most jurors and most judges feel that, when they give the sentence, they know that after a third of the sentence has gone by, they will be eligible for careful consideration. Just think for a moment about your own son or your own father or your own daughter being in prison, having served seven years of a lifetime term and being considered for a release. Don't you think that they ought to be examined and that the Pardons and Paroles Board ought to look them in the eye and ask them a question and, if they are turned down, ought to give them some substantive reason why they are not released and what they can do to correct their defect?
I do.
I think it's just as important at their time for consideration of early release as it is even when they are sentenced. But, I don't know how to bring about that change.
We had an ethics bill in the State Legislature this year. Half of it passed—to require an accounting for contributions during a campaign—but the part that applied to people after the campaign failed. We couldn't get through a requirement for revelation of payments or gifts to officeholders after they are in office.
The largest force against that ethics bill was the lawyers.
Some of you here tried to help get a consumer protection package passed without success.
The regulatory agencies in Washington are made up, not of people to regulate industries, but of representatives of the industries that are regulated. Is that fair and right and equitable? I don't think so.
I'm only going to serve four years as governor, as you know. I think that's enough. I enjoy it, but I think I've done all I can in the Governor's office. I see that lobbyists in the State Capitol filling the halls on occasions. Good people, competent people, the most pleasant, personable, extroverted citizens of Georgia. Those are the characteristics that are required for a lobbyist. They represent good folks. But I tell you that when a lobbyist goes to represent the Peanut Warehousemen's Association of the Southeast, which I belong to, which I helped to organize, they go there to represent the peanut warehouseman. They don't go there to represent the customers of the peanut warehouseman.
When the State Chamber of Commerce lobbyists go there, they go there to represent the businessman of Georgia. They don't go there to represent the customers of the businessman of Georgia.
When your own organization is interested in some legislation there in the Capitol, they're interested in the welfare or prerogatives or authority of the lawyers. They are not there to represent in any sort of exclusive way the client of the lawyers.
The American Medical Association and its Georgia equivalent—they represent the doctors, who are fine people. But they certainly don't represent the patients of a doctor.
As an elected governor, I feel that responsibility; but I also know that my qualifications are slight compared to the doctors or the lawyers or the teachers, to determine what's best for the client or the patient or the school child.
This bothers me, and I know that if there was a commitment on the part of the cumulative group of attorneys in this State, to search with a degree of commitment and fervency, to eliminate many of the inequities that I've just described that I though of this morning, our state could be transformed in the attitude of its people toward the government.
Senator Kennedy described the malaise that exists in this nation, and it does.
In closing, I'd like to just illustrate the point by something that came to mind this morning when I was talking to Senator Kennedy about his trip to Russia.
When I was about 12 years old, I liked to read, and I had a school principal, named Miss Julia Coleman, Judge Marshall knows her. She forced me pretty much to read, read, read, classical books. She would give me a gold star when I read ten and a silver star when I read five.
One day, she called me in and she said, "Jimmy, I think it's time for you to read War and Peace." I was completely relieved because I thought it was a book about cowboys and Indians.
Well, I went to the library and checked it out, and it was 1,415 pages thick, I think, written by Tolstoy, as you know, about Napoleon's entry into Russia in the 1812-1815 era. He had never been defeated and he was sure he could win, but he underestimated the severity of the Russian winter and the peasants' love for their land.
To make a long story short, the next spring he retreated in defeat. The course of history was changed; it probably affected our own lives.
The point of the book is, and what Tolstoy points out in the epilogue is, that he didn't write the book about Napoleon or the Czar of Russia or even the generals, except in a rare occasion. He wrote it about the students and the housewives and the barbers and the farmers and the privates in the Army. And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like presidents or governors or senators. They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people. If that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be?
Well, I've read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general, who protected his boss, and now brags on the fact that he tiptoed through a mine field and came out "clean." I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a mine field on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards.
I think our people demand more than that. I believe that everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form ought to remember the oath that Thomas Jefferson and others took when they practically signed their own death warrant, writing the Declaration of Independence—to preserve justice and equity and freedom and fairness, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
Thank you very much.
