Appeals court judge retires in Washington

Washington judge Michael Mullins has retired from his position on the Iowa Court of Appeals after 20 years on the bench, but that doesn’t mean he plans to stop working any time soon.

“I am a senior judge, effective last Friday, which means I’ll work quarter-time,” Mullins said. “I am going to maintain an office here in the courthouse but it’s going to be a much smaller office that is currently being used by District Court Judge Shawn Showers. I told him when I went part-time we ought to swap so he’d have a big office.”

Mullins has been a Washington resident for 40 years, settling down after he finished law school. He spent the first 20 of those years as a private attorney in the area, working in everything from civil litigation to legal consultation to criminal representation.

“I wanted to help people … I honestly didn’t know much about the legal profession, about the business of lawyering when I started law school,” he said. “A number of years after I was in private practice, a chief judge for this district talked to me one time and asked if I’d ever consider being a judge. He saw some things in me, he told me he thought I’d be a good judge, so I pondered that for several years … and decided it’s what I should be trying to do.”

That goal — helping people — remained Mullins’ objective as he became a judge, although the method changed.

“It’s satisfying from the standpoint that I have had the ability and the opportunity to try to bring justice and fairness to people and situations where there’s often conflict and difficulty,” he said. “With very few exceptions, when they come to court, it’s because somebody’s having a real serious problem. And I’ve always considered myself to be a problem solver, and I get satisfaction from feeling I help achieve fair and reasonable results for people.”

Still, Mullins said that desire to help others did not interfere with his obligation to remain neutral.

“One of the first cases that I was involved in was very heavily litigated, and I found it very easy to be neutral in the middle without choosing sides,” he said. “That’s when I realized, ‘Hey, I think I like doing this,’ because it allows me to use logic, my knowledge of the law, applied without the burden — or the responsibility, frankly — of advocating for some side.”

There are some exceptions, of course. Some cases are politically charged or closely watched by the public, requiring the judge to set aside their personal feelings. Despite that, Mullins said he had never regretted a ruling once it was handed down.

“When I finally reach a decision, I am satisfied that I’ve done the right thing and I’ve done it well,” he said. “That’s not to say that I haven’t maybe made a mistake, but I am able to move on. I do not sit around and worry about it, I can’t do that, it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the work I have to do and frankly it would serve no beneficial purpose.”

That mentality does not extend beyond the courtroom, however. Mullins said he was often indecisive in his off time.

“When I have decided a court case and I have filed an opinion it is final, there’s a finality to it,” he said. “With personal decisions, there aren’t too many of them that you make that are so final that you can’t do something to adjust or correct or modify it.”

The role of an appeals court judge has plenty of other difficulties to boot. Chief among them is the sheer volume of work: appeals judges only spend around two days a month in the courtroom, with the rest of their time focused on reading legal documents.

“Our court has been averaging deciding about 1,200 cases a year for the last several years,” Mullins said. “That means each of us every year have to author approximately 120 opinions, and then we work on panels of three so I’m involved in another 240 or so. It’s reading all the briefs, becoming familiar with them necessary and writing or reviewing the decisions.”

At times, it can be challenging to keep everything straight.

“I tend to remember fact patterns,” Mullins said. “If you ask me about a case of State v. Jones, I may not remember Jones, but if you ask me about a case involving a robbery and a knifing at a convenience store in Cedar Rapids, I probably remember that … at any given time, I may be in the middle of eight, 10, a dozen opinions.”

The issue is worsened by Iowa’s notoriously complicated sentencing codes, which were rewritten in the ‘70s but quickly returned to a maze of red tape with every amendment since then.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2002, Mullins decided to do something about it, using his day off to start work on a spreadsheet that would serve as a sentencing guide for any offense in the state.

“I took code books home with me, I sat at my kitchen counter early in the morning, right after breakfast, and I just spread the books out, got on a computer, started an excel spreadsheet,” he said. “I put down a crime and started just going through the code … I marched down through each section, as tedious as that sounds.”

The chart grew from there. What started as a six-page excel spreadsheet is now a publicly available 579-page document with 6,673 footnotes used by judges and lawyers throughout the state and studied by some students at Drake Law School.

The project unintentionally elevated Mullins to an academic authority on sentencing issues in the Hawkeye state.

“It really just happened, I started it because I needed a tool for myself,” he said. “I don’t have a particular passion about sentencing other than I recognize that what I’ve done is valuable, so I’ve worked to continue to develop that. Some people say, ‘Mullins, you’re an expert, at sentencing,’ and I say, ‘I’m only that because I’ve spent so much time on it,’ I didn’t start off to be, it kind of became self-perpetuating.”

It won’t be his last major project. In retirement, Mullins said he planned to write a book about his philosophy on life, tentatively titled “Take time to think.”

“Especially in the kind of news cycles that we have now and social media, there’s a lot of actions and reactions, and I don’t think there’s a lot of time spent stopping and pondering issues,” he said. “It’s real easy to get caught up in justifying those reactions without taking the time to stop and think about it … If I’m able to write it the way I want to, it will focus on a variety of topics, it won’t be the general broad thing I have now.”

Otherwise, Mullins’ retirement plans are mostly mundane, with an emphasis on time with family, some travel, fishing, and golfing.

“I just felt like it was time to change what I was doing a little bit,” he said. “I can slow down a little bit, spend more time with family and traveling and leisure activities.”

Mullins said the change would be bittersweet.

“I’m expecting that it will be a mixed bag,” he said. “I’ll miss the time with my colleagues, I’ll miss the satisfaction that comes sometimes with the intensity of the work, but I look forward to just being able to not work quite as hard and to have some separation from it.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com