By John Brummett

I’m standing in front of the voting machine and it asks me to choose a member of the Arkansas Supreme Court, either John Fogleman or Courtney Henry.

I’m thinking. I’m still thinking. Don’t rush me.

I’m on record believing it is folly to ask voters to make judicial choices. I’ve advocated a system by which the Arkansas Bar Association would recommend judges and the governor would appoint them and the state Senate would confirm them.

I know many lawyers and the great majority of them say they support Fogleman. He has experience, they say, while Henry has been an appeals court judge not yet two years and seems to be a young woman in a bit too much of a hurry.

Fogleman has been a fair and competent circuit judge, one they’re comfortable practicing before, these lawyers say.

They include persons sharing my general sensibilities. There was a dinner gathering of left-leaners Saturday night a week ago. The left-leaning lawyers were saying they were going with Fogleman.

So it’s Fogleman, right?

Well, wait.

I know Courtney Henry and she is an absolute delight, a dynamic young family woman.

I know her in-laws, the Henrys of Fayetteville, even better, and respect them enormously.

I know that Henry got elected to the Court of Appeals in 2008 from northwestern Arkansas even as right-wing extremists came after her, an assault she deflected by producing endorsements from persons as varied as Democratic stalwart David Pryor and Republican stalwart John Paul Hammerschmidt.

She went one better in this campaign, producing a fundraiser hosted by Hammerschmidt and Bill Clinton.

While it’s true that Henry has scant experience on the appeals court and has interrupted that service to make this presumptuous and ambitious run for the Supreme Court, she worked as clerk for the appeals court for nearly a decade prior to getting elected to it — and therefore is trained in the appeals process that is the very essence of Supreme Court work.

So it’s Henry, right?

Not yet.

She has a lot of campaign money donated by nursing homes and medical professionals. I know she has to get bucks somewhere. But that worries me.

So it’s Fogleman then?

Well, it would be, except for this: I am convinced that those kids called the West Memphis 3 got railroaded to murder convictions years ago by local panic about supposed satanic worship. I am convinced that the local justice system was insufficiently independent and discerning and altogether too obliging to that public panic. And Fogleman was the local deputy prosecutor handling much of the case.

Yes, his left-leaning supporters acknowledge, but, look, he wasn’t the judge allowing evidence that shouldn’t have been allowed. He wasn’t the prosecuting attorney deciding to bring the charge, but a hired deputy for that prosecuting attorney. So give him a pass, could you?

But what kind of pass are we giving those three men rotting in jail on convictions from cases that never got made?

What to do?

The fact is that I have every confidence either candidate would be a good-enough member of the state Supreme Court. There’ll be no harm nor foul here.

In that case I simply cannot bring myself to vote to promote a man who had anything to do with that West Memphis injustice. I understand the nature of his involvement. I understand it doesn’t define or personally discredit him. But I just don’t want to promote him to the state’s highest court as long as he has that misadventure on his resume.

Anyway, I’m with Barack Obama. Given two chances, he has nominated two women to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When people say our politics and government adequately reflect the citizenry, they are wrong. That won’t be so until a little more than half the people running our government are women.

So I went with Henry. Instantly, I regretted it a little, just as if I’d gone the other way.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.