♪ Gavin Jackson> Welcome to a "This Week in South Carolina" exclusive report.

I'm Gavin Jackson.

This week we have an exclusive sit down with former state Supreme Court Justice John Cannon Few, months after he left the state Supreme Court, following a failed re-election bid to a second term.

We discussed that rare situation, controversial rulings, and what's next for the jurists, and much more.

Gavin> So Justice Few, you are a South Carolina native born in Anderson 63 years ago, Duke undergrad, USC law grad, three years later, in 1988, then private practice before getting elected to the bench in 2000 to the circuit court, and then chief judge of the state Court of Appeals from 2010, 2016, and then elected to the state Supreme Court in 2016.

And we'll talk more about your time on the bench, but I just want to ask you about this new career path that you're on and what's going on with you.

Justice John Cannon Few> Well, I'm exploring the, I'm getting back into practicing law.

And that's, that's a lot for me.

And it's been 20 really 26 years on the bench.

But the last 6 to 12 months was kind of downtime.

So it's been 27 years since I was active in the private sector.

And, it's been fun, but I've got a ways to go to finish my planning.

Gavin> But around this time a year ago, you completed that filing process for re-election to the state Supreme court for a second ten year term, you went through that process, you were lobbying lawmakers.

I saw you every day, pretty much, it seemed like, and then you dropped out of that race the day before the election, prompting a hard restart of that process.

So tell us what, what do you think, why you didn't get that support that you needed to get re-elected to the state Supreme Court?

Justice Few> You know, that's a for a long time I thought a lot about that.

And, and recently I just hadn't even been thinking about it.

But I'll kind of, I'll start by saying that...in a way that's not really, I really wasn't concerned with that.

I knew my approach to being a judge and my approach to being re-elected was to do what I thought was the right thing to do at every turn, and especially in today's political environment, judges know, I knew that sometimes doing the right thing can be, can create a, backlash.

And so, that's what happened, I think, and I, but I, but I look back on it, not so much with concerned about why I didn't get the support, but I look back on it with a sense of pride and fulfillment that I, I feel like I did the right thing.

Now, a lot of people don't agree with me and don't, agree that I did the right thing, but in my mind, I follow the law at every turn.

And when I look back on that series of events that you're talking about, which in a way they could, it can feel very unpleasant.

But in the way I'm talking about, which is the way that I have settled in to dealing with it, I'm satisfied.

Gavin> And is that what you're talking, you're talking about, the abortion ruling specifically or were you talking about following the law specifically?

Justice Few> The abortion ruling was one of the instances that where this came up.

But there are many others, you know, during my time on the Supreme Court, really during, during my time as a circuit judge too, not so much when I was on the Court of Appeals, but during my time as a circuit judge and my time on the Supreme Court, I was lucky enough to be involved in some very high profile, very important cases that had implications across the state, whether they be economic or political or social or educational, they were important cases.

And those cases draw contrasting views and opinions, and you can only go one way.

And so you're, in a lot of those cases, you are going to get backlash.

I could go back to my time as a circuit judge, and I was running for the Supreme Court.

I think it was probably about, it was either 2008 or 2009.

And I was walking around the Gressette building over there and somebody said, "Have you seen the senator?"

And I said, "Is there... why do you ask that?"

He says, "Oh, he's upset with you.

"You need to go see him."

So I walked in there and I... I saw him sitting at his desk, and I just walked on in.

I didn't bother to wait for...to be invited.

And I sat down and very politely began a little conversation, and I said, "Senator, I hear you're upset with me."

He goes, "Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not, "I'm not upset with you."

And I said, "Okay, well, "I just...if, if you were, then I think it's only, "it's my responsibility to come and sit down with you "and hear you out.

"And, and if you have "a misunderstanding or a dissatisfaction "with something I did, I'd like to talk about it."

And he paused and he said, "Well, okay."

And he reached into his drawer and pulled out a folder that had all the things in it that he was dissatisfied with me about.

And so we sat there and discussed them.

There were three cases that I had decided as a circuit judge that he was unhappy with.

And after we sat there and discussed them he felt much better about it.

But that's, that... so it, the whole idea of, of, you know, getting into this controversy when you're a judge and then you have to go back in front of politically oriented people to be re-elected.

There's risks there.

And my approach from the very beginning was that's to be embraced, not to be avoided.

And so I took on those risks, openly.

And then you asked about specific cases.

So, you know, get moving pass the abortion later in the process, right before the re-election bid, we had the judicial, I mean, the, legislative pay case, which a lot of people in the legislature were very upset about.

And I'm sure that played some role in how they approached re-electing me.

But I look at all those not from concern about what caused me to lose support, but from pride in satisfying myself that I was following the law.

Gavin> Right.

