Archives & History Committee Interview of Judge Charles Randy Butler, Jr. on Aug [19:31-24:32]

because I wouldn't even have a lot of administrative experience. Larry Smith and I had been really friends. So, hand down all lonely Larry Smith for a year that he became my chief assistant, D.A. So Larry and I applied, he's never actually a big one together and so I did that. He went back to the store and said it was the biggest, most notorious catch you might have to buy the package. Well, there was a shooting by a, of a man, a black man on the street that no one beats me. He's a very, an activist civil rights leader who's driving the car and there's a passenger, passenger the car is shouting, kill this man and the team ride on the streets of the building called Lutheran pride diesel and diesel with a quitter. Burns called one the black woman, Karen J. Cooflin, his young black assistant was defending diesel. So Larry and I worked all this to put it in the driver. I mean, the passenger was set to try and so Larry don't possibly give you the parental thinking and the big picture. And so that was a big catch. Anyway, there was some others but Karen, but that one, I did that Charlie, or I'd say I was really into it, criminal prosecution. I did a criminal defense so shifted completely to prosecution and it was a big case of a hurricane damage case that involved among the school, more on whether it was fallen in the repairs, the school board somehow or falsified the invoices and some of the higher up was the school board of reap the wheat, tens of thousands of dollars from them, and across the field, one of them. And then I got sort of jaded to an old criminal law of the public defender of district attorney and other side of not the one of the legal action. And so Charlie, I did, he was elected from one of the lawyers that I expired, Joe Sullivan, and I went out to practice law together and then grew the firm until the four of us at the time and some of your lawyers merged that firm with what was left of my father's own firm and my father died Tom Penelto, the died while Dennis had been gone and Harry Ridic was just about covered with the retired who was still there but not only elected and they did a lot of all-on-the-guest work in background and really enjoyed it. All right. So that's all, that's a very fascinating history. So in, in 1988, you are nominated by President Reagan on the middle of the year. Yeah. Walk us through how all that came to be, how had that it was completely unexpected and this is not what we've got normally but how that came about. I'm sitting in my office for one day on the 15th of all of the First National Bank, there's whatever it's called now and I get a call from the bar hand who might have been achieved the urge at the time Ken Brevard said, for Andy, what are you doing? And I said, well, at that moment, I was trying to resolve a dangerous period when the client was going to try to resolve a dangerous period for the client. He said, well, why don't you come over here? I said, do you mean right now? People know come over here and be a disparate job. I said, you're serious for all of me, but yeah. I said, well, come over now is the deal, come on over. And that came about because the vacancy was created with cops and then nominated to the lab and sorry. And so that vacancy was what I had to build. And the nomination process went through all the series of background checks at the I've shed and it was extremely much about what it is. So in usual time to be nominated Reagan was a Republican. This I was nominated in April from 1828 when he was in here eighth year and he was going to go out of office for fall in January.