Preston to retire after five decades in public service
By TONY FYFFE
BSN Editor
PAINTSVILLE — From the courtroom to city hall to the Kentucky legislature and back to the courtroom, John David Preston has worn many hats over the years.
When he retires Jan. 1 from the 24th Judicial Circuit judgeship he has held since 2006, Preston, who turns 72 on Dec. 29, will also say goodbye to a public service career that spanned five decades.
His political career began and will end in the courtroom.
In 1981, Preston, a lawyer by profession, won the Republican nomination for commonwealth’s attorney for the 24th Judicial Circuit and, with no Democratic opponent in the November election, took office in 1982.
As the chief prosecutor of criminal cases in Johnson, Lawrence and Martin counties for six years, Preston decided not to seek re-election in 1987.
“I’d done it, and I didn’t want to keep doing it forever,” Preston said about why he opted out of re-election. “It was a tough job. I got in there, and we had murder cases right and left.”
Instead of seeking another term as prosecutor, Preston decided to run for Paintsville City Council and finished at the top of the ticket, winning one of six seats on the governing body.
Preston had been on city council about 10 months when then-Paintsville Mayor Robert Wiley resigned and fellow council members tapped Preston as his replacement. Preston served the remainder of the unexpired term and later won his own four-year term, serving until the end of 1993.
Preston said “probably the most significant accomplishments” during his tenure as mayor were the expansion of water lines.
“While I was on council before I became mayor, we got approval from Ashland Oil to extend water lines all the way out to Keaton and into Lawrence County,” Preston said. “It was like an $850,000 deal, and they just gave us the money, because they had the problems with the water from the oil production all those years.”
Preston said the city faced hard financial times when he became mayor.
“There were days where we literally sweated payroll because we didn’t have much money coming in,” he said. “And there was one time one of the fire trucks was down, and I think we were down to one truck that was manufactured one year after I was born. So, it took a long time to get us in shape. Five years of watching pennies and being very careful. In think we left it in better shape than we found it.”
In March 1994, Preston won a special election to the Kentucky Senate, representing the 25th District of Johnson, Lawrence and Boyd counties. When the General Assembly redistricted legislative boundaries due to the latest Census results, heavily Republican Johnson County, where Preston lived, was moved into the heavily Democratic 29th District, which was represented by Democrat Benny Ray Bailey of Knott County.
Preston said he knew that his days in the Senate were numbered but ran against Bailey anyway, with the outcome not in his favor.
“I could not swim against that tide,” Preston said.
Preston said his biggest political regret was seeking the Senate seat rather than running for state representative in the Republican 97th District.
“I enjoyed being in the Senate,” he said. “I couldn’t really get anything done, because if you were a Republican and you introduced a pretty good bill, one of the Democrats would change it ever so slightly and introduce it themselves, and that bill would get passed and your bill would not. But that’s just the way it is, but I enjoyed it. It was an interesting experience. Very difficult to do, though, because trying to be in the Senate and keep up a law practice was extraordinarily stressful.”
Preston stayed out of elective office for a few years but served for a time on the Big Sandy Regional Jail Authority and the Paintsville Utilities Commission.
When Republican Ernie Fletcher was elected governor, Preston was asked to serve as deputy secretary of the Cabinet for National Resources and Environmental Protection, a position he declined after much deliberation.
The next summer, after returning from vacation, Preston learned that Fletcher had appointed him chairman of the Kentucky Mine Safety Commission. Preston was not familiar with the commission, which conducts hearings concerning companies and personnel cited for repeated violations of state mine safety laws.
“Then I find out that I have to do the underground miner safety course,” he said. “That’s forty hours.”
Preston passed the course and received his “green card.”
“So, I was legally qualified to be an underground coal miner,” he joked.
In February 2005, Fletcher appointed Preston family court judge for the 24th Judicial Circuit following the retirement of then-Judge Stephen N. Frazier. Preston served in the position through 2006.
When the post came up for election, Preston decided instead to run for circuit judge to replace retiring Judge Daniel Sparks.
“I did not want to be the hamster on the little wheel that goes around and around and around,” Preston said when asked why he didn’t run for the family court bench. “Family court judge is exceedingly difficult. You deal in situations involving the welfare of children. You have to make dozens of decisions every single day that are really important, and you don’t have time to sit back and think about them. You just have to make it and go, and that’s really hard. They told us that the burnout rate for family court judge was about seven years. After that, you just can’t do it anymore. Some people hang on longer.”
Also, in 2005, Preston was one of two attorneys considered for a vacant federal judgeship in the Eastern District of Kentucky previously held by Karl Forester. The other candidate was then-U.S. Attorney Gregory Van Tatenhove.
Preston, whose ultimate political goal was to be a federal judge, said he had the support of then-U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning while Sen. Mitch McConnell backed Van Tatenhove, who had been a staffer for the senior senator.
“It was a tie between the Republican senators, and it went down to White House counsel, and they chose a guy who was ten years younger,” Preston, who was 55 at the time, said. “I can’t really quarrel with them about that. I would have liked to have the job, but I can’t really quarrel with their process.”
Preston said being interviewed by White House counsel was “almost a bar exam all over again, asking me a lot of constitutional law questions that I hadn’t thought about in years.”
Preston ran unopposed for circuit judge, which he calls the “most significant” of his elective jobs “because it’s the circuit court; it’s the big show in terms of the court system.”
Of the cases he heard during this long tenure, “one that stands out in mind” was a Magoffin County election suit in which Preston ruled that it was not a fair election. Preston’s ruling was upheld by the state Court of Appeals but reversed by the Kentucky Supreme Court in a unanimous decision.
“There was some evidence of vote buying, but it wasn’t really the key,” Preston said. “The key, I thought, was all of the election law procedures that were just ignored. I thought that cast a great shadow over the election, but they (Supreme Court) didn’t agree with me.”
Another case he noted was a Martin County murder conviction that was overturned by the Supreme Court due to exposure to the case on Facebook.
In the precedent-setting ruling, Justice Mary Noble ordered Preston to hold a hearing on whether jurors were truthful in pretrial questioning and to what, if any, extent exposure to the Facebook page of the victim’s mother created a miscarriage of justice in the conviction.
Preston said he later convinced the commonwealth’s attorney’s office that “they should give up the idea of trying any serious case in Martin County.”
“You just can’t do it,” Preston said. “It’s just too small a community, too tightly interconnected.”
Of all the elective positions he has held, Preston said the “most fun” was being in the Senate, “because you really didn’t have a lot of responsibility, just show up and vote.”
“You’re in the limelight,” Preston said. “KET (Kentucky Educational Television) is always there. Reporters are always interviewing you. It was fun, even if we (Republicans) were in the minority.”
Times have changed since then, Preston noted, as Republicans now control both the Kentucky Senate and House.
“There didn’t used to be any Republicans at all (in the legislature) west of I-75,” he said. “And now, there are no Democrats, representatives or senators, at all west of I-75. None. Not a single one.”
When he retires on Jan. 1, Preston and his wife, Mary, will head to Florida, where they will “spend a good deal of the time.”
“I will be finally and fully retired,” he said. “For the first time in sixty-five years, I will not get up and go somewhere in the mornings, starting in first grade.”
Preston, who is also an historian who has written 11 books, said he might break out his word processor in the future and crank out another book, but he has no plans to ever practice law again.
“It’s been a good run,” Preston said. “I haven’t always won. Sometimes I’ve had to take some licks — election licks, licks in the courtroom, and so forth and so on — but I’ve always given it my best shot. I don’t have any regrets.”