Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (GA)

Hanging tough
She's survived polio, poverty and two bouts of bone cancer. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Carol Hunstein is used to fighting. She says she'll never be the same after a bruising battle for re-election.

Her limp is barely detectable, whether Carol Hunstein is in her black justice's robe walking to her seat on the Georgia Supreme Court or in blue jeans lugging bags of pine bark through her yard. It only hints at tribulations that shaped one of the state's most powerful women.

Hunstein, 62, was sworn in Friday for her third term on Georgia's highest court.

This year, she survived a bruising campaign against a challenger whose supporters spent more than $1.5 million to unseat her. They bombarded television viewers with ads painting Hunstein as soft on crime.

Hunstein, a justice for 14 years, punched back with one of the most ferocious ads of Georgia's political season, saying challenger Mike Wiggins' mother sued him for taking her money and that he threatened to kill his sister. Wiggins, a former Bush administration lawyer, called the ad cruel and false. Moments before a televised debate between the candidates, he refused to shake Hunstein's hand.

Hunstein wasn't done. She called in support from prominent Georgia prosecuting attorneys, who appeared in a TV ad for her and scoffed at the notion that she is soft on crime.

On Election Day, Hunstein won 63 percent of the vote, and all 159 Georgia counties.

"I'm tough," she says, sitting in her Decatur family room on a recent morning. She is 5 feet 3 inches tall, and the campaign whittled 12 pounds from her small frame.

Hunstein lives in a spacious ranch house, her home of 21 years, on about an acre of land. She has a prosthetic leg, but it never kept her from painting her house, digging a pond or replanting a tree. Pink roses from her garden burst from a vase on the kitchen counter.

Her face is kind yet steely at times, and this is one of those times. The election, she says, wasn't about her; it was about protecting the judiciary from the influence of special interests.

Insurance companies, automakers, the medical industry and others contributed heavily to an independent effort to defeat Hunstein. Their aim: to protect Georgia's tort laws limiting how much businesses must pay in damages if they're sued.

The campaign against her also drew support from Republicans, including Gov. Sonny Perdue -- who swore in Hunstein on Friday. Court races officially are nonpartisan in Georgia, but Wiggins ran as a Republican.

"If they thought I was just going to let them take it away from me, I mean, they picked the wrong Supreme Court justice," Hunstein says. "It's just not in my character. I fight back for what I think is right."

Critics: Rulings hard to predict

Hunstein's critics, however, say plaintiffs' lawyers who supported her for re-election also represent a special interest. And they say her rulings are hard to predict.

"You want predictability in the law," says Todd Young, policy director for the Sandy Springs-based Southeastern Legal Foundation. The conservative public interest law firm now is studying proposals with state lawmakers to alter the state's highest court.

"Not pro-business, not anti-business, just predictable," Young says. "Then everybody understands the ground rules."

Wiggins and several key supporters last week declined to be interviewed about the election or Hunstein. Eric Dial, chairman of the Safety and Prosperity Coalition, an independent committee that raised more than $1.67 million to unseat Hunstein, had little to say except to comment on Hunstein's ad against Wiggins: "I thought it was unbecoming of a Supreme Court justice."

Hunstein was practically born fighting back. Her perseverance would see her through life-threatening illnesses, discrimination, abandonment and poverty. Her grit would be her ticket to success.

"She's the type of person that fights for the little person," says her son, John Abate, 43. "Because I think that's how she really sees herself. We came from having nothing."

Carol Wycoff was born Aug. 16, 1944, in Miami. Before she turned 2, she was diagnosed with polio.

Her childhood was riddled with surgeries and lonely hospital stays because of the polio and then something more ominous. When Carol was 4, her older sister was carrying her through her aunt's house and dropped her -- so hard that Carol's leg broke. X-rays revealed a tumor in her left ankle.

She had bone cancer.

Doctors wanted to amputate, but her father wouldn't let them. He fainted when doctors set his daughter's leg, and he refused to return to the hospital again. It was 1948. Carol underwent extensive radiation treatments and more surgery. She rarely saw her mother because her mother had other children to take care of. Doctors and nurses were her only regular visitors.

"Although it's not necessarily what I would have chosen, I think all of the events that have happened in my life have helped me be who I am," Hunstein said. By the time Carol was 11, her parents were divorcing. Then her mother, Mary, died.

Still, Hunstein cherishes some childhood memories. Her father would take her duck hunting in the Everglades. "That's the reason I'm not afraid of snakes or just about anything else," she says, laughing.

Because of the surgeries as a child, Carol had some noticeable difficulty walking. When she was about 15, she tried to get a part-time job as a telephone operator. She aced the written test, but the employer worried about her climbing the stairs to the phone room. Carol offered to arrive at work early and walk up alone, and to leave late, using the stairs after everybody else. She didn't get the job.

Her father discouraged her from going to college. "Women don't need to go to college," he told her. He said she could go only if she paid her own tuition, bought her books and paid him room and board. He urged her to get married and start a family instead.

She finished high school and married at 17, and gave birth to a boy at 18. Three years later, her husband abandoned them, and he never paid the court-ordered $20 a week in child support and $5 a week in alimony, she says. With no job and no health insurance, she sometimes went hungry. Then her left leg started to ache.