And... then it was also brought up a number of times too, that, you know, your temperament was also a concern that was brought up in some J.M.S.C.

filings and that there were certainly instances that you even noted that you wish you could take back, times you probably spoke harshly to lawyers when you thought it was warranted, and regrettably, when at times when it wasn't warranted.

But what's the background of that?

Why not?

You know, isn't that kind of just that kind of come with the territory of being a judge, or was it for you, do you think a lot of people maybe misinterpreted you, or do you think you were sometimes just too harsh on folks, whether it was in the courtroom or behind and in the chambers or something like that?

Justice Few> Well, I mean, I said, as you, as you remarked, I, acknowledged that there were times when I didn't need to be as harsh, if that's the right word.

But every judge has a different style, a different approach to what they do, and my style and approach to being a judge, just like my style and approach to being a lawyer, is really kind of infused with an enthusiasm for...what's right and getting to the bottom of it.

And when I was in courtroom, and during oral argument, I was fired up.

Not in a mad way, but in an excited way, because it's my job to make sure that, that I in particular, but also there's a, there's a collaborative effect of trying to understand.

The court doesn't simply take five individual routes to a deep understanding of what's going on.

There's...a collaborative collaboration, and that, that activity, the conversations, the dialog that goes on in the courtroom is, it has a combined effect.

You would call it synergistic, perhaps?

Gavin> Well, you know, it's almost like a tax when you're watching, you guys will kind of hit the the lawyers back and forth.

I mean, it's a lot.

Justice Few> A lot of times.

So sometimes, time is short.

And so you're trying to make sure you get your points in.

And many times, what's going on.

This is one thing that appellate lawyers and observers of appellate courts, need to keep in mind is many times what's going on is that's not the judge talking to the lawyer, that's the judge talking to one of her colleagues or one of his colleagues, because that collaboration is taking place even as the judges are talking more directly to the lawyers.

So I, my style is to get excited about it, get fired up about it and to press for, getting to the bottom of it.

And that has the collateral, collateral effect of some people are used to judges who have a more passive style, and, and are not used to me interrupting them in the middle of a sentence and saying, that's not what I was asking you.

I need to go to a different point.

And it does rub some people the wrong way.

Gavin> Yeah.

But kind of continuing with this election.

I know we'll have a lot more to talk about, too, including reforms.

But, in February, before the March election, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, took the Senate floor in a very kind of candid moment to say that it would look bad replacing a sitting judge with a politician, former House Speaker Jay Lucas, who left the state House in 2022 and had no experience on the bench, was one of the qualified candidates, who was trying to replace you.

Lucas supposedly had the votes to win, especially if the House went for him.

So, what did you make of his candidacy, and what did you make of those remarks by Senator Massey?

Justice Few> Well, I'll start with the, I'll start with the remarks by Senator Massey.

You could also bring in the the comments that were made by, Senator Rankin.

There were other instances, less public in nature, in which members of the General Assembly spoke out and, with, without saying, I really don't want to get into criticizing anybody, but it's just a really good thing that men and women who serve in the General Assembly have the courage to get up on a public podium and say something that's probably not going to be well received by all of their colleagues because they really believe in it.

So whether Senator Massey was doing what he should have done or the same with Senator Rankin, it's a good thing that they had the guts to get up and do it.

Now, you know, you asked me about, former Speaker Lucas.

I don't know whether you know this or not, but he and I were classmates in law school, and we were very good friends.

And it's very interesting that I probably would never have made it to the Supreme Court, might not have even made it to the circuit bench if it weren't for the support that I had from then Representative and later Speaker Lucas.

He's a brilliant man.

He's a good man.

I have a lot of respect for him.

And, and that's, I'll just leave it at that.

I mean, beyond that, it's the responsibility of the political process to make the judgments that you are asking me about.

It's not really my role to make those judgments.

And...like I was saying a few minutes ago, we know those judgments are going to be made.

We, we, you have to be prepared to live with them.

Gavin> And then why decide to drop out of the race before the election then just going through that, knowing that I guess you don't have the votes for it?

Justice Few> That was a tough decision.

I really deeply struggled with that.

I had conversations with my wife and family.

I talked to some extent with some of my colleagues of, when you're this far into, a career on the judiciary, you have a lot of... true friends around the state who are involved in politics, who will tell you the truth.

And I spoke with those people, and ultimately, I just decided that what I did was the right thing, to do.

Gavin> And then kind of going back to the, the abortion ruling back in January 2023, you were part of that 3 to 2 majority and Planned Parenthood, one, as it's known now.

And that ruling overturned the first six week abortion law.

You wrote a separate lengthy dissent.

Wiley said, I guess...(indistinct) as the majority... but different opinion, he said, "...to give the legislature "essentially give, give they, give them a roadmap "to what they needed to do to correct the law."

