Municipal Judge Gary Goodwin, 68, passed away Tuesday after dealing with health problems.
Goodwin held multiple roles within the city’s court system during his more than 40-year career, ranging from public defender to judge.
“He was a good man, a very good man,” Gawyn Mitchell, a local attorney who attended law school with Goodwin, told The Dispatch on Tuesday. “If you didn’t understand Gary and what he was trying to accomplish, you might think he might have been rude or something. He wasn’t. He was a gentleman.”
Goodwin began his law career in 1981. Over the years, he served a brief stint as Lowndes County prosecutor to fill out part of a term in 1991, served as municipal judge from 1994-1996 and as a public defender from 1999-2014. He was hired again as a municipal judge in 2015.
His various positions reflected both his love for the law as well as his heart for public service, Mitchell said.
“As a lawyer, he did a good job at whatever he was doing because I never heard anything bad that he did,” Mitchell said. “… Him being a judge, that shows something. That’s a hard job. Nobody realizes how hard it is to be a municipal judge because you know everybody in town.”
Following Rhonda Hayes Ellis’ retirement in March, Goodwin began handling the county’s full docket. That arrangement was supposed to last until the city could hire a replacement or interim judge for Hayes Ellis’ seat, but then Goodwin took medical leave in September.
The council hired two temporary judges to preside over municipal court throughout the month, with retired Chancery Court Judge Dorothy Colom picking up Goodwin’s docket as judge pro tempore. Shane Thompkins, municipal judge for Caledonia, hears cases that could be a conflict of interest to Colom, due to her son, Scott Colom, being the 16th Circuit Court district attorney.
With Goodwin’s passing, Mayor Stephen Jones said the city will continue the interim arrangement, keeping Colom and Thompkins on until someone else is hired for the seat.
The city will continue advertising for one of the judge seats, though Jones said it is still being determined whether the court will return to a two-judge system or rely on one judge with a pro tempore for the time being.
“We’ve actually been looking at how we want to fill that, whether it’s going to be one judge or whether it’s going to be two judges,” Jones told The Dispatch. “We haven’t really decided how to proceed with that.
“I’ll be visiting some other courts to see how they do some things because there’s still quite a few changes that we want to make and that we are already making down there,” he said.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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