manner inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the court’s rules. [http://www.supremecourtus.gov/publicinfo/breyercommitteereport.pdf The Breyer Report] at 76-78. Just as Judge Moore predicted in her concurrence, in the wake of Judge Boggs’s “Procedural Appendix”, relations between conservative and liberal members of the Sixth Circuit remain strained.