She was 23, and the bone cancer was back.

At a charity hospital in Miami, doctors amputated her left leg below her knee. They fitted the cast with a pipe, as a calf, and a shoe to walk on, then sent her home.

(Years later, Hunstein had dinner with the surgeon who performed the amputation. He told her he had saved her leg from the knee up, arguing with doctors who had wanted to amputate more: "She's not going to live a year. We might as well let her dance.")

When she returned to the hospital to have her stitches removed, she lucked into a conversation with the man in charge of the hospital's vocational rehabilitation program. She was a good candidate, he said, for a state program that would pay for college tuition and books. She attended Miami-Dade Community College, then Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, where she earned a bachelor's degree in marketing in 1972.

Her son remembers answering their home phone when he was about 8. It was "the hospital calling just to see if she was still alive, and they were surprised," he says. "Her will was what kept her dying from the bone cancer.

Good jobs were scarce for women and for people with disabilities. She found work in Miami as a receptionist and administrative assistant at an off-the-rack couture shop, still barely making ends meet. Her son recalls times when they ate eggs, bread and milk for every meal.

Law school: a ticket out

Hunstein kept looking for a way improve their lot. An occupational profile test she had taken in college had said she would make a good military officer or lawyer. The idea of either career was daunting, but she pressed ahead. She attended law school at Stetson University, in DeLand, Fla., supporting her son with Social Security benefits after her former husband died. She graduated in 1976 and was admitted to the State Bar of Georgia that November.

At Stetson, she had met her second husband, Ralph Hunstein, who became her law partner after they moved to Atlanta. Hunstein & Hunstein handled civil litigation, along with some criminal defense work. "I used to go to the Fulton County Jail and get a misdemeanor case assigned on a Monday, and I'd get a free breakfast that the inmates cooked," Carol Hunstein says. "And hopefully I would dispose of the case by that Friday." Because then she would get paid. "And the practice just kind of built from there." The Hunsteins had two daughters, Krista and Gabrielle, before they divorced in 1990.

In 1984, spurred by a judge who called her "little lady" and otherwise derided her in open court, Hunstein ran for election to the DeKalb County Superior Court. "If you weren't part of the 'in' group of attorneys, then you and your client weren't necessarily treated the same," she said.

Her campaign slogan was, "This time, this woman." She promised voters she would apply equal justice and treat everyone with dignity and respect. She defeated four male candidates, becoming the first woman elected to that bench. When Judge Hunstein arrived for work, the only robe available was a man's small. "That'll be fine," she joked with court staff, "as long as it's pink."

It didn't take her long to establish herself with her colleagues. They elected her president of the Council of Superior Court Judges of Georgia. She was the first woman to hold the position. She also chaired the Georgia Commission on Gender Bias in the Judicial System, which brought about a change in the law so that rape victims no longer had to pay for their own rape evidence kits.

In November 1992, then-Gov. Zell Miller had a vacancy to fill on the Supreme Court after the death of Chief Justice Charles L. Weltner. Miller chose Hunstein over four other finalists, making her the second woman on the court. (Earlier that year, he had tapped Leah Ward Sears.)

"How she [Hunstein] grew up and how she survived and how she overcame hardships, that is most appealing," Miller says. "And when you put that with a very, very fine mind along with the record that she had as a Superior Court judge, it made it very easy to choose her."

Hunstein was elected, without opposition, to full terms in 1994 and 2000.

Christopher J. McFadden, an appellate lawyer who has argued many cases before the court, says, "It's clear from her demeanor and from making eye contact with her from the podium that she is paying close attention to both the legal issues and human consequences of the cases before her."

Justice Robert Benham, who has known her since the beginning, calls Hunstein a quick study with "an abiding faith in the concepts of fairness." Although they have disagreed on cases, "she has the ability to see all sides of an issue. And she reserves judgment on an issue until she has had a chance to thoroughly analyze the issue before the court," he says.

"I admire her not just for the position she holds but the journey that has brought her to this position," Benham says. "She has weathered the storms, and she has made a wonderful jurist."

Hunstein's youngest daughter, Gabrielle, 25, says her mother "reiterates that you have to cherish what you have, and you have to live life to the fullest, and you can't dwell on things that don't go your way. Negative things just have to be overcome."

As a justice, Hunstein has participated in more than 5,000 cases and written more than 600 opinions, according to her campaign literature. Supporters say she is known for being tough on repeat criminal offenders, deadbeat parents, perpetrators of domestic violence and lawyers who break criminal and ethical laws.

Now she's known for something else: She can play hardball politics.

"I don't think I will ever be the same," Hunstein says, reflecting on the campaign shortly before standing up to leave for work.

"It has, if anything, increased my strength, my own self-confidence. I said in '84 that I trusted the voters of the state of Georgia. And I trust them now."

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Carol Hunstein, who was appointed by then-Gov. Zell Miller, was sworn in for a third term on Friday, weeks after weathering a bitter campaign. A poster from the hard-fought campaign is below.

Wow, opened my eyes!