- Coming up a discussion with three leading candidates for North Carolina's court of appeals.
We'll meet candidates Julie Flood, Carolyn Thompson and Donna Stroud next.
The 2022 Judicial Candidates' Forum is made possible by a partnership between PBS North Carolina and the North Carolina Bar Association.
Hello there, I'm Kelly McCullan and welcome to this special program where you'll meet and hear candidates for North Carolina's court of appeals.
Joining us first on this program are candidates seeking.
What's called the seat eight office, Republican Julee Flood and Democrat Carolyn Thompson.
They're on stage with me.
Thank you so much for your participation in this forum.
- Thank you for having us.
- Thank you.
- We flipped a coin just before this interview and Ms.
Flood, you won it.
So you want to answer the first question?
I'll ask many of the same questions of both of you.
This is a conversation where we get to know the candidates.
So, tell us about your qualifications and why is now the right time for you and the court of appeals?
- Thank you.
First I'd like to thank the North Carolina Bar Association and UNC-TV for having us.
I think it's very important for voter education and we just really appreciate being here.
As far as my qualifications go, I currently work at the court of appeals as an attorney.
Prior to that, I have worked for eight other jurists, judges and justices in both federal and state appellate courts.
That work has included researching, analyzing, and writing opinions for the jurists.
I have written, over the course of 20 years, hundreds of judicial opinions.
I've written for four Democrat jurists and I've written for five Republican jurists.
So I have experienced working with all different types of people and different backgrounds.
As well, I helped to train new attorneys coming into the court system as far as the important work of the courts and how we do that work.
In addition to my appellate court work, I have also been in-house counsel in the private sector.
I've also been a law professor at several institutions and teaching all different types of courses.
So between my professorship, my business experience and my appellate court work, I've stayed very current in all different types of law, which is very important for the appellate courts.
- Ms. Thompson, same question to you.
It's a long term on the court of appeals.
- [Ms. Thompson] That's correct.
- What makes you want to serve us in North Carolina?
- Well, I'm coming to this ballot with 26 years of prior legal and judicial experience.
I began practicing law in 1996 in the family practice law, juvenile services law, including being the attorney for the Vance and Warren counties Departments of Social Services, petitioning for abuse, neglected children, child support enforcement, all while running a private practice.
And then in 2008, I took the bench as a district court judge in the same district, the Ninth Judicial District.
Presided over juvenile, family, criminal, mental health services, domestic violence cases.
And stayed on that bench until 2018, when the governor appointed me to the bench as a superior court judge in the Ninth Judicial District.
I'm now a practicing attorney in the same district, continuing my heart's passion, which is domestic violence awareness and also family law practice.
And so with the 26 years of experience, I believe this is the right time to make sure I'm a part of upholding our constitution.
- 26 Years of experience, local level, all levels of the local level.
It's foundational once you move to the state level.
How do you see it working out for you?
What do you bring that ordinary voters can understand?
- I think that this particular open seat, because of my judicial experience and being able to have a judicial philosophy of making sure that everyone is heard fairly.
Everyone has an opportunity to receive an impartial ruling.
Everyone has an opportunity to be managed with fairness and a speedy court.
We have a lot of backlog, as you can imagine right now because of COVID and not being able to get into the courtroom timely.
So management, the ability to administer a court docket and have matters heard timely.
- And Ms.
Flood, business experience ties in to your portfolio.
Tell me about that and blending it with the court's work and with some of the teaching that you've done.
For the same question, it's foundational.
Once you join the court, what can we expect?
- Right, so in my business background, I've handled all different types of employment and human resources law.
From contracts to leases, employment policies as well.
In my teaching background, I've taught many different types of courses.
Criminal law, family law, administrative law.
So, as I mentioned, I have remained very current in many different types of law.
In the court, every two weeks, I handle 12 cases.
So I'm used to processing a lot of work.
And managing and overseeing and mentoring on a lot of the work of the judiciaries.
So I think that's extremely relevant to be able to be ready on the job from day one.
I bring to that experience a judicial philosophy that is rooted in originalism, textualism.
