By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The man’s face just radiated hate.

Twenty years ago, I covered a rally of white supremacists that took place at the Indiana Statehouse. Those were heady days for hate

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
groups. Klan leader David Duke had won national attention with a too-close-for-comfort gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana – he finished second and claimed nearly 40 percent of the vote — which he then parlayed into a run through the 1992 Republican presidential primaries. He lost, but he managed to drag the Klan out of the swamps and into the spotlight.

Commentary button in JPG – no shadowEmboldened, white supremacist groups adopted a strategy of demanding to use public places – Statehouses, county courthouses, public monuments – for their rallies. Government officials inevitably resisted. The hate groups then filed suit, won on First Amendment grounds and used the resulting publicity to build their crowds.

Left to their own devices, they probably couldn’t have filled a phone booth.

The rally I covered featured barely articulate speakers using a cheap, muffled sound system. The number of people protesting the rally and declaring that Indiana was no home for hate outnumbered the white supremacists.

Anger flowed like a flood tide through the crowd. At one point, the chants the two sides hurled at each other turned to shouts. Then people started pushing and shoving, and the crowd seemed to move like a snake from the west side of the Statehouse into the concrete corridor dividing the north and south buildings of the Indiana Government Center. People pushed, shoved, punched and jostled against the doors and windows of the south building for a few terrifying moments until police and security personnel managed to restore order.

But that wasn’t the scariest moment.

That came earlier, before the disorganized rally began.

I’d noticed a man standing off to the side, an older white guy in work boots and a frayed green baseball cap. He watched the stage with a laser-like focus.

I told him I was a reporter and asked if I could talk with him.

He nodded yes.

He’d driven over from southeast Illinois to hear the speakers. With little prompting, he shared his story and philosophy.

Both contained the usual inanities. Blacks, Jews and everyone who wasn’t just like him had ruined everything. They’d shattered the economy and wrecked the culture.

His own life, he said, was a tragedy because of them. He told me, barely pausing for breath, how his wife had left him and his teen-age children wouldn’t even return his phone calls or answer his letters.

I lost him when I asked how black and Jewish people could be responsible for his wife leaving him and his children refusing to talk with him.

His eyes narrowed and he stared at me for a long moment, and then said, his voice a hiss:

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

As he walked away, he hurled this over his shoulder:

“You people need to watch yourselves.”

You people.

A little later, when the rally turned violent, I saw him running along the edge of the crowd. He’d taken off his belt and was swinging it like a whip. He was just about to lash a college-age young woman with it when a police officer body-slammed him.

None of the verbs – twisted, contorted, inflamed – normally used to describe anger do justice to the rage that colored his face.

I’ve thought about that man since the news broke that another white supremacist, Frazier Glenn Miller (also known as Frazier Glenn Cross) tried to stage his own version of the Holocaust in Overland Park, Kan. Police say Miller opened fire at a Jewish community center and a retirement complex. He killed three people and terrified who knows how many others.

None of them had ever done a thing to hurt him.

Miller came from the same part of the cultural landscape that the guy I talked with years ago occupied, a warped spot in which people who aren’t exactly like them – you people – always are to blame for everything that doesn’t work in their lives.

It would be comforting to think that Miller was the only person out there who was that angry, that hate-filled, that dangerous.

Comforting, but, sadly, wrong.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

Marilyn Odendahl for www.theindianalawyer.com  

Attorneys and judges alike say whenever Judge Sarah Evans Barker is on the bench, there is no question who is in charge in that courtroom. This is a judge they universally describe as well-prepared, well-organized and authoritative, but not averse to occasionally introducing a little humor in the proceedings.

It is not surprising that when Barker, U.S. District judge for the Southern District of Indiana, announced her plans to take senior status June 30, many in the legal community caught their breath. Then they learned that she will be continuing to work at full bore until a successor is appointed, and only at that time will she cut her caseload slightly.

barker-sarahevans0414-1col.jpg District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker hopes to have more time to spend with her grandchildren as she transitions to senior status. (IL Photo/ Marilyn Odendahl)
Upon hearing of Barker’s intentions, Ronald Elberger, her law school classmate and former Bose McKinney & Evans colleague, smiled.

“It means she is still going to be in the federal court, which is good news,” he said.

Thirty years ago, Barker was tapped for the federal bench. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1984, becoming the first woman to serve as a District Court judge in Indiana.

Even before she put on a judicial robe, Barker had been kicking at the glass ceiling. In 1972, she was the first female hired as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana. Nine years later, she was appointed U.S. attorney, then being just one of two women to serve in that position.

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Barker said she knew that serving as a federal judge would be challenging and take all the talent she had, but it would also be interesting and rewarding.

