Justice Archibald of Houlton dies at 94

HOULTON – Aroostook County District Attorney Neale Adams admitted Tuesday that he felt a tinge of fright when he first stepped in front of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court as a young lawyer back in the late 1970s.

It was, after all, the first time that he had argued a case in front of the Law Court, and he did not know what to expect.

And then, he encountered the Honorable Justice James P. Archibald, sitting behind the ornate bench in his majestic black robe – and much of his fears were assuaged.

“He was a perfect gentleman,” Adams recalled Tuesday from his office in Caribou. “He was always relaxed and accommodating, a very nice man. He took some of the fear of being a young lawyer right out of you.”

Archibald, a Houlton native who spent his nearly 50-year career hearing cases running the gamut from general misconduct to murder, died on Sunday at his winter residence in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. He was 94.

Born in 1912, Archibald followed in the footsteps of his father, Bernard Archibald, who was also a Houlton lawyer.

At first, he dreamed of becoming a doctor, and told the Bangor Daily News in an interview 10 years ago that he once cajoled a local surgeon into letting him watch an appendectomy. But conversations around the family dinner table always turned to law, and talk of trials and juries and appeals soon captured his interest.

After attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick and the Boston University School of Law, Archibald came back to Houlton in 1937.

He married his wife, Leta, a year later. The couple went on to have two children.

Archibald practiced law with his father until the elder Archibald’s death in 1941.

Then he was elected Aroostook County attorney, but was on the job only two years before government officials requested that he serve his nation in a different venue. He was drafted into the military during World War II, and was again elected county attorney when he returned. He held the position for the next six years.

Archibald’s professional docket was packed with thousands of cases, stemming from the routine to the sensational. As a special assistant attorney general, Archibald was called in to investigate the double murder of a doctor and his wife in South Paris, and in 1954 led a probe into allegations of payoffs by a Maine wine distributor to the state liquor commission. Three years later, then-Gov. Edmund Muskie appointed him as Superior Court justice.

For the next 15 years, Archibald traveled the state as one of only eight Superior Court justices in Maine.

In 1971, Archibald was appointed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court by then-Gov. Kenneth Curtis. He spent the next 10 years on the Law Court before becoming active-retired in 1981, and sculpted a reputation as a fair, firm judge who was both businesslike and down-to-earth.

Maine Supreme Judicial Court Clerk James Chute was just a 25-year-old law student when he took a summer job with Archibald at the Aroostook County Superior Courthouse in Houlton. Chute, who has been clerk of the Law Court since 1978, characterized Archibald as “a wonderful man with a tremendous amount of common sense.”

He, like Adams, said Tuesday that the justice always treated everyone who came before him with straightforwardness and respect.

“He always treated everyone the same, no matter what,” Chute said.

“He was very judicial,” echoed Adams, who also worked with Archibald after his partial retirement. “You never saw him display self-righteousness or mortal superiority. He was a super person.”

There are two pictures of the lawman in the Houlton courthouse, in the lobby and upstairs in the courtroom. The door of his old office on the second floor still bears his name.

Vincent L. McKusick, the former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, said Tuesday that he was saddened to hear of the passing of his friend and colleague.

“He had a wonderful life,” McKusick recalled. “This is really the passing of the ‘grand old man of the supreme judiciary’ … He had a remarkable run, and he was one of the best.”

Even after he stopped banging his gavel in the courtroom on a daily basis, Archibald spent the last decade of his life presiding over numerous trials.

Archibald achieved the legacy that he said that he ultimately desired when he spoke to the BDN in 1996.

“Looking back, I know I’ve made my share of mistakes,” he pointed out at the time. “And any judge that says differently about himself is completely off the wall. We’re all human beings sitting up there. But as long as others consider me to have been a fair judge, what more can I ask?”

Funeral arrangements were pending Tuesday.