Retired Circuit 4 Judge Jack Meigs has presided over thousands of cases during his 25 years on the bench, but he didn’t realize how stressful his job was until he retired.

“A lot of times you don’t realize it, and I didn’t realize it until after I was off the bench how stressful it was,” Meigs said after being presented with a resolution Monday at the Dallas County Courthouse.

“I didn’t feel like I was under stress while I was on the bench. After I left, I said yeah, you really were. Twenty-five years to do something like that is a long time.”

Meigs, who served Dallas, Bibb, Hale, Perry and Wilcox counties as circuit judge for 25 years, retired in March. He was appointed in 1991 after his predecessor was appointed to another court.

“I kind of always thought that I would like to be a judge in my early career. I was in a private practice for law there in small town Centreville, where you do a little bit of everything,” he said. “You don’t see many people running against incumbent judges, so it kind of worked out that Charlie Thigpen, who had this seat, was elected to the Court of Civil Appeals.”

Meigs has presided over capital murder cases, divorce cases, civil cases and everything few and far between.

“As a circuit judge you see all kinds of different things,” he said.

“You just have to consider the responsibility that is placed on you because you are affecting people’s lives, and I’ve always tried to take that seriously and to consider the people.”

Meigs has also presided over some high profile cases in Dallas County and across the circuit, such as the retrial of Joe Duncan, a former Alabama State Trooper that shot and killed his girlflriend in 1987, who was also a state trooper.

He also tried the retrial of Earl Jerome McGahee, who murdered his ex-wife and a nursing student at Wallace Community College Selma in the 1980s.

“Those were a couple of fairly infamous cases here in Dallas County,” Meigs said.

Meigs said serving as judge wasn’t an easy task.

“It’s not as clear cut as sometimes you might think it would be. This is probably a worn out idiom, but there’s always two sides and the truth is in the middle,” he said. “There’s really not that much controversy to what actually happened, but a lot of times there is. Sometimes sorting out what really happened is hard to do.”

Meigs said one of the things he is most proud of during his tenure is following procedure.

“You want to make sure procedurally that everything is done properly because you don’t want the case to come back based on an error you made,” he said. “Generally, that’s what happens when a case gets overturned on an appeal. It’s either because the judge made a mistake or a lawyer made a mistake, and I didn’t want to be the one to make a mistake.”

Meigs said he also tried to keep the judicial process moving in a timely manner.

“Justice delayed is justice denied. I tried to keep my dockets timely and cases moving, and if you wanted your date in court to get you your date in court on time,” Meigs said.

Meigs said he still practices law occasionally from home, and he plans to spend his free time farming in Centreville.