The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett has reminded Americans of how much courts can shape our lives, but the work of judges is rarely seen by the public.
No one illustrates that better than a man who sat on Virginia’s federal district court in Richmond and ruled on some of the most important cases of our time. He’s the subject of a new documentary.
Robert Merhige was a criminal defense lawyer in Richmond when he and his friend, J. Sargeant Reynolds, a rising star in Virginia’s democratic party, decided to take a road trip.
“He called me one morning to go to the race track," he remembered. "He said we have to leave early, because I have to stop in Washington. We were there very early on a Saturday, and we had some breakfast, and I said, ‘What do you have to stop for?’ and he said, ‘Well I’ve got to go to the White House.’ And I said, ‘What for?’ and he said, ‘I’ve got an appointment with a man over there to talk about you.’”
President Lyndon Johnson put Merhige on the federal bench in 1967, where he would rule on some of the most contentious issues of the 20th century. Recognizing, for example, that white flight had left Richmond with a largely segregated school district, he ordered the integration of Henrico and Chesterfield County schools – busing kids to and from Richmond. His goal was simple according to Al Calderaro, who recently finished a film about Merhige.
“If you can get people together, they will find out that people are people and racial differences which are superficial don’t really matter in the long run.”
Many white residents didn’t see it that way.
“The judge’s life was threatened, his family’s lives were threatened, at one point they shot his dog," Calderaro says. "They burned down a guest house on his property where his mother-in-law was living. There were KKK rallies every weekend around his house. He had 24-hour, 7-day-a-week U.S. Marshal protection. It was pretty intense.”
But Merhige was a courageous man who felt he had to do the right thing.
“With all the threats and all, I took it up with my wife," he recalled. "I said, ‘Look, I’ll quit if you want me to,’ and she said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well I’m glad you feel that way, because I think what I’m doing is what I’m supposed to do,’”
When a chemical company in Hopewell spilled the toxic pesticide Kepone into the James River, he imposed the largest fine of its kind -- $13 million, but environmentalist Gerald McCarthy said the judge wasn’t satisfied.
“It’s just a shame, he continued, that all this money is going to go to the federal government, and it’s not going to help the people of Virginia or the environment of Virginia which are the entities that have suffered this pollution incident.”
So Merhige proposed much of the fine -- $8 million -- be paid to a newly created foundation that has, so far, awarded 14,000 grants to environmental groups to clean up Virginia.
When 16,000 women sued a Richmond-based pharmaceutical company for medical problems caused by its intrauterine device, Merhige combined all of their cases into a single class action suit, then created an agency to review each claim and award damages. Those cases would become models for future litigation.
In a court known for its slow pace, Merhige moved quickly according to attorney Ann Holton – his court known as the rocket docket.
“He was very committed to the notion that justice delayed is justice denied.”
And ACLU attorney Phillip Hirschkopf says he was tough in a good way.
“Bob Merhige had absolutely no capacity to accept bullshit. That was the probably the strongest trait in him. He suffered fools very poorly. And no judge ever twister arms harder for a settlement. He was notorious for that. He’d get you in chambers, and you really needed a drink when you got out of there, because he’d shrunk your head.”
Merhige died in 2005, but he is remembered in this documentary from Al Calderaro and director Robert Griffith. It’s called The Judge, and it’s available online at the Virginia Film Festival website through Sunday: https://virginiafilmfestival.eventive.org/welcome