Because you said that in Planned Parenthood, that under article one, section ten "prohibition and unreasonable invasions of privacy "is a principle of law, "in the six week ban and the Fetal Heartbeat Act "violates that provision "because, as a matter of law, "it is an unreasonable intrusion "into a pregnant woman's right of privacy."

So, it was a bit of a surprise decision, I think, for folks on the outside not realizing, I think sometimes people just think it's going to go the way it's going to go.

But then it was a 3 - 2 decision to overturn that, that law, that six week law.

What was it like for you after that?

Kind of tell us a little bit more about that ruling.

Obviously, like I said, you had that lengthy ruling, but, what it came down to for you and the ramifications from that ruling.

Justice Few> I remember being at a... I was asked to join a fellowship of judges from around the country, and many of them were federal judges.

And this was about the time that the Dobbs had not been decided.

and but, but there was, a little bit of a fervor around the country that Roe v. Wade was not safe.

And I remember thinking to myself and saying it to this group of judges, we were talking about abortion.

I said to them, "Well, that's never coming "to the South Carolina Supreme Court."

And boy, was I wrong.

It did come to the court.

And yeah, we knew that, we knew that, that the decision we were making was consequential.

You read each of the five of us in that first round, wrote detailed opinions explaining our view.

Nobody, no one person had the exact same view.

And mine came down to a narrow, my view came down to a narrow point, really more of legislative procedure than, than abortion rights.

And I felt... I always think it's important for a, for a member of the Supreme Court to explain themselves.

Sometimes...there are reasons why you don't.

But in a case like that, I felt like it was important for me to explain myself and for me to explain the point of procedure that, that I was focused on, it really, almost by necessity, came out as what people call a roadmap in order to explain why the procedure was mistaken, in my view, I needed to explain what would be the proper procedure, and I did that, and people perceived it as a roadmap.

I wasn't trying to engineer where the legislation would ultimately go, and but, but that's the way it was perceived.

Gavin> Did any lawmakers ever reach out to you after that decision?

Justice Few> Oh yeah.

Gavin> What did they say?

Justice Few> By the dozen.

Gavin> What do you do in that situation?

Justice Few> I stand tall.

Gavin> Do you respond to them or you just?

Justice Few> Yeah.

You, we, this is a... Okay, if, if someone reached out to me immediately after the opinion came out, when we're still in this period of reconsideration and asked me to do something different, that would be improp... But nobody ever came anywhere close to doing anything like that.

I mean, in the, in the many months that followed the final decision.

Yeah, we I would see people like in the State House where you were and at receptions and in my hometown and, and as I travel around the state and, and we talked about it a lot.

And, there were a lot of different, there were, there were most everybody honestly most everybody was like, Wow, you, you stood up for what you thought was right.

Gavin> Did you ever think that you wouldn't get re-elected because of that?

Justice Few> I knew that, that was a risk.

Absolutely.

And...it's important I think, it's important for, for any political officer whether they be popularly elected or appointed to be willing to risk their job to do the right thing.

That is, that's an element that's a fundamental, important element to, democracy.

Gavin>When you're looking, going through the J.M.S.C process, you were asked to list five of your most significant orders.

And in fact, the Planned Parenthood one was not one of them.

You actually quoted, several other ones, including Owens v. Sterling.

That was the 2024 decision that reversed a lower court ruling regarding the constitutionality of the state's execution methods.

And this came about after changes to state law that mandated death sentences be carried out by electrocution unless the inmate chooses a firing squad or lethal injection, which for 13 years was not available.

So that led to a lot of those law changes.

So why was that such a consequential order for you to, to note in that list of significant cases for you?

Justice Few> Well, in a way, in a way, it kind of gets back to that legislative procedure.

The, that case could have been about something else.

But the legislature looked at what it perceived to be a problem, that we have this death penalty.

The, the people embraced the voters, embraced the death penalty.

People are getting the death penalty, and yet the state cannot carry it out.

So the legislature said, we need to do something about that.

The way they went about doing it to me was constitutionally sound, and it was important to me to write about the soundness of that procedure so that it would be, can be understood how to deal with problems like that in the future.

The death penalty, as a practical matter, has lost a lot of its importance in South Carolina because for a variety of reasons that all boil down to the fact that, there aren't very many prosecutors seeking the death penalty right now.

So in that sense, the, the decision might not be all that important.

But in the, in the, in the sense that I just discussed with you, I think it was an important case.

Gavin> Just you mentioning that talking about prosecutors and, you know, settling versus going to trial.

I mean, do you think what's your reasoning behind that?

Do you think it's just easier sometimes to settle versus actually risk it with a jury or what's why is that happening more and more in your opinion?

Justice Few> I'm not, in civil cases it's happening a lot more than it did, say 30 or 40 years ago.

I'm not positive that that's true in criminal cases.

I don't know the exact statistics, but, you know, the number of cases that we have, the number of crimes that occur in South Carolina is astronomical.

