The Alaska citizen., 1917-03-12

. ht <Ailf III J J. COHldlhS q SUI of the retrement from the circuit bench of the State of Oregon of Judge Henry E. McGnn This story will be of particular interest to Fair bankSans for the reason that Judge McGinn Is a brother of John L. Me Ginn. who IS well known as a prac- ! titioner in the local courts and who is the owner of large amount of various kinds of property in Alaska The story is as follows:
 i A vigOrCIs and picturesque figure has left the bench of the Oregon State Circuit Court Henry L. Me Ginn, for six years judge of depart ment No. ,. in Multnomah county, re- tired Saturday at the expiration of his term of office.
 His retirement was voluntary He had declined to be a candidate to succeed himself. saying he would not under any circumstances accept a | second term.
 But Judge McGinn and his one term on the bench will be remembered long after some other judges and their doings are forgotten. The six years of his incumbency have been crowded with events of intense pub lie interest
 There has been hardly week in that six-year period that the news 1 papers have not carried accounts of some extraordinary occurrence in 1 Judge McGinns court
 1 Perhaps the judge had stopped a trial with the remark that there was no need of proceeding further, be cause he would not convict any man on the testimony of a stool pigeon" l Maybe he had laid down the prn- 1 ciple that no woman would ever be sent to prison from his court. 1 Youths Are Encouraged.
 Or he might have released a youth ful thief on the lads mere word of honor to keep straight" because the judge believed that sending man to the penitentiary is worse than sending him to hell"
 Still. again, he might have gone out of his way to eXCoriate a husband for not supporting his family, and then l have bargained with him the terms of support on which he could save him 1 self from jail, or he would decline to accept the verdict of jury in a dam age suit with the remark that the damages allowed were too small It might have been any of these things and many others Of almost | I ;I,y al, ', there has been something so out of i the ordinary that the Courthouse i reporters would seize upon it for their papers. Real news, too, every line of it. for Judge McGinn is no grand stander.'
 Those twin gods of respectable i juriS SprudenCe-preceden and techni- cality-have had a sorry time of it 1 from him He has shown vastly more interest in some such matter as that an old woman who had traded her property away under misrepresen- tation should get it back. And wheth- CT she did it technically or untechni- cally hasn't particularly worried 1 Judge McGnn.
 ! Precedents Swept Aside
 If precedents or technicality has stood in the way of what he conceiv- ed to be common justice in such a case there would be a sweeping ges- ture of his big hand, as if to brush them aside, as he spoke his mind l from the bench.
 1 Lawyers who banked on precedent and techn;cality on such occasions i have received precious little mercy from the judge. Naturally enough he hasn't been over-popular with them. Certain lawyers generally those on whose toes he had stepped-have criticised him bitterly, as often as not in open court.
 Though impetuous and insistent at times to the point of being abso- lutely dictatorial, there isn't much of the over-lord about Judge McGinn. 1 In his six years on the bench he has never disciplined or fined lawyers for contempt who argued with him, no matter what they said but then and there returned as hot shot as he got.
 Trials Often Stopped.
 On occasions his impulsiveness has led him to take snap judgment on a case and stop the trial with the re- mark that he had made up his mind and didn't care to hear further evi- dence. But if the opposing lawyer could convince him that the court was wrong Judge McGinn has often reversed his ruling and ordered that the case proceed. Indeed he ire quently. after such an incident has decided in favor of that lawyers client.
 ! By reason of his impatience with technicalities. his impulsiveness and his peculiar views against sending any person to the penitentiary-pe liar, at any rate, in comparison with the accepted conventional view of punishing the wrong and unsuccessful litigants have some times sneeringly referred to Judge McGinn as crazy" and "high-handed" and have said that he decides with out regard to law"
 Judge McGinn is not crazy" but he is intensely human-the most hu- man judge. perhaps, that ever sat on the Oregon bench. and his faults have been human faults, Really, to under