Sarah Stewart elected Alabama Chief Justice
The Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building, which houses the Alabama Supreme Court, seen in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, on January 24, 2023. Associate Justice Sarah Stewart, a Republican, won election as chief justice on Tuesday. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Sarah Stewart will be the state's next chief justice, winning election easily Tuesday night.
As of 10 p.m., Stewart, the Republican nominee, had almost 920,000 votes (68%). Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Greg Griffin, the Democratic nominee, had almost 436,000 votes (32%), according to the unofficial count on the Alabama Secretary of State's website.
Stewart, first elected to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2018, pledged to bring "a conservative approach to dispensing justice impartially, ensuring Alabama's body of jurisprudence evolves in strict accordance with conservative principles."
Stewart declined to say specifically what those were. In February, Stewart joined the state court's majority in ruling that frozen embryos were children under an 1872 law and that the parents of embryos accidentally destroyed in a Mobile clinic in 2020 could sue for damages.
The ruling led several in-vitro fertilization programs around the state to suspend operations and touched off debate nationwide. The Alabama Legislature quickly passed a law in March protecting clinics from criminal and civil liability in IVF services.
The justice also wrote that she wanted to update judicial resource allocation and use metrics to "ensure objective and transparent manpower and weighted caseload studies."
Stewart also proposed coordinating with different courts to address their needs and use funds to modernize the court system. Stewart also said she would work on "strengthening relationships with our business community to address the high costs and slow pace of litigation, focusing on business's particularized needs through initiatives like business courts, user-centered case management, and online dispute resolution for account collections cases."
Griffin did not have a campaign website and could not be reached for interviews.
Stewart will succeed Chief Justice Tom Parker, a Republican, who could not run for re-election after passing the state retirement age for judges. Parker is on track to become the first Alabama chief justice to complete a full six-year term in office since Sonny Hornsby in 1995.
