On the record.

The Eastern Section's median time from oral argument to filed opinion is 11.4 months. That is the slowest of the three appellate sections in the state and 41% slower than the Western Section.

The drivers are not exotic. They are: opinion drafting on a non-binding internal schedule, no public reporting of judge-specific timelines, and a workflow culture that treats a six-month backlog as routine. None of that is a feature. It can be fixed by an appellate judge who picks up a clipboard.

I will commit, in writing, to a 6-month civil and 4-month criminal cap on every opinion I author, and publish my own running median monthly so the bar and the public can hold me to it. The Western Section runs a 7.4-month median with the same caseload and the same statutes. There is no mystery here. There is just work that someone has to do.

I write a thousand-word lay summary on every opinion I author from the Knox County Circuit bench. It runs at the top of the published order, before the syllabus, in language a litigant can read on the courthouse steps.

I have done this for nine years. It has not generated a single appellate confusion, a single ethics complaint, or a single moment in which the legal text was watered down to fit. What it has done is produce litigants who walk out of the courthouse understanding what just happened to them.

I am running for the Eastern Section in part to apply this discipline to every published opinion the court issues. The legal text remains. The casebook still gets the precedent. But before all of that, the litigant gets the answer.

I have spent the last nine years on the Knox County Circuit Court bench writing 1,847 opinions. Of the 184 that have been appealed, none has been reversed for legal error. I do not say that to brag — I say that because it is the only thing a judge should be measured on.

I will not run a campaign about specific cases. I will not discuss hypothetical fact patterns. I will not accept endorsements from elected party officials or party committees. The campaign will operate by the canons of judicial conduct on the trail and on the bench, equally.