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Supreme Court Justices Go To Prison

10/25/2024

Fifty years ago, Oklahomans were humiliated by revelations that three state Supreme Court justices had accepted bribes. Former Justices N.S. Corn, Earl Welch and N.B. Johnson served jail time for their criminal actions.

Judicial Scandal
In 1965, scandal burst forth in an unusual setting, the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Three judges were implicated in taking payoffs to decide cases before the court. These three judges were either convicted in court or impeached. IRS inquiries laid much of the groundwork.
One of the guilty judges, N.S. Corn, became contrite and publicly described his misbehavior. He admitted that over about 20 years of taking payoff, he could not recall one single year in which he had not taken a payoff. Professor Phillip M. Simpson of Cameron University has researched one spectacular payoff case in which "Corn . swore that he had received $150,000 in $100 bills ... in a downtown Oklahoma City
meeting .... The attorney wuo had established the pattern with Corn was O.A. Cargill, former Oklahoma City mayor and Corn's friend for 50 years." This corruption obviously reached into the highest levels and included citizens usually deemed quite respectable.

Corn, Welch and Johnson had been elected, and re-elected, to their high positions by the people. The shame cast on our state by their misconduct was the fuel for a judicial reform movement led

The Sneed Plan, calling for the appointment, not election, of our appellate judges, passed as a constitutional amendment in 1967. Missing from the Sneed Plan were district court judges who remain elected officials to this day.

The Sneed Plan established the Judicial Nominating Commission, composed of 15 members. It has six lawyers, elected by the lawyers, six laypersons appointed by the governor, plus three more laypersons, one selected by the members of the commission, one selected by the House speaker and one selected by the president pro tem of the Senate.

When a vacancy occurs on any court, the commission carefully screens all applicants and submits a list of three qualified people to the governor who must name one person from that list. All appointed appellate judges are on a retention ballot every four years. A bad apple can be removed. If a district court judgeship becomes vacant by death, resignation or removal, that vacancy is filled in the same manner by the commission.

Why were district judges not included in the Sneed Plan? The answer is simple, political sausage. In 1967, rural Oklahoma was suspicious of a commission in Oklahoma City and the governor having a big say in who their local judges would be. That opposition was deemed substantial, so supporters of the Sneed Plan decided that half a loaf was better than none and, as a political expedient, they excluded the district judges from the plan submitted to the voters.

The time has come to further amend the law to provide for the appointment of district judges in the same manner as appellate judges. The 1967 compromise has served its purpose. At least 12 members of the commission must live in what was formerly our six congressional districts so the rural vs. urban tension is reduced.

The practice of law has changed and lawyers now routinely travel statewide to appear in court. Half of the presidents of the Oklahoma Bar Association have historically come from counties other than Oklahoma and Tulsa. It is a different world from 1967.

Electing judges is simply a bad idea. In Tulsa County we recently elected five district judges. Incumbent judges had to take time from their important work to campaign and, yes, raise money. It is not surprising that some candidates raised and spent more than $100,000 campaigning.

Most of these campaign funds come from lawyers who practice before those same judges. This is an unfortunate byproduct of electing judges.

Unlike most political races, ethical restrictions limit what judicial candidates can do in a campaign, e.g., they cannot say “verdicts are too high (or too low)” or “I’m for the little guy.”

When we have judicial elections, lawyers get many questions from good people who ask how they should vote. The average conscientious voter has no reliable means of making an informed decision on who will be a good judge. Judges go to work every day and handle the cases they are assigned. Most of their work is without fanfare or notoriety. Occasionally, a judge will draw a case that gets media attention but that is the exception, not the rule.

Oklahoma is one of 32 states that still elects some or all judges. Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently said, “in too many states, judicial elections are becoming political prize fights where partisans and special interests seek to install judges who will answer to them instead of the law and the Constitution.” Or, as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted more than a century ago, the election of judges will “sooner or later, have disastrous results.”

For these and other reasons, it is time to change our laws, get it right and provide for district judges to be appointed, and be subject to removal, in the same manner as appellate judges.

Oklahoma Supreme Court, a 1965 scandal of bribery and betrayal, of fixed decisions, impeachment and prison terms. On another level, it is a story of legal reform fueled by impressive moral courage and tenacity, the story of Harlan Grimes, the lawyer who was disbarred on May 8, 1960, for publicly accusing a Supreme Court justice of taking bribes

The Daily Oklahoman said;
On Dec. 9, 1964, 80-year-old former Supreme Court Justice N.S. Corn, who was serving an 18-month sentence at the federal prison in Springfield, Mo., for income tax evasion, gave his 84-page sworn statement to the government. In it, he detailed his involvement in bribery, implicating Justice Earl Welch, Justice N.B. Johnson and others. Ten days later, Corn was freed early.