You can take numbers from an individual county... I remember knowing these numbers some years ago in the Greenville County alone, in circuit court cases, not magistrate court cases, was processing something like 15,000 indictments a year.

Now, that probably represents about 10 to 12,000 people, because some people have more than one indictment.

And if you think about trying to try 10 to 12,000 cases a year, it's literally impossible.

And also the criminal justice system plays not, it plays a big role in rehabilitation.

And that role is best played in the nego... in the negotiating process, where the prosecutors and the police and the citizens and everybody can kind of look at an individual case and say that man or.

that woman needs help The way to get them help is not to take them to trial and have a jury, although it could work that way.

But the best way to get them help is to negotiate a solution, and everybody work together to try to give the person the help they need.

That helps the community, that helps the defendant, the families.

It helps everybody.

So the, it's not a bad thing.

A lot of people say that we are, somehow forsaking our constitutional responsibility by, not by, by having a guilty plea system.

I don't agree with that.

I think the guilty plea system is essential, and it plays a vital role in, in improving and and promoting criminal justice.

Gavin> And Justice Few, let's talk about the dynamic with the legislature that you've been referencing a lot.

I think that's always a fascinating thing to look at, because a lot of time in those rulings that we see y'all rule on when it comes to things that come from across the street, from the State House to the Supreme Court, you'll always seem to kind of go over overextend yourselves on these rulings to make sure that you're showing that you're trying not to legislate, that you're not legislating from the bench, that y'all are just interpreting the law.

So how would you describe that relationship?

Is that even a relationship?

I feel like it's kind of an odd thing to say, that there's a relationship between the two.

Maybe it's just a balance between the legislative branch and the judicial branch.

But how do you see that, especially when it comes to folks saying, you know, maybe you guys are legislating from the bench or that you're there to clean up what the State House is sending you?

Justice Few> Whether it's something that we should call a relationship or not, there is definitely interaction.

And that interaction is healthy.

It's certainly essential.

And...part of that interaction is when the court has decided to either up... either uphold or invalidate legislative action.

The explanation of why the court is doing that is important for the public to understand, for the bar to understand, for, for the circuit judges and the Court of Appeals to understand and, and for the legislature to understand.

And if I didn't mention it, I think I'd have said voters to start with.

Right?

So, that's the, to me, that explanation is important.

I'm not sure that we were necessarily going out of our way to do it.

We're in our lane to explain why we're doing something to either uphold or invalidate legislation.

And... Gavin> And looking at the judicial selection process, which you've been through multiple times, what do you think needs to be done, in your opinion, when it comes to changes to the...reforms?

Obviously we're one of two states, where we have a merit selection commission versus, you know, popular election or appointment just by the governor or by the legislature, do you think that there needs to be changes, like wholesale changes made to the selection or election process of judges in South Carolina?

Justice Few> Well, let me, let me start with part of what you said.

You, you pointed out, as many do, in fact, any time you pick up a news story, the, the author of the story is always going to point out that we're one of two, two states in the country that do it this way, that does not necessarily mean that it's a bad way to do it.

And if you look back historically, this process of electing judges has served us well.

And when I deal with judges in other states and you'll hear many lawyers who practice in other states say this, that the quality of judges from top to bottom in South Carolina is better significantly than the quality of state court judges in other states.

So historically, this process has served us very well.

Times change, political dynamics change, and it's a healthy thing for us as a state for, for the...citizens, for the judges, for the lawyers, for the legislature to, to re-examine whether this remains the best way for us to elect judges.

Of course, you're asking me that question because that re-examination is in full swing right now, and I applaud that.

And I think as, as an individual... Now, I'm a private citizen, and it's my responsibility to engage in that discussion.

It's the responsibility of citizens all over South Carolina to engage in that discussion.

If we delegate that to people who have a political agenda, we're not going to come out with the best solution.

So I look at the current discussion going on right now as an opportunity for South Carolina to not only find or keep the best way to elect judges, but also to engage its citizens in a conversation that is productive.

Gavin> So keep it somewhat like it is now, and not necessarily make it gubernatorial, appointment wise?

Justice Few> I mean, that's part of the discussion, and I'm not going to I don't want to tell you... I believe in the system.

The system that we have... when the members of the legislature fulfill their responsibility, when the public fulfills its responsibility to learn about candidates, to communicate with their, with their representatives, the system works well.

But we have to make sure that it's working like it's supposed to work.

And if it's not, then maybe we do need to change it, but I'm not going to, I'm, I don't really, I'm not really I don't think it's my role to tell you what I think the legislature should do.

I think that the each member of the legislature has a responsibility within the process that we currently have, and they also have a responsibility to assess whether that process is the best.

Gavin> You can find that entire interview and more at YouTube.com/SCETVnews.

For South Carolina ETV, I'm Gavin Jackson, Be well, South Carolina.

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