And I assess that to mean that I believe the law says what it says and means what it says.
And I strive currently, in the court, every single day to bring that philosophy to the court.
And I believe the result of that is stability.
Stability for the attorneys interpreting what we have written.
Stability in terms of, for the parties and be able to understand what the implication is for their case.
And I believe that that's the very foundation to justice for all, and to treating each person fairly and equally.
- And with your experience with Democrat and Republican judges, in the general sense, what qualities make for a good appellate judge, regardless of party affiliation?
- Well, this is an, a political process to enter the system.
I believe however, that every day that I step into the court, when I go through those doors as an attorney, and I would commit to every day that I step into the court wearing a robe, that party affiliation is left behind.
I don't believe that there is any room for policy or party perspectives.
We are an error correcting court.
We apply the law as it is written.
We are not there to make the law.
And so I don't believe that partisan issues have any place in the court.
They don't have any place in the court as an, for me as an attorney.
And I believe that that's why so many different perspectives have put their trust in my work and work product.
- Ms. Thompson, you've been watching the court from outside as, from your various positions.
I'll ask you the same question.
There's qualities you'd like to see in an appellate court judge.
What are they?
- Well, I agree that sure, we are not to have any partisanship.
Anytime that I have sat on the bench and heard a case with a grieving mother, I've never asked the question, what is your party affiliation?
Anytime that I've had to deal with a juvenile who's gotten out of sorts at home and needs a place to stay other than detention, I've never asked, what is your parents' belief system?
This position has to be about impartial and fair.
Having clear eyes toward justice, regardless of party affiliation, and making sure that you are rendering rulings based upon the laws and the facts that are before you.
Every case is different and the voters need to understand that when we're coming to the bench, that they will have a fair shot at being heard and receive a fair ruling.
- I wanna ask this question carefully, because it can be taken the wrong way.
But, how do we know that any court, and in this case appeals court, how do we know that it's running at its most effective level of operation, as an entity?
- Well, because the court of appeals turns out, probably 1600 cases a year, and a year.
And as Ms.
Flood has said, that we have a lot of issues coming before the court of appeals.
We have to make sure that when we are putting judges in this position, that they are hard workers like I am, and that they will put their nose to the grind, if you will, and make sure that people have an opportunity to have a fair ruling in a timely manner.
- Same question to you.
How do we know the court is working effectively?
You're an employee of the court.
Is it running the way that it needs to run?
And you're just joining a well-oiled machine?
What's your perspective?
- I think the court is a very well-oiled machine.
We each have our tasks.
We each have our roles.
Each person there is very committed to timely performance.
We have goals of timeframes in which to turn out and produce and complete cases.
And we kind of keep tabs on that, within each chambers while the ultimate goal, however, is excellence and, and quality.
We don't wanna sacrifice timeliness for quality.
So first and foremost, we work towards getting it right.
And secondly, we also work towards timely administration of justice.
And I believe that we've got the great teams of staff attorneys, and judges, and attorneys doing the important work of the court.
- Of all your personal professional skills out there.
If you got 30 seconds with someone at the supermarket, to tell them, these are the two things that make me the very best for this job.
What are they?
- First thing that I would say is integrity.
And by integrity, I mean that not only personally, but professionally.
I have been committed to the work of appellate courts for over 20 years.
I have honed and refined the skills of deep analysis.
There's also a level of just passion for the work that I do.
From the first time I worked for the chief justice of the main Supreme Court to the four judges for whom I've worked at the court of appeals.
My passion has not waned.
I am passionate about the work, I'm passionate about doing it day to day, and to passing that along to young attorneys who are new to the experience.
- I'll ask you.
You get one minute with someone in the parking lot.
Why are you the best?
What skills do you have that would make you a great choice?
- Well, the experience that I've already talked about for 26 years being a prior district court judge and superior court judge and understanding the workings of the courtroom so that when the matter comes before me as an appellate judge, I understand from a background of what it looks like to manage as a district court judge and as superior court judge.
So when I get the record, I can get a flavor of what was happening at that point, and then render my rulings based upon the record in front of me and the law that applies.
