A Brownstown native who has spent the past five decades practicing law from both sides of the bench originally had his eyes set on the skies.

Fate, however, kept attorney Bruce Markel III from becoming a pilot, so he joined the family business.

“My career goal was to be a pilot,” the 70-year-old said as he nears the end of a career that has seen him spend the past 13 years as judge of Jackson Superior Court I.

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“I had qualified for flight school in the Navy,” he said.

Markel, who was an ensign at the time, said he wanted to go to flight school and become a pilot.

“I wanted to be a commercial pilot after I got out of the service,” he said.

The Vietnam War, however, was winding down, and the Navy just cut a lot of people out of the program, Markel said.

“I was one of the ones they cut,” he said. “When I got out of the Navy, I had the GI Bill, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go to law school.’”

Markel had joined the Navy as an ensign after graduating from the University of North Carolina.

After completing his hitch with the Navy, the 1964 Brownstown Central High School graduate headed off to the University of Louisville to obtain his law degree just as his father, Bruce Markel Jr., had done years earlier.

He would graduate from law school in 1974 and joined his father in his practice in Brownstown.

His younger brother, Joe, who died in 2014, joined the firm in 1976.

Their father passed away in 1984, but the practice continued with the addition of a couple of other attorneys over the years, including Jackson Superior Court II’s only judge, Bruce MacTavish, and Ron Lambring. Lambring is still with the firm, now known as Markel, Lambring and Miller, along with Zach Miller.

Bruce Markel III continued in private practice until January 2006 when then-Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed him to serve out the balance of Frank Guthrie’s six-year term as judge of Jackson Superior Court I. Guthrie, that court’s first judge, left after being appointed as a commissioner to the state Alcohol and Tobacco Commission.

At the time of his appointment, Markel was the first Republican to serve as judge in Jackson County since John M. Lewis III, who left the circuit court bench in 1964.

After filling out Guthrie’s term, Markel ran for the judgeship in 2008 and 2014.

“My present term would end at the end of 2020,” he said.

Markel, however, got married in January, and he wants to live with his new wife, Penny, in the house they built together two years ago on the south side of Indianapolis.

“She retired last July from Bridgestone North America, where she was an IT support director,” he said.

The two have been engaged for several years, but it just wasn’t possible for them to live together because he had to live in Jackson County to be a judge here, and Penny lived on the north side of Indianapolis.

“One of us would have had to commute — me an hour, her two hours,” he said. “We have not been able to live together, which I don’t care for.”

Markel said his age, coupled with the fact that he would like to live with his wife and in a new house he has never lived in, are the main reasons he made the decision to retire.

“… and I’m tired of commuting on weekends,” he said.

So on May 31, Markel plans to pass his gavel to a new Jackson Superior Court I judge. That person will have to be appointed by Gov. Eric Holcomb since the judges of county courts work for and are paid by the state. Counties are required to provide the courtrooms and staff.

Markel said 13 years on the bench is a great way to cap a legal career.

“I love doing this,” he said. “It’s a great job. This has been a really great privilege and a fantastic way to end a legal career. I like getting up every morning, going to work and believing that I am actually making a difference.”

Markel said while the police like to talk about the “thin blue line,” the “thin black line” is where the buck stops.

“The court system is the difference between anarchy and civilization because people come here to settle their differences instead of shooting each other,” he said. “In a court of law, the weak have the same rights as the strong. It’s a level playing field for everybody.

“No judge makes 100 percent good decisions. People obviously disagree about things or they wouldn’t even be here. So many times, there’s somebody who is unhappy, but they were unhappy before they got here. It does make a difference.”

Markel said he thinks America has the best legal system.

“… modeled after the British system but improved,” he said. “Some people don’t like the fact that it is so easy to sue, but it is probably better to have it that way instead of making it hard because at least people get a chance to be heard.”

Markel said the one thing he doesn’t like is it seems like it is a revolving door in regards to criminal cases.

“With the drug epidemic, we just see the same people here over and over again until they either commit a felony or they overdose,” Markel said. “You don’t feel like you’re accomplishing much of anything.”

And because he handles only misdemeanors, the maximum time he can sentence someone to probation is one year.

“That’s really hardly enough time to rehabilitate anybody that is a hardcore addict,” he said. “So you feel like you are really helpless in regards to the drug problem, and Jackson County is no different than most places. There are really very few resources to refer these people to.

“Locking people up and making them go through withdrawal is not a solution because they get out and go back to use again. There’s nothing we can do with most of these people. You have to have people on probation for long periods of time to be successful.”

Markel said he, however, is not advocating that a person convicted of possession of a syringe be put on probation for a year.

“It’s an appropriate classification. It’s just that you can’t do much with them,” he said.

The biggest change Markel said he has seen in recent years stems from the installation of electronic devices in police cars, which allows officers to run the license plates of motorists they stop.

He said that has led to a huge jump in the arrests of people for driving while suspended and those with expired plates.

“And then, along with that, when they stop these people and they are going to impound the car, they are finding drugs,” Markel said. “This has just skyrocketed, and these are cases when it starts out as a traffic stop and turns out to be a drug arrest.”

The state’s decision to reopen a weigh station on Interstate 65 at Seymour also is going to lead to more tickets being written, and those tickets are processed through Jackson Superior Court I.

Markel said the learning curve for a new judge is going to be pretty steep.

“There’s a new electronic filing system, and they’re going to have to deal with learning everything there is that has to be learned about infractions and misdemeanors,” he said. “Here, it is not uncommon for the prosecutor to file eight to 10 misdemeanor cases a day.”

He said it took a couple of years for him to settle into the job.

“When I first started this job, I certainly couldn’t do it in 40 hours a week,” Markel said. “I was coming in on Saturdays.”