Wayne County Circuit Court will lose four long-standing, well-respected judges to retirement at the end of the year: Judges Prentis Edwards, Thomas E. Jackson, Michael Sapala and Carole Youngblood. The Detroit Legal News sat down with the judges for a look back at their careers. This is Part 3 of a 4-part series.
By Steve Thorpe
Legal News
When reporters interview Judge Carole Youngblood they would be wise to remember that she very nearly ended up wielding a notebook instead of a gavel.
“At one time I wanted to be a reporter,” she says. “In high school I was editor of the newspaper and yearbook. When I went to Wayne I was on the paper there.”
She became disillusioned when the college paper wouldn’t print some of her investigative work.
“I had some stories spiked that I had worked so hard to get. They wouldn’t publish them because they didn’t think it was the right image to project,” she says. “That was it. I quit. It’s not that I don’t like good news. It’s just that when you find things that are wrong and shouldn’t be happening and they won’t publish it … I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing here? I’m not going to do fashion.’ ”
Youngblood says it was idealism that led her initially to journalism and, eventually, to the law.
“In both journalism and law, you can make a difference,” she says.
Youngblood was elected to 3rd Circuit Court in Wayne County in 1994 and was re-elected in 2000 and 2006. She retires from that court this month. In 1998 she ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan Supreme Court.
She and her husband, Amos Williams, practiced together in the firm of Williams & Youngblood, P.C., before she was elected to the judiciary.
Youngblood has been a longtime mainstay in legal organizations including the Michigan Judges Association, Women Judges Association, American Judges Association, State Bar of Michigan, Women Lawyers Association of Michigan, National Lawyers Guild, Metropolitan Detroit Bar Association, Wolverine Bar Association, and WLAM Foundation.
The teenage Carole Youngblood didn’t seem destined for the law. Other than a desire to satisfy her youthful idealism, she had only the fuzziest idea of what to do with her life. And she says she had never even met a lawyer, let alone been influenced by one. Born in Highland Park and raised in Royal Oak, her parents were working class people.
“I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school,” she says. “My parents had to drop out during the Depression.”
Youngblood broke the mold by not only graduating from high school, but also entering a university. But her college years included a detour that changed her life.
“I went to Wayne State for two years, then, in 1966, I volunteered for one of the federal poverty programs, part of President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty,’ “ she says. “I went down to South Carolina, supposedly just for the summer, to work on a project and ended up staying 16 months. It was called the Neighborhood Youth Corps and we helped kids go back to school and stay in school by giving them community jobs, where they got paid minimum wage. The two counties I worked in were the poorest in the United States except for two in Mississippi.”
Coming from a city that has its own tough and poor areas, Youngblood thought she was prepared for what she would find. She wasn’t.
“I walked into a different world,” she says. “One of our projects was building outhouses. No one had indoor plumbing and many didn’t even have outhouses. That’s how poor it was. Many people didn’t even have a cupboard. They would have a single shelf with a sack of rice and a sack of beans.”
Youngblood returned to school with a heightened resolve to make a difference. But, hearkening back to those working class roots, she knew she also had to make a living. Accounting seemed like a steady, reliable profession and she was even accepted into U-M’s MBA program. But two things sidetracked her business career: She got bored with ledgers and she got a job at a law firm.
“It sounded like an interesting job to work at an attorney’s office,” Youngblood says. She didn’t have a clue what a lawyer did except for what she had seen on TV. “I liked Perry Mason a lot.”
Her law firm ambition initially didn’t even necessarily include being an attorney.
“When I went to work at the law firm, I was 21 and I thought of Della Street. She had an interesting job. She got to go to court and mingle with the lawyers.”
But eventually the idea of being support staff wasn’t enough.
“I worked for several attorneys and got promoted to paralegal and, eventually, office manager. That’s when I decided, ‘I’ll go to law school and be a lawyer.’ So I did.”
Most law students find the school experience nearly overwhelming, but Youngblood managed to work full time with her left hand while mastering the law with her right. And she refused to be intimidated by the experience.
“You hear the law school horror stories, but I was already old enough that it was impossible to terrorize me,” she says.
“Plus, when I worked down south, I was threatened by people who said I should go back north,” she says. “That scared me, but I was only 19. Later, I just didn’t get scared.”
What she did get was focused. Personal life? What’s that?
“When I went to law school, that’s all I did,” she says. “I never read a newspaper. I never watched a TV program. I didn’t have dinner with a friend, I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything. My
weekends were nothing but schoolwork. I would tell my friends, ‘See you in 10 weeks during the next school break.’ That’s what I gave up and what it cost.”
When she finally did have time for a personal life, it’s probably not surprising that she fell for a fellow law student. Amos Williams also had more life experience than the average student, having served two combat tours as a paratrooper in Vietnam and then a career as a Detroit police officer, before retiring as a lieutenant to become an attorney.
The pair formed the law firm of Williams & Youngblood, P.C., and they’ve had a long professional relationship, as well as a long marriage.
So when the idealistic judge and the grizzled ex-cop face each other over the breakfast table, do the sparks fly?
“Friends would say, ‘Don’t you drive each other insane?’” Youngblood says. “Actually, when we get home we talk about our cases all evening. We could discuss a single piece of evidence for two hours. He’s really smart.”
Her belief in his intelligence is probably bolstered by their concurrence on nearly all things legal.
“We have almost exactly the same views on the law,” she says. “It’s all we talk about. We love the law and being lawyers.”
Youngblood’s love for being a practicing attorney seemed to preclude a future on the bench. It was friends and, eventually, her husband who persuaded her that she should make a run for the bench.
“They finally talked me into running (for Circuit Court) in 1994 and I won on my first try. ”
At the time, Circuit Court judges did criminal, civil and family law all at the same time. Youngblood believes that each has its attractions and disadvantages, but she liked the variety of doing all three.
“I think it was better when you didn’t do just one thing,” she says. “Sometimes you just want to scream, ‘If I have to do one more auto neg case, I’ll commit suicide.’ “
Of the three, Youngblood found family law was the most emotionally draining.
“Some of these families are in so much pain and anguish,” she says. “The kids suffer so much. I find them to be really hard cases to do. I commend all the judges who stay in family, the ones who have seniority and could leave. It’s tough. Those were the cases where I wanted to take the kids home with me.”
Her most satisfying case, not surprisingly, echoes a young woman’s desire to “make a difference.” The effects of the case rippled out until they covered the whole country.
“In 1997, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, like nearly all insurance companies at the time, did not pay for bone marrow transplants for women for breast cancer,” Youngblood says. “They claimed it was still experimental.”
Because the wheels of justice turn slowly, women who sued to get the benefits were dying before the cases could come to trial.
Youngblood got a case by blind draw that involved a suit filed by 10 women against Blue Cross, seeking the treatment. Doctors from all over the world testified to their success with bone marrow transplants in treating a variety of cancers.
“The only doctor Blue Cross called who said the procedure was experimental was on their board of directors,” Youngblood says. “Blue Cross settled the case and agreed to pay for bone marrow transplants when they were recommended by a physician. Eventually, because women in Michigan got bone marrow transplants for breast cancer, women across the country got bone marrow transplants for breast cancer.”
“That’s why I ran for judge.”
When asked what she’ll miss most about being a judge, Youngblood doesn’t hesitate for a second.
“I have the greatest staff in the world,” she says. “I’ll miss all of them. We’ve had a great working relationship for more than a decade.”
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