But in short form, if I'm in the grocery store, I'm the one that's going to make sure that you are, your individual rights are protected and we will uphold our constitution.
- You both have discussed the business side of the court of appeals.
It's a lot of work.
What are your expectations?
How do you see this court working, going forward?
Will it get busier?
Will COVID, becoming more of a memory, make things easier?
What are your thoughts?
- I think because we haven't yet seen the outcome of what COVID has done to our court system.
I just rode by a courthouse this morning in Oxford, and people are wrapped around the building, if you will.
We have a lot of people waiting to be heard.
Waiting for an opportunity to get a result.
And I think with our current staff, they're doing a great job.
But when this time comes for us to take the bench, we will dig in with everyone else, and get the job done in a timely manner.
- Your view from the inside, we only have a minute left.
What do you expect going forward in this court?
- I think perhaps at the trial level, there may be different backlogs in each different community.
At the appellate court, however, I believe that we are right on task.
We were able to keep going during COVID by integrating things such as WebEx hearings.
I have seen the panels continue going.
We have not taken a break from that.
I think we are efficient.
I think we're effective.
And I think we're ready to go from day one.
- Ms. Thompson, Ms.
Flood, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with myself and the voters in North Carolina.
- [Ms. Thompson] Thank you.
- [Ms.
Flood] Thank you for having me.
- Early voting for North Carolina's 2022 general election begins Thursday, October 20th, 2022, and runs through Saturday, November 5th.
You can also vote on election day, Tuesday, November 8th, 2022.
There are four seats up for grabs in election 2022 for the state court of appeals.
We're joined by Republican Candidate Donna Stroud.
Her opponent declined the invitation we offered to join us for this program and this conversation.
Ms. Stroud, thanks for coming on television and on the digital media to explain your candidacy and good to see you.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- I can, I could read the tele-prompt for your biography and your expertise.
However, you're here.
Tell us about your qualifications.
What, in your opinion, makes you the right pick for court of appeals?
- Well, first I've been on the court of appeals since my first election in 2006.
So I've been there for almost 15 and a half years now.
So I have a track record, of course, on the court.
I was, then of course, I was appointed as chief judge of the court in January of '21.
Because the senior judge on the court is normally, serves as the chief judge and our prior chief judge retired.
So I became the chief judge then.
And the chief judge just has additional administrative duties.
We all hear cases the same way.
We all decide cases the same way, but the chief judge has some additional administrative duties.
So I've been doing, yeah, I've been doing the job and I love doing it, enjoy it very much for 15 and a half years.
And before I was on the court of appeals, I served as a trial court judge, and a district court judge for a couple years.
And then before that I practiced law for 16 years.
So I've had extensive experience in all of the areas, all the things that the court of appeals does.
- I was gonna ask about, so many experiences are possible when you're an attorney, you can go to civil, you can go criminal cases, defendants, prosecute... What blend of skills or talents do you need to be most effective when you go to the court of appeals level of service to our state?
- The court of appeals is different because we are doing reading, research, writing primarily in our cases.
And it is different for being a trial judge, where you're presiding in a courtroom and, you know, dealing with all sorts of a very fast...
I sort of compare it to an emergency room, like in a hospital where you have, you know, lots of things coming in and out.
And at the court of appeals, we're sort of more like the, you know, the more serious cases where now they have to go and get the specialist to look at it closely and take more time with it.
So, we are, you know, they are a little bit different.
I've worked with about 50 judges during my time on the court, you know, from all different backgrounds and all different, you know, personalities.
And I can tell you that there's some people who really just like the reading and the research.
And I really enjoy the work on the court of appeals and others think it's a little bit too quiet.
So I, but I love it.
- Aren't the court of appeals, most people know supreme court, and, of course, US Supreme Court, always getting all the attention, talk about legal issues.
What, what is the differences?
Why don't we the people hear as much about the court of appeals compared to other, other types of courts?
- The court of appeals is, is certainly the least known court.
I think that we spend a lot of our time campaigning and just explaining what it is.