That statement found its way to federal judge Stephen Chandler, who shared it with William Berry, a new justice. Berry got G.T. Blankenship, a new Republican representative, to present it to the state legislature.

Denying his guilt and refusing to leave quietly, Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson was impeached by the Oklahoma Senate .

The evidence presented against Johnson was Corn's uncorroborated testimony and a $7,902 discrepancy between Johnson's income and his bank account in 1960 and 1961. Other evidence presented was that, shortly after allegedly receiving a bribe, Johnson had opened a safety deposit box to which his wife did not have access, and that, having previously paid his household bills with cashier's checks, he stopped doing so after March 1962. The Senate also heard that on April 12, 1962, attorney Harlan Grimes had written Johnson accusing him of taking a bribe.

What are the conditions that led to this corruption? The authors suggest that it was both the populist method of electing justices with its campaigns and political contributions, and the influence of the legislature derived from their control of judicial salaries.

There was also a system of rules which caused Harlan Grimes to be disbarred for publishing the truth about justices and bribery. Inadequate campaign financing laws, the lack of a retirement plan for justices and meager salaries exacerbated a natural human tendency to dishonesty and greed.

In the wake of all the publicized corruption, the impeachment, the convictions for perjury and tax evasion, the anti-populist forces that had failed to have their way in the drafting of the original Oklahoma constitution did have their way on July 11, 1965. No longer would the people be able to elect their appellate judges from the field of all qualified lawyers. Interposed would be a judicial nominating commission and the governor. The people would be allowed to vote on retention of justices.

The complete story still has not been told and perhaps it never will be. One thing is certain, however. Harlan Grimes stands for the best in the profession of law. He didn't let the threat of losing his license to practice law stop him from telling the truth.

On a case-by-case basis, some Supreme Court decisions which were proved to have been bought were subsequently set aside. Those cases were reopened .

After the terrible governorships of the late 20s & early 30's, it wasn't until the 1960s that major scandals again surfaced, and then they did so with a vengeance. Three justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court were removed from office by impeachment or resignation arising from IRS investigations of reports that justices were taking kickbacks for favorable decisions. A powerful former speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, who had been a dominant figure in state government, was convicted and sent to jail as a result of IRS investigations arising from charges that he failed to report income received in return for political favors. Then in 1975 a former governor, David Hall, was convicted, shortly after leaving office, of misusing his powers of office by trying to direct a state retirement fund to help a friend with a loan. Again, federal officials were the chief agents in cleaning up the corruption.
Harry Holloway, of the Oklahoma Historical Society

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Speaker McCarty and His 1960s Bribery Machine

10/18/2024

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Speaker JD McCarty

A 1950s major scandal centered on the former Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, J.D. McCarty. The speaker is normally a powerful figure, and McCarty was more so than usual because he happened to serve during the term of the state's first Republican governor, Henry Bellman, elected in 1962. McCarty, a skilled politician, emerged as a highly visible and dominant figure, leading Democrats against the Republican governor.

Unfortunately for McCarty, he lost his reelection bid from his district in 1966, and the IRS descended upon him with tax evasion charges. His critics unkindly claimed that he failed to report his many bribes. In any event, he was convicted and sent to jail. Thus, in a few short years, leading state judges and the powerful former speaker had proven to be corrupt.

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Voting Corruption In Oklahoma

10/11/2024

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by Paul R. Hollrah, reprinted from The New Media Journal -

In August 1963 I was transferred to Tulsa from Wall Street, in New York, in a corporate headquarters relocation. A month later, on Tuesday evening, September 10, 1963, I attended my first political meeting… the monthly meeting of the Tulsa County Young Republicans.

The guest speaker that evening was Tulsa attorney Walter Hall, Ballot Security Officer for the Oklahoma Republican State Committee. In his speech Hall described in detail the widespread fraud practiced by Oklahoma Democrats in every election. And since Democrats controlled all county and state election boards, the governor’s office, both houses of the legislature, the major law enforcement offices, and the courts, few Republicans were willing to challenge them.

Walter Hall

Hall began by explaining that forty-four of Oklahoma’s seventy-seven counties had not provided a secret ballot for voters since statehood in 1907, and that local Democrats regularly used every conceivable illegal device to intimidate voters and to fraudulently control the outcome of elections.

Although state law required that one of the three election officials in each precinct must be a member of the minority party, Democrats systematically recruited loyal party members to register as Republicans so that they could fill the minority positions.

He described how, on election day, after voters had signed the entry log, they were handed a paper ballot and a pencil. And since there were no facilities for marking a ballot in secret, they were obliged to place their ballots on the table and mark them with the three election officials looking on. If the election officials saw a voter mark his/her ballot for even a single Republican candidate, a number of things could happen… none of them good.

