Mobile County District Judge Mike McMaken, the longest-serving judge — state or federal — in Mobile County, confirmed that he would step down from the bench on Oct. 1, closing out a career of more than 25 years and setting in motion a succession that could reshuffle the local judiciary and the state Senate delegation alike.
McMaken, 65, confirmed the move late on a Thursday afternoon. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 25 and a half years. I have a son going off to college in 10 days, a daughter with one more year of high school. I want to try to make use of my time a little better where my family is concerned. But I am going to miss it.”
The timing was deliberate. A son within days of leaving for college and a daughter entering her final year of high school made the coming years, in McMaken’s telling, the last stretch in which his calendar could still bend around his family’s — and a district judgeship, with its daily docket of thousands of cases, does not bend easily.
First elected in 1986 as a Democrat, McMaken took the oath of office in January 1987 and won re-election in 1992, 1998, 2004 and 2010, later becoming a Republican. The party switch, common enough among Alabama judges of his generation, never cost him an election in a county whose politics shifted steadily toward the GOP over the course of his tenure — a run of five successful campaigns that made him a fixture on the county’s ballot for a quarter of a century.
In the fall of 1993 he took on the additional duties of presiding over Mobile’s Drug Court, a role he had continued alongside his district court work ever since. What began as a side assignment became, over nearly two decades, the work he spoke about with the most feeling.
A soft spot for Drug Court
McMaken said he hoped to remain involved with the Drug Court if possible. “We’re about to have our 100th graduation. 100 classes is pretty impressive,” he said. “Not everybody benefits. Some fail. Some don’t try. But in almost 20 years, how many have benefited is astounding. When it works, there is nothing like it. It’s wonderful.”
Drug courts were still a young idea when McMaken took over Mobile’s. The model, which emerged nationally at the end of the 1980s, trades the conventional path through the criminal system — charge, plea, sentence — for supervised treatment, frequent court appearances and graduated sanctions, offering defendants charged with drug offenses a chance to earn dismissal of their cases by completing the program. Alabama’s courts adopted the approach in the 1990s, and Mobile’s program under McMaken became one of the state’s longest-running.
The judge’s description of its record was candid about the failures. Drug court participants relapse, drop out and reappear on the criminal docket; the program’s defenders have never claimed otherwise. Its promise lies in the graduates — defendants who enter the program facing prison and leave it employed, in treatment and out of the cycle. McMaken’s nearly 20 years at its head gave him a longer view of those outcomes than almost anyone else in the courthouse.
He said he hoped to stay busy with the Drug Court, with mediations and with pro bono work through the bar association. Retirement, in other words, would end his tenure on the bench but not his connection to the courthouse work he knew best — senior judges in Alabama are often recalled for special assignments, and mediation has become a staple of the state’s overburdened dockets.
McMaken had battled health issues for several years and had occasionally been sidelined for brief stints while undergoing treatment. The absences were noticed at the courthouse — a judge’s docket cannot simply pause — but the brief durations of the interruptions testified to the routine he kept between treatments, returning to the bench as quickly as his health allowed.
The health considerations, combined with the family calendar, framed a decision that colleagues and lawyers across the courthouse described as characteristic: an announcement made plainly, without a farewell tour, timed to give the system that depended on him the earliest possible warning of the vacancy.
A succession puzzle
The vacancy set up an intricate chain of possibilities, the kind that Alabama’s blend of judicial appointments and legislative careers occasionally produces. The governor could appoint state Sen. Ben Brooks, the Tillmans Corner product, to the seat if Brooks emerged as one of three names submitted by the Mobile County Judicial Selection Commission.
Brooks was already the unopposed Republican nominee for the Mobile County Circuit Court slot held by retiring Judge Jim Wood. A sitting state senator with no opposition for a circuit judgeship was a rare thing, and it positioned Brooks to move to the bench in January regardless of anything else — and positioned the governor to move him again if the district court vacancy was filled first.