But we are, the technical name is an intermediate appellate court.
And that just means that we're the appellate court in the middle between the trial court and the supreme court.
So we hear appeals from all of the trial courts, all across the state.
We have district courts, superior courts.
We have administrative agencies and cases are tried there.
That's the cases, those are the places that you see on TV, where you see a trial and a witness testifying and a jury sitting over there and that sort of thing.
And so people are more familiar with the trial court because they see that more often.
You read about it in the news more often.
Then, only a really, a tiny percentage of cases are appealed.
We have about three and a half to 4 million cases going through our trial court in the state of North Carolina each year.
And we'll get about, maybe 1200, 1500 appeals.
That come to our court.
So, really a very small percentage of those.
But we are, we sit in three judge panels, we have 15 judges on the court total, and we rotate to sit with other judges all the time.
We don't have fixed panels.
So we sit with two other judges and we look at the legal arguments.
We read the briefs, we hear the arguments from the attorneys and consider whether or not the trial court made any sort of legal error that caused prejudice in the case.
And, then we write opinions on that and all those opinions are out there.
You can read them, nccourts.org, has got all of the opinions that the court writes available.
And actually, our oral arguments of the court, where attorneys come to argue cases, are also live stream now.
So they're all on YouTube.
So if anyone is interested in how those arguments work, they're all available online.
- Does that change the dynamic for you?
You, I mean, if you've been on 15 years, you predate the YouTube live stream.
- [Stround] Yes.
- And even court comfort with cameras and audio recording equipment in the courtroom.
How is it different?
How have you changed with the times?
- Well, I'll tell you, judges are not really necessarily quick to adjust to new technological changes, okay.
And, we actually had considered live streaming for years and a lot of courts debate it.
Some will do it, some don't do it.
We had thought about it.
We had gotten the equipment even before COVID, but we had not made that decision to proceed to live streaming the cases.
And then when COVID came along, we went, of course, to remote arguments.
And we were doing those online.
We were doing them by WebEx.
And so we sort of had to get used to that.
Like everybody else did during COVID.
We had to get used to that in a hurry.
And, so we did.
And then as we resumed our operations in person, we now keep that as an option for people.
If attorneys need to do an oral, a remote argument, they can do that.
So it's, I don't know that it really changes it a lot.
We have to be more careful.
Sometimes there are cases where there are confidential information or children's names or things that we don't want to broadcast out there, to, cause it might harm someone.
And so we'll be a little more careful about some of the things that we say in the arguments and, but so far, so good.
We've not had any major, you know, crazy things happen or technological glitches.
Nobody's become a meme yet.
So we're just hoping that it stays that way.
- With, you've worked with the dozens of, of other judges that have come and gone in the court of appeal since you've arrived.
And now you're the leader.
What are, in the general sense, regardless of party affiliation, the best qualities that make a great appellate judge?
So as we're going down our ballots or doing our own homework online, do we look at party really hard for an appellate judge?
Or do we look at what they've done, what they've said?
What kind of, what traits, what do I need to know - right - before I cast a vote?
- I think the first thing is their experience.
You know, certainly, now we have a wide variety of experiences on our court and that's a good thing because we hear all sorts of different cases.
But, I think having some really good, substantive experience and that you've established yourself, you know, in whatever area it is.
Whether you have, did real estate law, or you did civil litigation, or you did criminal law, whatever.
That you've had some good, solid experience there.
And, you want people who are going to make independent decisions.
That are gonna look at things carefully.
That are gonna be fair.
That are gonna be unbiased and just decide things the way that the law requires.
So, just a willingness to really dig down into it, and study the law, and try to get it right, in every case.
I think.
- The court of the machine, 1500 case- that's a lot of cases to hear.
Even if it's just three or 4% of the total cases that are out there.
How do we know that the court is running well?
What does it take to satisfy you as a sitting chief judge?
To go, you know, opinions aside, the mechanism of the courts- - [Ms. Stroud] Sure.
- working the way I want it, is it, doing what you need it to do?
Is it doing what we need to do as North Carolinians coming out of COVID-19 and the pandemic?
