JACKSON — Just call him Jim the giant-killer. Jim Kitchens, that is. At the polls on Nov. 4, the folksy, affable Kitchens toppled Jim Smith, the heavily financed, seemingly unbeatable chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
Kitchens not only won the election but won convincingly against a massive TV advertising blitz fed by big money from special interest groups obviously with a pro-business agenda they knew Smith would continue to impose as chief of the high court.
Significantly, legal veteran Alex Alston, former president of the Mississippi State Bar, in a newspaper op-ed piece, put a question mark over Smith’s leadership of the high court, which Alston showed had a pro-corporate bias. That must have resonated with a number of voters.
It’s arguable that appellate court judges should be appointed rather than elected — a system this column has decried for years — but obviously the elective system isn’t going to be changed very soon. That means Supreme Court judges necessarily are judged themselves in the political arena.
That’s where Jim Kitchens evidently scored big. He came through as more likeable than Smith in his simple homespun TV ads, picking out “I’ll Fly Away” on an old piano, the favorite tune his mother taught him and who at 94 still gives piano lessons in their hometown of Crystal Springs. But there had to be more to Kitchens’ appeal than what he portrayed on TV.
The 65-year-old Kitchens had obviously built up a considerable reservoir of goodwill in his 41 years of law practice, including 12 years as a district attorney in Southwest Mississippi, and it paid off for him in his high court quest. That became particularly true in vote-rich Rankin County — Smith’s home county — where Kitchens ran virtually even-Steven with Smith.
Kitchens in the late 1970s had established a base of friendship with Rankin County lawyers and political figures when he served the county as acting districting attorney, filling in for Jim Herring, who was running for lieutenant governor — incidentally, as a Democrat.
Supreme Court races are by law non-partisan, but there was no doubt Smith was the Mississippi Republican Party’s candidate, a fact that the party made quite plain (and legally questionable) by putting Smith’s picture on a flier containing the entire GOP ticket from president on down.
Kitchens was the source for the funniest — and true — story I’ve ever written in my long career as a Mississippi journalist: the case of the milk-sucking rabbits.
In 1972, Kitchens was DA of a district including Walthall County. I was visiting my friend, Paul Pittman, the editor of the Tylertown Times, when Jim told me what had happened several days before in a local Justice of the Peace Court.
There had been a rash of head-lighting of rabbits by hunters in Walthall County and an eager new game warden set out to catch a culprit with the goods, staking himself on the side of an oft-traveled gravel road one bright moonlight night. Bumping along comes a dairy farmer (Walthall was a big milk-producing county) in a flat-bottom pickup truck.
The vigilant game warden spots a brace of freshly killed rabbits laid out on the truck bed. Flagging down the farmer, the warden whips out his arrest ticket pad and writes up the old farmer for a game law violation. Unless he pays a $50 fine by Tuesday, the farmer will be hauled before a JP for trial. Plus, the game warden confiscates the rabbits for evidence.
Tuesday comes, no fine is paid, and Dude Herring, the county jokester, enters the picture, volunteering to represent the farmer at the JP court trial the coming Saturday. That’s when the fun happens. Court is held in the JP’s living room, and a batch of farmers gather to support their colleague. Trial begins, the rabbits in evidence are hauled out. Dude is ready.
“You know, judge,” says Dude, “Walthall is a big dairy county, and of late our dairy farmers’ herds have come up dry and they don’t know why.
“What their investigation has revealed is a rare breed of milk-sucking rabbits has invaded our county, and our farmers mean to fight back,” Dude says, “and that is exactly what farmer Jones was doing when he shot those dad-burned rabbits. Judge, if you inspect those rabbits, you’ll find milk stains on their whiskers.”
Judge Honea picks up the rabbits and appears to look intently at their whiskers. “You’re right, I can see milk stains.” Then, in a booming voice, he says, “Not guilty.”
Elated, the farmer’s neighbors clap him on the back. Dude’s a hero. Justice served, udderly so to speak.