After Brooks was sworn in as a circuit judge in January, the governor would again be positioned to fill the district judgeship by appointment. In tapping Brooks, the governor might also save the state money by setting a special election to fill the resulting state Senate vacancy in conjunction with the November general election — an arrangement that avoids the considerable cost of a standalone special election and hands the voters a full slate at the polls.
The domino effect did not stop with the courts. Each vacancy in the chain creates another: a district judgeship filled from the Senate creates a Senate vacancy; a Senate vacancy creates a legislative campaign; and a legislative campaign in a Mobile County seat draws the names of everyone who has been waiting for a door to open.
Several names were already circulating for that Senate seat: state Rep. Jim Barton, who had erected campaign signs; Mobile County Commissioner Mike Dean, who said he would run; and others drawing mention, including recent county commission contender Nick Matranga and Mobile County Circuit Judge Charlie McKnight.
The early signs were a measure of how valuable the seat was considered. Barton, a senior House member from southwest Mobile County, had moved first with signage visible around the district; Dean, whose county commission district overlapped the senate seat’s territory, made his intentions public almost immediately. Both were established officeholders with the name recognition and donor networks a legislative race requires.
A Senate vacancy would touch more than individual ambitions. The seat represents part of Mobile County in a chamber where the county’s delegation has long shared influence over local legislation — the bills affecting the port, the county’s government and the city’s boundaries all pass through delegation hands — and its loss, even temporarily, would leave one of the county’s Legislative delegations a voice short until a special election could be settled.
How the seat gets filled
Typically, the five-member Mobile County Judicial Selection Commission screens applicants for the bench and sends a list of three prospects to the governor, who has 90 days to choose one before the appointing authority transfers to the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. The commission’s design is meant to remove some of the politics from judicial vacancies: lawyers and a presiding judge do the screening, and the governor chooses from names that have survived that review rather than from the full field of applicants.
At the time, presiding Circuit Judge Charlie Graddick and attorneys Danner Frazer and Billy Bedsole sat on the commission. Two non-lawyer slots, picked by the county’s legislative delegation, stood open — a reminder that even the nominating process itself depended on the same delegation whose membership the McMaken succession could reshuffle.
The 90-day clock adds its own pressure. Once the commission delivers its list, the governor’s office has a quarter of a year to decide before the choice moves to the state Supreme Court’s chief justice — a deadline that tends to concentrate the negotiations among the governor’s staff, the local delegation and the applicants themselves.
For a district court that handled thousands of cases a year, McMaken’s departure meant more than the exit of a familiar face. District judges in Mobile County carry the daily weight of the local justice system — misdemeanor dockets, preliminary hearings for every felony charge filed in the county, small claims and civil suits below the circuit threshold — and the loss of a veteran judge with 25 years of institutional memory is felt in every courtroom calendar that has to be redrawn.
The district bench is also where most citizens encounter the courts at all. The people who appear before a district judge are defendants on first appearance, landlords and tenants, drivers contesting tickets, creditors and debtors — a cross-section of the county that a circuit judge rarely sees in one room. McMaken’s decade-and-a-half of double duty, holding the district docket and the Drug Court simultaneously, made him one of the judges most Mobile residents were likely to have stood before.
It touched off a sequence of appointments and elections that would ripple across the courthouse and Montgomery in the months to come. A retirement announced on a Thursday afternoon, in the plain words of a judge describing his own family’s calendar, would end up moving a senator to the circuit bench, a governor into the middle of Mobile County’s judicial politics, a special election onto the November ballot and a half-dozen careers toward the vacancies left behind.
McMaken, for his part, planned to leave the way he served — without ceremony beyond what the moment required. The Drug Court graduation he mentioned was approaching, its 100th class about to be counted, and if the system allowed it he intended to be there for it: not on the bench, but still watching the program he built for nearly 20 years do the work he always said made the whole career worthwhile.