- Yes.
We're doing well.
We look at, and of course we track these statistics all the time, I get a report every month.
We look at, of course, the cases coming in, the cases going out, the disposition times.
That is how long it takes a case, once it comes to us, before we get that opinion out.
We track all of that.
And obviously we want to get that as short as we reasonably can, given all the things that we have to deal with.
Our court has been known, I mean, there were, has been some research done on that over the years and it was a while back.
But actually, North Carolina's court of appeals was one of the most efficient intermediate appellate courts in the country.
Based on that, you know, research that was done a while back by people that looked at various courts.
And I'd say we're still doing that.
We're, and of course we're always trying to improve.
We have various resources to help us with that.
We have the center for state courts.
We have the administrative office of courts here in North Carolina.
There's a chief judges conference that I participate in.
And so we go to different programs and different groups that do research on the courts and try to look at best practices.
And so we're always trying to improve that.
- Let's talk about you a little more in depth.
What is it about you, and your personality, and your style of legal scholarship that, in your opinion makes you an effective appellate court judge?
- I think, and I call myself a law geek.
I mean, I just, I really enjoy digging down into the cases.
Each case is sort of like a, you know, a new mystery or a new, you know, it's a new story.
Every case is a story.
And, but they're stories about real people and they're extremely important.
And, every case is the most important case to the people that are in that case.
And so we're very aware of that.
So they're fascinating.
And I think that, and it's important that, that we feel that way about it.
You know, sometimes people will ask, well, you know, what's the most important case or what's the biggest case or whatever.
And that's really hard to answer, especially after you've written about 1300 opinions.
But, you know, just depending upon the legal issues presented, it could be what's considered a very small case in the legal world.
It could even be a small claims case or something like that, that we find really, you know, that's very interesting.
That presents a very important and interesting issue that might affect a lot of people.
It's not just the multi-million dollar cases that have a lot of that, you know, a lot of money, you might get a lot of coverage.
So I think, you know, just the important thing, probably like with any job, is really enjoying it and wanting to do a really good job at it.
- One interesting aspect about judicial races is those with experience that are in office tout the experience, those that are coming up say change is needed.
And I've interviewed dozens, hundreds of legislators and they run their course.
How do you stay fresh in the generic sense?
You've been on the bench, you've seen 1300 opinions come across, you've had to participate in, are you still learning or do you reach a point where you're now a wise judge and that's who we want overseeing our case when we appeal it?
Wear your crown proudly on that question.
- But we're, yeah, you're always learning.
I mean, you, and the more you learn, the more you learn that you have a, that you don't know.
Right?
So sure, you're always doing that.
I mean, I teach judicial process at Campbell Law School.
I've taught that.
I started teaching that in 2008 and I have an LLM in judicial studies that I got from Duke.
So just additional education above the, you know, the law degree from Campbell.
And it's, so yeah, you know, you're just always trying to learn and improve and there's always new issues.
I mean, that's one of the amazing things is you would think that by now, like every single legal issue, you know, had already been answered.
But no, there are always interesting new things coming in.
And even now, sadly, of course with COVID, it has created all sorts of legal issues that you wouldn't even imagine.
Just the impacts it had on even, just procedures in the case and delays and things.
Not even talking about the actual law about it, that now we have these new issues we have to do.
And so there's always something interesting, you know, something new that we are trying to try to get it right.
- North Carolina, that's Donna Stroud.
She is on the court of appeals.
She is seeking a new term on the North Carolina court of appeals.
So you'll see her name on a state ballot.
Judge, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, insight, and vision with us here tonight.
- Well, thank you so much for having me.
- And thanks to the court of appeals candidates, Carolyn Thompson and Julee Flood who have joined Ms. Stroud on our stage for this program.
If you're planning on voting, the early voting period runs October 20th through November 5th with traditional election day on Tuesday, November 8th.
I'm Kelly McCullen.
Thank you so much for watching and please vote this election season.
The 2022 judicial candidates forum is made possible by a partnership between PBS North Carolina and the North Carolina Bar Association.
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