Judge Arthur Recht’s Impactful Life

Judges often struggle with the issue of how far their authority should reach.  Strict Constitutionalists prefer a restrained bench that is careful to leave public policy to the legislative and executive branches. More activist judges believe they have a responsibility to use their power to right a wrong.

Sunday, Arthur Recht died in Wheeling following a stroke.  Recht, 80, was a former circuit court judge, state Supreme Court Justice and, more recently, a senior status judge.  He is best known for two landmark decisions that caused his critics to view him as an activist, but his supporters to hail him as a necessary reformer.

Arthur Recht

His most famous ruling bears his name—The Recht Decision.  It was a sweeping opinion in 1982 in a class action lawsuit that set new education standards and that changed how public education is funded in the state to provide a more thorough and efficient education of all children, regardless of where they lived.

Attorney William McGinley wrote in The State Encyclopedia, “While no school in West Virginia has ever met all of the standards established by the Recht Decision… the litigation led to sweeping improvement in public education.”

McGinley added of the Recht Decision, “Critics alleged the standards were set so high that they could never be achieved.  Proponents argued the state’s survival depended upon the education of its youth.”

Recht was also drawn into a controversy over the state’s former maximum security prison. The Moundsville penitentiary was 150 years old and in terrible condition.  In 1981, inmates filed petitions arguing their confinement in the decrepit institution constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

The state Supreme Court appointed Judge Recht to hear the case.  He held hearings, took expert testimony and even toured the facility himself.  The judge ruled in favor of the inmates, setting in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the closing of the Moundsville prison and the construction of a new state penitentiary at Mount Olive.

In a 2007 interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Recht said the conditions at the old prison were intolerable. “There wasn’t one redeeming feature about the place. It turned your stomach.”

Arthur Recht may not have set out to make history, but history found him and he acted as he thought best with rulings he believed were in accordance with the state and U.S. constitutions.

The results in both of the high profile cases were controversial, but also impactful in ways that are still being felt today.

 

 

 





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