McAnulty, William E., Jr. 1947–2007

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William E. McAnulty Jr. 1947–2007

Judge

In 2006 William E. McAnulty Jr. became the first African-American judge to sit on the bench of the Kentucky Supreme Court. A well-liked and respected jurist and community leader in Louisville, McAnulty was appointed by Kentucky's governor to the state's highest court to fill a vacancy, but he won an eight-year term in a regular election later in 2006. Just a few months later, McAnulty was diagnosed with cancer and died in the summer of 2007. He retained his famous sense of humor despite the circumstances, joking before undergoing brain surgery that “my only fear is that I would wake up and be Clarence Thomas or a [University of Kentucky] fan,” the Lexington Herald-Leader quoted him as saying.

Born on October 9, 1947, McAnulty grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, as one of three children in a household that was part of the city's black middle-class community. His mother, who suffered from mental-health problems, was wrongly diagnosed and given improper medication, which made her illness—ultimately discovered to be schizophrenia—even harder on the family. “It made me an adult a lot earlier than I wanted to be,” McAnulty told Michael Kamuf, a writer for Business First-Louisville, years later of his mother's episodes of illness and subsequent hospitalizations.

After graduating from Shortridge High School, McAnulty won a job as a clerk in the Indiana governor's office and went on to enter Indiana University. Planning to become a special-education teacher, he enrolled in the University of Louisville. After earning his master's degree in education in 1971, he decided to apply to its law school. Early on, he aimed for a career on the bench, he told Amanda D. White in an interview that appeared in the University of Louisville Magazine, because “there aren't many jobs in the world where you have the call over life and death. You're part of the final word as far as people's liberty, their property and their children—all sorts of things. It's about as significant as it gets.”

After receiving his law degree from the University of Louisville in 1974, McAnulty became a juvenile court judge in the city. In 1977 he was elected a district court judge in Jefferson County, and three years later was named Kentucky's state justice secretary by Governor John Y. Brown Jr. McAnulty was the first African American ever to hold a cabinet-level post in the state, but he stepped down after just one month due to the heavy demands of the job that required him to be in the capital, Frankfort, at a time when he had a wife, a toddler son, and another child on the way back home in Louisville. It was a time when African Americans like himself were moving forward at a rapid pace after years of discrimination. McAnulty, though, said that he had occasionally run up against bigotry inside business and political circles in the state, and he admitted that it “sometimes takes the air out of your balloon,” he told Business First-Louisville's Kamuf. “But if you allow it to get the better of you, you're lost. And I would rather win.”

Kentucky's governor reappointed McAnulty to his former district court judgeship after he resigned from the justice-secretary post, and he remained there until elected to the circuit court bench in 1983. One of the many stories that friends and colleagues liked to recount about McAnulty was that he showed up to the victory party that night in 1983 on crutches after having taken a spill in a basketball game with a neighbor. His opponent was just twelve years old at the time, but Allan Houston would later go on to hoops fame as a shooting guard for the Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks.

The circuit court bench handled serious cases, including one of the most sensational Kentucky crimes of the 1980s involving two African-American teens tried for the slaying of two white high school students. One of the accused received the death penalty, even though McAnulty was personally and publicly opposed to capital punishment. This notorious trial was one of thirteen murder cases he heard on the circuit court bench. Finally, he stepped down, telling Kamuf in the Business First-Louisville interview, “I sort of lost the freshness I felt was needed for undertaking that kind of a job.” He entered private practice in 1990 and became a partner with Greenebaum, Doll, and McDonald, a Lexington firm specializing in business law. In 1993 he was reelected to the circuit court bench and became its chief judge. He was a popular arbitrator, and in regular surveys he consistently received high marks by trial lawyers for his impartiality; in another marker of judicial wisdom, less than 10 percent of his decisions were overturned by higher courts.

In 1998 McAnulty was appointed to the bench of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and in 2006, when Justice Martin E. Johnstone of the Kentucky Supreme Court announced his retirement, McAnulty was named to fill the spot. Even with all his experience and nearly thirty years on the bench, he was awed when he arrived for his first day on the job at the state's highest court. “You don't realize the magnitude of it until you get there,” he told White in the University of Louisville Magazine interview. “I almost felt like a 10-year-old kid sitting there.” Later in 2006, he stood in an election for a regular eight-year term on the bench and defeated his circuit-court judge challenger with 52 percent of the vote.

The year 2006 marked another milestone for McAnulty: He finally quit a forty-year cigarette habit. Six months later, in June of 2007, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “I'm paying the piper. I ain't a victim and I ain't going to whine,” a report from Brett Barrouquere of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette quoted him as saying. The cancer spread to his brain, and he underwent surgery in July. A few weeks later he retired from the bench when he broke his collarbone in a fall. He died at his home in Louisville's Highlands neighborhood on August 23, 2007, at the age of fifty-nine. Survivors include his second wife, Kristi, with whom he had two young children, and two grown children from his first marriage.

At a Glance …

Born on October 9, 1947, in Indianapolis, IN; died of cancer on August 23, 2007, in Louisville, KY; son of William E. Sr. and Ann (Moss) McAnulty; married Brenda Hart; married Kristi Weihe; children: (with Hart) Patrick, Katheryn, (with Weihe) William III, Shannon. Education: Earned undergraduate degree from the Indiana University; University of Louisville, MEd, 1971, JD, 1974.

Career: Juvenile court judge, 1975; elected Jefferson County district court judge, 1977; named state justice secretary, 1980; elected circuit court judge, 1983; Greenebaum, Doll, and McDonald, partner after 1990; reelected to the circuit court, 1993, and became its chief judge; appointed to the bench of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1998; appointed to the Kentucky Supreme Court, June 2006, and elected, November 2006. Metro United Way, chair, early 1990s.

Memberships: Kentucky Bar Association, Louisville Bar Association.

Awards: Kentucky Trial Attorneys Association, Henry V. Pennington Outstanding Judge of the Year, 1997.