John Michael Guidry

John Michael Guidry (born January 19, 1962)^[1] is an African-American Democratic judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the First Circuit, Second District, based in the capital city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

Biography

Guidry graduated in 1979 from the historically black McKinley Senior High School and in 1983 from Louisiana State University, both in his native Baton Rouge. He received his Juris Doctorate in 1987 from the historically black Southern University Law Center, also in Baton Rouge.^[2] He is a faculty member at both Southern University and the Southern Law Center.^[3] Guidry is a member of the NAACP, the Louis A. Martinet Legal Society, and the group 100 Black Men of Metro Baton Rouge. From 1980 to 1984, Guidry was a legislative assistant and from 1984 to 1987, he was the assistant clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives. He was an assistant attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish from 1988 to 1991 and maintained a private practice from 1987 to 1997.^[2]

Guidry was elected to the District 67 seat in the state House in 1991 with 56.4 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field.^[4] He served only from 1992 to 1993,^[5]when he resigned after his victory in a special election to the Louisiana State Senate.^[6] The vacancy occurred with the election for the first of two terms in 1992 of the African-American Democrat Cleo Fields to Louisiana's 4th congressional district seat in the United States House of Representatives. Guidry defeated Republican Sandra Bologna Ribes in the state Senate contest, 10,983 votes (64.8 percent) to 5,964 (35.2 percent).^[7]

Fields declined to seek a third term in Congress in 1996, a victim of redistricting. He instead returned to the state Senate, when Guidry won a special election to the circuit court on October 18, 1997, to succeed fellow Democrat J. Louis Watkins, Jr., of Houma in Terrebonne Parish, who died in office. Guidry received 5,413 vote (62.6 percent) over two other Democrats, Curtis A. Calloway and Donna Wright Lee, in an election which attracted fewer than 9,000 voters to the polls.^[8]

Guidry ran unsuccessfully in 2012 for the Place 5 seat on the Louisiana Supreme Court though he led an eight-candidate field in the nonpartisan blanket primary with 93,110 votes (27.5 percent). The Republican Jefferson D. Hughes, III, of Walker in Livingston Parish, also a circuit court judge, trailed with 71,911 (21.2 percent). Four other Republicans held 35 percent of the vote; another Democrat, 14.8 percent, and an Independent, less than 1 percent.^[9] In the lower-turnout runoff contest on December 8, 2012, Hughes defeated Guidry, 52,939 votes (52.8 percent) to 47,259 (47.2 percent), to claim the ten-year term on the Supreme Court to succeed the retiring Catherine D. Kimball, the chief justice in her last years on the tribunal.^[10]

In 2014, Judge Guidry was named the new president of the Louisiana Judicial Society board of governors.^[3]

References