« Ind. Decisions - Upcoming oral arguments this week | Main | Courts - "Court weighs whether to identify authors of critical and anonymous postings on the Internet" »
Monday, December 29, 2008
Ind. Courts - "Floyd County's newest judge a history maker"
Harold J. Adams reports today in the Louisville Courier Journal:
She's a new judge in a new court -- and she made history in Floyd County.Real estate attorney Maria Granger will be sworn in Wednesday as judge of the newly created Floyd Superior Court 3, and in the process she will become the county's first African-American judge.
In fact, Indiana has never had an African-American judge south of Bloomington and has had only one south of Indianapolis, according to Lake County Circuit Judge Lorenzo Arredondo, vice chairman of the Indiana Supreme Court's Commission on Race and Gender Fairness.
Granger, 39, a Democrat and former deputy prosecutor in the county, defeated Republican Rick Fox in the Nov. 4 election.
"It's great that we finally have a minority elected in Floyd County," said Nicole Yates, president of the New Albany chapter of the NAACP and a Granger friend.
But the campaign focused on the qualifications of the candidates rather than the potential precedent-setting outcome.
Granger said she avoided race and other demographic labels such as age while campaigning.
"I considered that a distraction" from the question of who was better qualified, she said. * * *
Granger is a native of Washington in Daviess County. She graduated from Washington High School in 1987, Indiana University in 1990 and the IU Law School at Indianapolis in 1994.
In addition to being a former deputy prosecutor, she has served as a hearing officer appointed by the Supreme Court to hear evidence in cases where Indiana attorneys are accused of misconduct and recommend disciplinary action for the high court to consider.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 29, 2008 08:04 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts