A Man of Duty The death last weekend of U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner, a victim of cancer, robs Tennessee of a wise and conscientious jurist, who — even when to do so ran counter to his conservative instincts — helped guide the state into a new age of democratic self-government. It fell to Turner to adjudge or preside over such serious matters as the runoff provisions in Memphis city elections, the guilt or innocence of former congressman Harold Ford Sr., and Dyersburg Chancellor David Lanier, redistricting and voting rights cases galore. In each case, Turner tried to adhere to a judicially sound and central way, avoiding the extremes of legal expediency or political correctness. Turner’s 1991 decision holding a municipal runoff unconstitutional paved the way for the ascension of Mayor Willie Herenton as Memphis’ first elected black mayor and, though based on the merits of the case as he saw them, may have neutralized the grounds of a potentially serious and volatile conflict. A later ruling, accepting runoffs in district elections but barring them from at-large municipal races, demonstrated the jurist’s penchant for crafting compromise solutions. In Rep. Ford’s 1993 trial, Turner resoundingly denied a motion — from the U.S. Justice Department, no less — that would have mandated a local and heavily African-American local jury like the one which had proved intractably divided in 1992, forcing an earlier mistrial. In insisting on the importation of a predominantly white — and, as it proved, unbiased — jury from rural West Tennessee, Turner insured that the ultimate resolution of the case in Ford’s favor wold be incontestable in public opinion. And his rulings excluding certain controversial Ford-family documents deprived the prosecution of a useful — but perhaps irrelevant — weapon against Ford. Though he never shied away from enforcing the letter of the law, Turner was not above expressing human sentiments from the bench. In 1993, forced by statute to levy a long-term sentence against Lanier that, in effect, made his death in prison possible, Turner made it movingly clear that he hoped the convicted man would both survive the sentence and come to some point of saving self-realization about the gross forms of sexual harassment that had caused his predicament. Yet when one of Lanier’s lawyers subsequently tampered with a witness while the former chancellor was appealing his sentence, Turner wasted no time revoking Lanier’s bond and remanding him to jail. Even the dutiful, resigned, and philosophically consistent way in which Turner faced his illness and death was characteristic of the man. After learning last November that the persistent pain in his lower back was a sign not of sitting too long on the bench of a workday (as he first thought) but of a metastasizing prostate cancer, Turner basically refused to consider any long-odds, debilitating strategy of fighting his illness and instead accepted it, without treatment, as his destiny. He resolved to keep on working, nose to the grindstone of duty, and did so until he took a fall and, because of his weakened system, broke a hip in January. He wanted to die with his boots on, and, in a true sense, did so. To his last days, he was faithful — as he saw it — to the laws of man and of nature. We can only hope that the process of naming a successor to this man of decisive and balanced judgments is not subverted by political or partisan gamesmanship in this national election year. It would be a disservice to his memory.