IOWA CITY (AP) — Harold Vietor, a highly respected state and federal judge in Iowa who served on the bench for five decades, has died.
His death was confirmed Monday by the Des Moines-based federal court for the Southern District of Iowa, where Vietor had served starting in 1979.
Vietor died Saturday after suffering a stroke in Tucson, Arizona, where he had recently moved. His daughter works there as a federal public defender.
Vietor, who was known as “Hal,” was appointed as a district judge in Linn County by Gov. Harold Hughes at age 33 in 1965. He had worked in private practice in Cedar Rapids after attending the University of Iowa law school. Vietor, a Parkersburg native, had also served in the Navy during the Korean War.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Vietor to fill a newly created federal judge position in the Southern District of Iowa. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, where Sen. John Culver of Iowa championed the appointment.
Vietor served as the district’s chief judge from 1985 to 1992, overseeing the restoration of the main courtroom in the federal courthouse in Des Moines.
“Judge Vietor handled exceedingly complex cases in this district,” said the district’s current chief judge, John Jarvey. “He had a way of making it look easy.”
Jarvey praised Vietor’s “wisdom, kindness and collegiality” and said he had an extraordinary command of the law.
Vietor assumed senior status in 1996 but kept handling cases on a part-time basis until recently. Last fall, his colleagues and former clerks gathered to congratulate him for 50 years on the bench.
Tall with gray hair and a booming voice, Vietor was “kind of out of central casting” for a federal judge, said Senior U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt, who succeeded Vietor on the bench. Vietor handled a number of significant cases, including two in which his rulings were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, he said.
“He always had a reputation for fairness and for treating people with great dignity and respect,” Pratt said.
A fierce defender of the fundamental fairness of the jury system, Vietor oversaw hundreds of trials during his career. In a 1996 speech to the Iowa Bar Association, he said, “The primary pleasure of trial judging is working with you trial lawyers, each of us performing our respective duties to bring about a just resolution to a case.”
“He was a lawyer’s judge, a judge’s judge,” said Des Moines attorney Gary Dickey, who served as a law clerk for Vietor from 2002 to 2004. “What lawyers want is a judge who is fair and predictable and you trust will be thoughtful in making decisions. I think that’s exactly the type of judge that he was.”
Vietor “had a tremendous respect for the rule of law” and often issued rulings that were required even when he personally disagreed, Dickey said.
Late in his career, Vietor stopped taking criminal cases because he disagreed with federal sentencing guidelines that he believed improperly took away judges’ discretion.