“You have an extended reach as a judge into our society to affect the relationship and the course of events and the interpretation of law,” Barker said. “So you do that with a modesty, you do that within the parameters of your role and with a sense that your part is only to give things a little nudge, not to be preemptive in terms of reorganizing people’s lives and affairs.”

Along the way, Barker always took time to mentor and help attorneys build their careers. She played matchmaker, pointing lawyers to opportunities both in the profession as well as in the community.

Sam Laurin, partner at Bose, faced Barker two times as a young attorney, barely six years into his practice. One day, he asked if the court could end session early so he could go home for his daughter’s birthday. Barker readily obliged, and then they spent a few minutes off the record talking about their children.

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laurin Laurin
Laurin knew to be prepared when going to Barker’s court and to never be late, a lesson he learned when opposing counsel arrived after the appointed hour.

“The trains are going to run on time in her court, but there is time for occasional levity as well,” Laurin said.

The Southern District of Indiana is one of the busiest District courts in the country and that, Barker said, is one of her primary motivators for her decision to transition at this time – an additional judge will bring relief to the docket. Once she becomes a senior judge, a vacancy will open on the five-member court and once a new judge is appointed, she will cut her caseload to 80 percent. Her reduced caseload, combined with Senior Judge Larry McKinney’s caseload, will essentially add a sixth judge to the Southern District.

“For me, part of the fun has been to come in every day and see what arrives in my inbox and then to see if I am up to the challenges it presents,” Barker said. “I’ll just keep doing it that way.”

Three decades has filled her docket with a wealth of cases, but she does not want to choose which was more special, comparing it to asking a mother to choose her favorite child. Every case deserved her careful attention and best effort, she said.

When rendering an opinion, Barker maintained the judge has the role and responsibility to stay limited to the legal question being presented by the case.

She pointed to her decision in the complaint over the state’s voter ID law, eventually upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, as an example. There, she said, she addressed the ID law as it was argued and on the basis of the facts and law as presented found the statute to be constitutional. She emphasized she did not rule on the wisdom of the voter law, nor did she tell the Legislature what she thought the state should do.

“That sort of captures my sense of what a judge does,” Barker said. “You decide the case before you, you don’t decide wider issues.”

Likewise, in deciding Buquer v. City of Indianapolis, City of Franklin, Johnson County, 1:11-cv-0708, she found the state’s immigration law to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment.

The judge’s role, Barker continued, is to render a decision on the case presented. From the bench, the judicial officer should look at the parties, look at the mechanics of the case as to whether it was brought in the proper venue at the right time, and are the right issues being raised when attacking the statute.

One of the cases that solidified Barker’s judicial reputation was the Bridgestone/Firestone Tire Products multidistrict litigation that involved more than 800 lawsuits from all over the United States and overseas. The case was assigned to Barker in 2000 and took a decade to resolve with the first four years being the busiest.

To help with the massive litigation, Barker called upon U.S. Magistrate Judge V. Sue Shields and appointed Debra McVicker Lynch, now a magistrate judge with the Southern District, to the special master position.
debbie lynch Lynch
Lynch had developed an interest in being a judge during the two years she served as Barker’s first female law clerk. She has no doubt Barker had her in mind when she asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation for a special master.

“I think what’s really important that doesn’t get out often enough about her is that she didn’t strive to be the first, she strived to be one of many women,” Lynch said of Barker. “I really think it’s important to be said that she was not just the first but she always tried to be one of many, many women in leadership positions.”

At the first pretrial conference of the Bridgestone/Firestone litigation, Barker’s courtroom was a sea of mostly male lawyers dressed in black and gray suits. Lynch remembers entering with Barker and Shields – three women in charge of a major case that involved numerous issues and countless plaintiffs.

Barker and her decision to put women on the team must have sent a strong message. At the next pretrial conference, Lynch said, more women lawyers were in attendance.

Outside the courtroom, Barker continued to champion women. She was a driving force behind the Women in Law Conference, previously sponsored by Indiana Lawyer, which brought the female members of the bar together to network and talk about issues in their practices, including balancing work with families.
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Indiana Court of Appeals Chief Judge Nancy Vaidik remembers picking up the phone shortly after she had arrived in Indianapolis and hearing Barker introduce herself and offer an invitation to lunch. Vaidik is now following Barker’s lead by mentoring and helping young women as well as her law students at Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

“Judge Barker knew she had a responsibility,” Vaidik said. “She told me she knew if she screwed up she would set back other women. Her most lasting legacy is not the cases and not (being) the first woman. It is her generosity and mentoring of other women in her own funny, smart, lady-like way.”•