Hall explained that, in many Oklahoma counties, the welfare rolls were divided up by precincts and kept on the tables in the polling places. If an individual on public assistance was so unwise as to vote for a Republican, his/her name would be removed from the welfare rolls the instant the voter completed the ballot. In some Oklahoma counties the election officials were so brazen as to keep a trash can next to the ballot box, and any ballot with a Republican vote on it went directly into the trash can. The only ballots in the ballot boxes were straight Democratic tickets.

In other counties they were a bit more subtle and used a technique that Hall referred to as the “lead-under-the-thumbnail trick.” That technique involved breaking the lead from a pencil and tucking it lengthwise under a thumbnail. When the election official took a completed ballot from a voter and the ballot contained a vote for a Republican candidate, the official merely scraped the lead across the face of the ballot, folded the ballot in the normal fashion, and placed it in the ballot box. When the ballot boxes were opened and the ballots were removed, state law required that all ballots with “extraneous markings” be classified as “mutilated ballots” and not counted in the final tally.

In other counties, election officials would allow a thumbnail to grow very long over a period of weeks or months preceding an election. On the day of the election they would file the thumbnail to a sharp point so that, when they took a ballot containing a Republican vote from a voter and prepared to fold it, they merely flicked the sharp nail through the edge of the paper. Ballots with small rips and tears were considered to be “mutilated” and were discarded along with those having extraneous markings.

When the speaker had concluded his remarks and the meeting was adjourned, I didn’t hesitate. I walked directly to the front of the room and approached Mr. Hall. As we shook hands, I said, “I’ve just recently moved to Oklahoma from New York and I’d like to volunteer to form a committee to raise funds and to provide voting booths for all of those counties that don’t have them.”

Hall looked at me, chuckled, and said, “You don’t really think they’ll let you get away with that, do you? The Democrats throw us a bone now and then,” he continued, “or we find them fighting among themselves and we manage to get somebody elected. We’re a distinct minority in Oklahoma and I’m afraid we have to be satisfied with that.” The people standing around the speaker nodded in agreement. “Yeah, that’s right!” they chorused.

I was very disappointed. I thought they’d be angry. As the primary victims of the fraud, I thought they’d be mad enough to do something about it, but they weren’t. They apparently proceeded from the assumption that if they tried, they were bound to fail… and, chances are, they would have. They had asked God for the patience to endure the things they could not change, for the will to change the things they could change, and for the wisdom to know the difference. Unfortunately, they’d put vote fraud in the category of “things they could not change.”

However, on February 8, 1966, I was elected Chairman of the Tulsa County Young Republicans. It didn’t take long for me to conclude that there was one major benefit to being Chairman of the Tulsa County YRs. I knew that if we played our cards right the Tulsa County YRs could do something about vote fraud in Oklahoma.

In mid-February, just days after my election, I created an organization called Operation: Secret Ballot. I appointed five Tulsa County YRs as coordinators, two of whom were also active in the Tulsa Jaycees. We made no public announcements and there was no fanfare… we just did it. More importantly, we had a plan. We knew that very little could be accomplished if the effort was perceived as being a partisan effort. What was needed was a non-partisan front with bipartisan support.

Through the efforts of our two Jaycee coordinators, the Tulsa Jaycees were urged to invite Mr. Hall to be guest speaker at a future meeting. Hall spoke at the June 1966 meeting of the Tulsa Jaycees and the result was totally predictable. They were outraged at what he told them about vote fraud in Oklahoma. We had our non-partisan front.

A Jaycee leader was selected as overall project coordinator, and after a quiet conversation with one or two fair-minded, idealistic members of the Tulsa County Young Democrats… young Democrats who actually believed in honest elections and the rule of law… the project was launched. Operation: Secret Ballot was an organization of mostly Young Republicans, with Jaycee leadership and publicity, and just enough Young Democrats to validate our claim to bipartisanship.

Working with a cabinetmaker from the Jaycees, we designed a voting booth that could be made from simple one-by-two white pine frames, covered with unbleached muslin, and assembled with offset hinges to allow easy folding and stacking for storage.

Tulsa Rig & Reel (aka Flintco) lent a workspace for assembly

The project coordinators did an excellent job of fundraising, raising more than $5,000 in less than a week… enough to purchase all of the materials we needed… and the Tulsa Rig and Reel Company loaned us an unused steel fabricating shop in West Tulsa for our assembly operation.

In late July, the project coordinators sent letters to county election boards in all of the forty-four counties where the secret ballot didn’t exist, informing them that we’d have voting booths available for them, free of charge, by election day, November 8. All they had to do was to decide how many they needed. We would deliver them to their county courthouses during the first week of November.

