J. K. STOUT,
PIONEERING JUDGE IN PENNSYLVANIA,
IS DEAD AT 79
Friends said the cause of death was leukemia.
It may not say much about Pennsylvania that the first black woman to gain a seat on a state bench was born in Wewoka, Okla., received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and studied law at Indiana University, but it is to the state’s credit that once Judge Stout established a practice in Philadelphia in 1954 it did not take the local legal community long to recognize that it had gained a treasure.
Within two years she had been appointed to the District Attorney’s office, where she promptly extended her reputation as “the hardest working lawyer in Philadelphia.” Getting up at 4 a.m.seven days a week to study law, cases and evidence, she became so well known for her preparation, and for her successful prosecutions, that it seemed hardly surprising that she would win swift appointment to the bench.
When she did, in 1959, on an interim appointment to the old Philadelphia Municipal Court, she came up for election two months later and won handily, becoming the first black woman in the country to win election to a court of record.
She was later appointed to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, where she specialized in homicide cases. In 1988, she received an interim appointment to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, making her the first black woman in the country to be a judge on a state’s highest court, a position she held for a year, until she turned 70, the court’s mandatory retirement age, and returned to the bench in Philadelphia.
She dealt firmly with offenders and despised crime, but seemed to reserve her greatest fury for what she perceived as its underlying cause, an almost willful ignorance, especially among defendants who had dropped out of school without learning to read and write.
Slackers could expect no leniency, but if she saw a glimmer of remorse and a spark of resolve to do better, Judge Stout, who had a fine eye for the line between teenage excess and hard-core crime, could be accommodating. One gang member who was sentenced to time at reform school rather than at a harsher correctional facility, later became her law clerk and went on to establish a large law firm.
In one of her more celebrated cases, while assigned to juvenile court in 1965, within 24 hours after a white sailor from Georgia was severely beaten while trying to defend a 16-year-old white girl from being raped at a subway station by eight black gang members, Judge Stout had tried, convicted and sentenced seven of the thugs to long prison terms and placed the eighth on probation.
“Rape today, jail tomorrow,” she suggested, might be an effective deterrent.
This and several other long sentences she imposed on violent gang members over the next few weeks made Judge Stout such a hero in Philadelphia that when the executive director of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent form letters to members of the Philadelphia bar protesting her “swift justice,” he received so many angry replies that he sent a second letter, beginning, “I am sorry that our criticism of Judge Stout has upset you.”
Her tough stance made her a pariah to local gangs, and when her mail included a number of death threats, Judge Stout was predictably outraged. The grammar was atrocious, she said, and the letters were riddled with misspellings.
Indeed, she gave so many impassioned lectures on the importance of education that youthful defendants learned to assure her that they attended school regularly, a tactic that might have worked more often if Judge Stout had not learned to check school attendance records.
She routinely sentenced first-time offenders to write long essays, and was such a stickler for proper usage that she blithely corrected her fellow judges’grammar, and woe betide the lawyer who sought to “appraise” her of something.
“I know my value,” she would snap. “Now if you want to apprise me, get on with it.”
When lawyers sought leniency for their youthful clients on the ground that they had deprived upbringings, Judge Stout was unmoved. “We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was 13,” she once said, rejecting poverty as an excuse for crime.
She might have grown up poor, but her parents were both teachers, and Judge Stout, who credited her mother with instilling her lifelong habit of hard work, learned to read at 3, entered the third grade at 6 and started college at 16, first at a black school in nearby Missouri and later at the University of Iowa before returning to Oklahoma as a music teacher.
For all her later education, she credited her accidental legal career to a high school shorthand course. Seeking work in Washington in World War II, she landed a job at a law firm and was so good at taking legal dictation that she began to study law, first in Washington and later at Indiana University, where she obtained two law degrees while her husband, Charles Otis Stout, was studying for his doctorate. He died in 1988.
When one of the Washington firm’s partners, William H. Hastie, was named to the Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in 1950, he hired his former stenographer as administrative assistant, a position she held until she entered private practice a few years later.
Throughout her career Judge Stout lectured widely,invariably stressing the importance of using correct English, especially when she addressed law students.
In recent years, as she was showered with honors, she modestly suggested they were undeserved but she could hardly complain. The citations hailing her myriad accomplishments were letter-perfect.
August 24, 1998