Entry Category: Judges - Starting with P

Isaac Charles Parker served as federal judge for the Federal Court of the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). He tried 13,490 cases, with 9,454 of them resulting in guilty pleas or convictions. His court was unique in the fact that he had jurisdiction over all of Indian Territory, covering over 74,000 square miles. He sentenced 160 people to death, including four women. Of those sentenced to death under Parker, seventy-nine men were executed on the gallows. Born on October 15, 1838, in Barnesville, Ohio, Isaac Parker was the son of Joseph and Jane Parker. Joseph was a farmer, and Jane was known for her strong mental qualities and business habits. She was active in the Methodist …

George W. Paschal was a Georgia-born lawyer and politician who had an unusually restless and wayfaring career, including a spell in 1843 as one of the four earliest justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court. His sojourn in Arkansas, with his Cherokee wife, lasted only about ten years. Like quite a few Southerners of his time, Paschal defended slavery for practical and not philosophical reasons but also championed the Union, which made him sometimes the arch enemy of both sides. He was jailed in the Confederate state of Texas and was threatened by a mob of Union haters. He publicly attacked his boss, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, for his ruling on the validity of secession from the …

Chris Piazza was a judge in Little Rock (Pulaski County) for thirty years, capping a public service career that also included thirteen years as a prosecutor before he was first elected a Pulaski County circuit judge. Over the course of his years on the bench, he presided over a wide range of cases and was hailed by some and reviled by others for his pioneering decision ruling the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Christopher Charles Piazza was born on March 3, 1947, to Sam Piazza, who was the oldest child of an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Little Rock in 1903, and Francis Jordan Piazza, a native of Plymouth, England, whom Sam had met while serving in World War …

Norman Dale Price was an attorney who spent a notable career at Little Rock (Pulaski County) as a trial lawyer. Soon after getting a law license in 1951 and moving to Little Rock, Price set up a law firm with, among others, state Senator Max Howell, who would become for many years the most powerful person in the Arkansas legislature. Price would become a leader in both the state and national Trial Lawyers Associations, and his career also included a ten-month stint as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Dale Price was born on February 26, 1924, in Bear Creek Springs (Boone County), a community north of Harrison (Boone County), the youngest of four children of Albert Pike Price …

Doris Pryor is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She assumed that role in December 2022 after serving in a variety of legal positions since her graduation from law school and admission to the bar in 2003. Doris Lenea Clark was born in 1977 in Hope (Hempstead County) to James and Linda Clark. She and her brother Michael grew up in Hope, and she was an honor student and president of the school’s student government. After graduation from Hope High School in 1994, Clark attended the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County), from which she graduated cum laude in 1999. She spent the year after her graduation from UCA working in …

John Ingram Purtle was a populist lawyer and politician who spent eleven tempestuous years as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court late in the twentieth century. Purtle—who was called “the Great Dissenter” in a law review article after his death—resigned from the court in 1989 because of enduring conflicts with his fellow justices, most of whom he said had judicial philosophies that were “not in harmony” with his own. Four years before his resignation, Purtle had been charged in an arson-for-profit scheme with his legal secretary and another person, but he was acquitted in a jury trial. John Purtle was born on September 7, 1923, the middle child of nine children of John Wesley Purtle and Edna Gertrude Ingram …