By Jessica Holdman
SCDailyGazette.com
COLUMBIA — South Carolina lawmakers could make moves to diversify the state Supreme Court. Or it could become the only all-male, all-white high court in the nation through at least 2028, the next time an opening is expected.
Three female judges — including two women of color — are among six candidates vying to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Chief Justice Don Beatty, the only Black justice on the state’s high court. The other three candidates are white men.
The high court hopefuls include two state Appeals Court judges — Blake Hewitt of Conway and Letitia Verdin of Greenville — three Circuit Court judges — Deadra Jefferson of Charleston; Keith Kelly, a former state House member from Spartanburg County; and Jocelyn Newman of Columbia — and Administrative Law Court Chief Judge Ralph King “Tripp” Anderson of Columbia.
The six applied by Monday’s deadline to the Judicial Merit Selection Commission, the Legislature’s judicial screening panel.
Beatty, also a former legislator from Spartanburg, is retiring when his term ends this summer, after he turns 72, the state’s mandatory retirement age for judges. Last month, the Legislature unanimously elected John Kittredge as the next chief justice.
Who lawmakers opt to replace him will shape the look of the court for some time. A seat isn’t likely to come available for more than four years, when Kittredge ages out. (State law requires judges to retire from full-time work by Dec. 31 of the year they turn 72.)
Meanwhile, South Carolina’s judiciary has been under intense scrutiny over the last two years as fights over abortion politicized a judicial selection process historically based on personal relationships and geography.
South Carolina is one of only two states where the Legislature elects nearly all judges. Virginia is the other.
South Carolina already has the only all-male Supreme Court in the nation. Eighteen states have no judge of color on their Supreme Court, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
From two to zero
For six years, South Carolina had two women on the bench: former Chief Justice Jean Toal, who retired in 2015, and Justice Kaye Hearn, elected in 2009.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew Roe v. Wade in June 2022, it left the state court to decide the legality of the state’s abortion laws. After the ruling, a law legislators passed in 2021 that banned abortions once an ultrasound detects cardiac activity temporarily took affect before abortion providers sued to block it.
In a 3-2 decision in early January 2023, the state Supreme Court tossed out that first “fetal heartbeat” law as violating the state constitution’s guarantee from unreasonable invasions of privacy. The majority opinion was written by Hearn, the only woman on the court. It was her last opinion before she retired — she turned 72 in 2022 — and it was blasted by GOP lawmakers as judicial activism.
In the race to replace her, two female judges ultimately dropped out before the Legislature elected Justice Gary Hill, the male judge who had the votes.
Then in August, the all-male court upheld a new version of the law that bans abortions around six weeks into pregnancy, which GOP legislators tweaked to address concerns raised by one justice in a separate opinion eight months earlier. Considered the swing vote, Justice John Few agreed with Hearn’s conclusion but not her reasoning.
In the second, 4-1 ruling, only Beatty still found the law unconstitutional.
The candidates
The Legislature is set to vote in June on who will fill the vacancy created by his departure. A public hearing for the six candidates will be May 9. The screening panel will forward up to the three names for a vote by a joint General Assembly for a job that pays a $213,300 salary.
Among the female candidates, Jefferson has been on the bench for 28 years. Lawmakers elected her to Family Court in 1996 and then Circuit Court in Charleston in 2001. What she lacks is time on the state Appeals Court that the majority of justices boast.
Only Anderson has served longer. He was first elected to the Administrative Law Court in 1994, a year after the Legislature created the independent agency to hear disputes about state agencies’ decisions. He has unsuccessfully sought a seat on the state Supreme Court multiple times since 2015.
Verdin has been a judge since 2008. Lawmakers elected her first to Family Court in the Upstate, then Circuit Court and finally to the state Appeals Court just last year.
Hewitt has sat on the Appeals Court longer — since 2019 — while having the least judicial experience of all the candidates. Even his election to his current position was contentious. Black lawmakers walked out of the chamber after the Legislature passed over a Black woman who had been on the bench 20 years to select Hewitt, a white attorney who had never been a judge.
Kelly, a former Republican legislator, has been a Circuit Court judge for 11 years. He served two terms in the state House before Rep. Bill Chumley, also of Woodruff, ousted him in the 2010 primary.
And Newman, the daughter of Circuit Judge Clifton Newman, has spent eight years as a Circuit Court judge in Columbia. Among the decisions she’s weighed in on during her career is South Carolina’s use of a firing squad or electric chair in death penalty executions.
Newman sided with four death row inmates suing over the options. The case is now pending before the state Supreme Court.
Jessica Holdman writes about the economy, workforce and higher education. Before joining the S.C. Daily Gazette, she was a business reporter for The Post and Courier.
S.C. Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