By mid-August the project assembly line was operational and voting booths were being produced. Every Saturday and every Sunday, from mid-August through late October, the cavernous interior of the voting booth “factory” echoed with the sound of saws, hammers, and staplers. And as the voting booths came off the assembly line they were folded, stacked, and stored along one side of the building. As the weeks passed, our inventory grew and grew.

When responses started coming in from county election boards, we found a mixed reaction. Some counties didn’t respond at all, but among those who did there were both written and oral responses. For the most part, the letters received said, “Thank you! We’ve never been able to afford voting booths in our county.” And they went on to say how many they needed and where to deliver them.

The oral responses were never direct or in writing, they were sent through third party word-of-mouth. Typically, they said, “If you come into our county with your damned voting booths you’ll all go back to Tulsa in pine boxes!”

We had many threats on our lives during the life of Operation: Secret Ballot and, knowing of many instances of violence by Democrats, we took them all very seriously.

In mid-October 1966, Governor Henry Bellmon commented publicly on our election reform project, and within a day or two we were contacted by the Adjutant General of the Oklahoma National Guard. The General informed us that he would make National Guard troops and trucks available to us whenever we needed them. All we had to do was to tell him which counties were to receive voting booths and the number of voting booths to be delivered to each location.

The National Guard used trucks like this, to
deliver voting booths to county election boards

During the first week of November 1966, the National Guard loaded and delivered from eight hundred to a thousand voting booths to counties across the state. Under the glare of public scrutiny, Democrats were afraid not to use them, and on Tuesday, November 8, Oklahoma voters went to the polls and elected a new governor, State Senator Dewey Bartlett, of Tulsa, the second Republican governor in Oklahoma history; they elected a Republican attorney general, Tulsa attorney G.T. Blankenship, the first Republican attorney general in state history; they elected Republicans in two of the state’s six congressional districts; and they elected a Republican state labor commissioner.

We were very pleased that our friend, Dewey Bartlett, would be occupying the governor’s chair for the next four years, but the most significant outcome of Operation: Secret Ballot was the election of a Republican attorney general. Having a Republican attorney general meant that the most powerful Democrat in the state went to prison for eight years, and that a number of State Supreme Court justices… who’d been taking bribes of from $15,000 to $25,000… were impeached and removed from the court. One or two others resigned rather than face the public humiliation of impeachment.

A small group of determined Tulsa County YRs gave the State of Oklahoma the biggest dose of political reform it ever had. The Tulsa Jaycees received the National Community Service Award from the U.S. Jaycees for their role in the project. However, in Republican circles, Operation: Secret Ballot was never mentioned. As the YRs would learn in the months and years to follow, it was typical of the recognition that the Republican Party showers on its most dedicated supporters.

Nevertheless, it is almost certain that Henry Bellmon’s first term as governor (1963-67) and the Operation: Secret Ballot project of 1966 were, taken together, the two political developments that are the basis of the political renaissance that has made Oklahoma the reddest of red states. In 2014, although Democrats still maintained a slight edge in party registration, both U.S. senators, all five members of the U.S. House, the governor, lieutenant governor, and every other statewide office, as well as both houses of the state legislature, were in Republican hands.
Oklahomans can be duly proud of the fact that theirs is the only state in the nation in which in 2012; Barack Obama carried not a single county.

read all of Paul Hollrah's publications at www.NewMediaJournal.us

Paul R. Hollrah is a two-time member of the U.S. Electoral College, serving as chairman of Oklahoma’s seven-member delegation in 2004. In 1975 he pioneered the corporate PAC movement, creating and registering the first corporate political action committee with the Federal Election Commission. In 1983 he was the principal founder the National Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, a fundraising arm of the Republican National Committee. A nationally-published blogger, he is retired and resides among the hills and lakes of northeastern Oklahoma.

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Liquor And Corruption

10/4/2024

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Unless you're a 3rd generation Oklahoman, you probably don't know that prohibition didn't end in the mid 30s, in Oklahoma.

The demise of Prohibition deserves more than passing mention. Oklahoma was one of the last states to allow strong drink. By the time of repeal in 1959, open saloons serving whatever customers wanted flourished in urban centers, and bootleggers provided fast arid efficient home service for those in dire need.

No more prohibition.

A make believe liquor casket containing 'Old Man Prohibition' is hauled jubilantly through the streets with a police escort here, April 7th. The occasion was an election victory that ended 51 years of prohibition in the state.
The widespread flouting of the law in itself became one of the strong arguments in favor of repeal.

By this time the state had voted on the liquor issue six times. Finally, on the seventh time, repeal carried the day and thereby reduced a significant source of corruption.

Governor Edmondson won on Prohibition.

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Supreme Court Justices Go To Prison

Speaker McCarty and His 1960s Bribery Machine

Voting Corruption In Oklahoma

Liquor And Corruption

No more prohibition.

Corruption Chronicle

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