MOBILE — The single most consequential piece of news for the Mobile County courthouse in the spring of 2005 was not a verdict or an indictment. It was a retirement.
Circuit Judge Ferrill D. McRae announced he would retire the following year, leaving an open seat on the bench after roughly four decades of service — and setting off the kind of quiet, careful jockeying that precedes any judicial contest in Alabama, where judges run in partisan elections.
The scramble for the McRae seat
Attorneys mentioned as prospective candidates to succeed McRae included:
- District Judge George Hardesty, a veteran Republican who had worked as both a defense attorney and a prosecutor before joining the district bench.
- Robert Smith, a Mobile lawyer who had run for the Alabama Supreme Court the previous year.
- Jim Frost, a Mobile attorney.
- Duncan Crow, a Mobile attorney.
- Ben Brooks, the Mobile City Councilman, then campaigning for re-election in District 4.
- Walter Honeycutt, who had run unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee against incumbent Democratic District Attorney John Tyson.
One name was removed from speculation almost as soon as it appeared. Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis moved to dismiss any suggestion that he would seek a circuit seat, saying he planned instead to run for a second term as judge of probate court.
A challenge to Judge Thomas
Elsewhere in the courthouse, local attorney John Williams was reportedly weighing a challenge to Circuit Judge Herman Thomas, seeking the Republican nomination to face the Democratic incumbent.
Williams, then 36 and a native of Citronelle, had spent four years as a prosecutor in Montgomery before returning to Mobile in 1997 to open the Mobile office of Graddick and Belser. He had served eight years as municipal judge in Citronelle and was the city prosecutor for Satsuma. He attended the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was student bar president.
The circuit clerk’s office
Court administrator Jo Jo Schwarzauer said she planned to seek the Republican nomination for Mobile County circuit clerk in 2006, challenging the office then held by Democratic incumbent Susie Wilson.
Schwarzauer, a lifelong resident of Mobile County, had worked at the courthouse for more than 28 years. She began in 1976 in the office of then-District Attorney Charlie Graddick — later a circuit judge himself — and left the district attorney’s office in 1988 to join the staff of former presiding Circuit Judge Braxton Kittrell. She took over as court administrator in January 2000.
Why this all happened at once
The clustering was not coincidental. Alabama holds its judicial and county-office elections in the same partisan cycle as its statewide races, and 2006 was a gubernatorial year. Anyone contemplating a move — a judge weighing retirement, an attorney weighing a first campaign, a career courthouse employee weighing a run for the office she had worked in for decades — had to decide in 2005.
Mobile County was also in the middle of a slow partisan realignment. Offices that had long been held by Democrats, including the circuit clerk’s office and several judgeships, were drawing serious Republican challengers. The pattern visible in these early-2005 rumors — Republicans lining up against Democratic incumbents in the district attorney’s office, the circuit clerk’s office and the circuit bench — would define Mobile County politics for the next decade.
Judge McRae’s retirement, then, was more than the end of one man’s long career. It was the opening of a competition that would substantially remake the county’s judiciary, and it began, as these things usually do, with a list of names and a lot of telephone calls.