Russell steps into familiar role as chief justice

Missouri’s newest chief justice took office on July 1 with plenty of experience on the job — and several tasks already underway that will shape the future of the court.

Judge Mary R. Russell, who previously served as chief justice from 2013 to 2015, was elected by the court to serve a second two-year term in the court’s top administrative role.

Among Russell’s many duties will be to chair the Appellate Judicial Commission, where she will play a key role in helping select two new colleagues.

The seven-member commission is scheduled to meet Aug. 21 to 23 at the Supreme Court Building in Jefferson City to publicly interview applicants for the vacancy that will be created when Judge George W. Draper III retires on Aug. 4. Draper’s vacancy is one of two expected on the Supreme Court this year, as Judge Patricia Breckenridge will reach the mandatory retirement age in October and trigger a second replacement cycle.

In addition, Russell will help pick at least one panel of finalists for a Court of Appeals vacancy, as Judge Sherri B. Sullivan has announced that she will retire from the Eastern District in August. Interviews for that vacancy are scheduled to take place in St. Louis the week after finalists for the Supreme Court vacancy are selected.

During Russell’s prior term as chief justice, there were no Supreme Court vacancies and just a handful of Court of Appeals openings to fill. Yet it’s hardly an unfamiliar process for Russell, who has been an outspoken proponent of Missouri’s Nonpartisan Court plan throughout her career.

“How would a girl from rural Missouri ever become a judge on the Supreme Court if we didn’t have the level playing field that the Nonpartisan Court Plan promotes?” she told reporters 10 years ago as she became chief justice for the first time.

The court no longer holds press conferences marking new chief justices’ terms. Russell, through the court’s communications counsel, declined a request for an interview for this story.

Russell, one of five children raised on a Ralls County dairy farm near Hannibal, was in private practice in Hannibal until Gov. Mel Carnahan named her to the Court of Appeals Eastern District in 1995. Gov. Bob Holden elevated her to the Supreme Court in 2004.

Russell’s jurisprudence represents the center of the Supreme Court. In nearly 19 years on the high court, she has never issued a solo dissent. She is consistently in the majority — over the last two years, she’s voted on the prevailing side in 96 percent of split cases, a higher percentage than any other judge.

Unlike his or her counterpart on the U.S. Supreme Court, the chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court doesn’t control which judges write a particular opinion, so Russell’s leadership won’t necessarily change the outcome of cases. Much of the job involves outreach to the public, a role Russell relishes.

During her prior term, Russell visited county courthouses as an “undercover judge,” dressed in plain clothes so she could get a sense of what ordinary Missourians were experiencing. She often urged the lawyers and judges to demystify the court process and better educate the public about the legal system.

“It is sad that more people are able to name three Kardashian sisters but cannot name the three branches of government,” Russell she told members of The Missouri Bar at its 2013 annual meeting.

Russell also began efforts to overhaul the state’s municipal courts, whose practices came into question during the unrest in Ferguson that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Among other things, the Russell-led court installed a judge from the Court of Appeals to hear Ferguson’s municipal cases and restore a sense of fairness to the process.

Russell’s prior term also coincided with the state executions of 16 men from late 2013 to mid-2015. Ten of those occurred in 2014, the highest number in a single calendar year in modern state history.

In an interview at the time, Russell said the number of executions was the result of a large backlog of death-sentenced inmates whose appeals had been exhausted, and she noted that execution warrants, like other court actions, require the approval of at least four judges.

The reason Russell is in a position to serve as chief for a second time stems from the court’s complicated internal seniority system. By tradition, after a judge serves as chief justice, he or she becomes the least senior person on the court until new judges are appointed or another chief justice rotates to the bottom.

As a result, Russell had greater seniority than Judges W. Brent Powell and Robin Ransom, who joined the court after her original term ended in 2015. But when her new term ends in 2025, Russell will be junior to the yet-to-be-determined colleagues join she will help choose this year.

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