Judge J. Ben McInturff

DIVISION III, POSITION 1

December 8, 1972–July 1, 1988

Elected; Retired

Born in 1924, Judge Ben McInturff was raised during the Great Depression. He attended Gonzaga University and the University of Washington and later graduated from Gonzaga law school in 1952 after serving three years in the U.S. Marine Corps. While in the Marines, Judge McInturff contracted polio. He spent two years in the hospital and was left about 75 percent paralyzed.

Judge McInturff started practicing law in 1952. He was appointed a part-time justice of the peace in 1953. In 1955, his position transitioned to that of a full-time Spokane County District Court judge.

After working in the district court, Judge McInturff was elected to Division Three of the Court of Appeals in 1972 and retired as its chief judge in July 1988. In 1981, Judge McInturff served as presiding chief judge of the entire Court of Appeals.

Judge McInturff’s physical disability greatly impacted his perspective on life and his desire to help others. A moving story about Judge McInturff occurred in 1980. Judge McInturff had learned of a teenage girl, Holly Caudill, who was rendered a quadriplegic after suffering a broken neck during a 1977 car crash. Judge McInturff visited Ms. Caudill and assured her that she could still achieve great things if she tried. Ms. Caudill eventually attended Gonzaga law school and, in 1995, Judge McInturff came out of retirement to swear in Ms. Caudill as the first female quadriplegic assistant United States Attorney.

Judge McInturff was frequently a dissenting voice on the Court of Appeals. He was especially proud when, in 1984, the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted one of his dissents, almost verbatim, in holding strict liability applied to a gas main explosion. The Minnesota court quoted Judge McInturff’s words, reasoning, “Unless the victim was the wrongdoer, why shouldn’t the one distributing the natural gas for profit pay the resulting damage, then recover from any third party wrongdoer, if those be the circumstances?” Mahowald v. Minn. Gas Co., 344 N.W.2d 856, 865 (1984) (quoting New Meadows Holding Co. v. Wash. Water Power Co., 34 Wn. App. 25, 35, 659 P.2d 1113 (1984) (McInturff, J., dissenting).

Judge McInturff loved the courts he worked on and the court personnel. His judicial heroes were U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice William O. Douglas, and Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Judge McInturff died in 2006 at the age of 82.