New judge means Rowan District Court bench has female majority

SALISBURY — With the swearing in Thursday afternoon of now Judge B. Ashley Andrews, the district court bench in Rowan County now has more female judges than males, for the first time in history.

Andrews was appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Judge R. Marshall Bickett. Andrews will serve as District Court Judge in Judicial District 27, Rowan County. Andrews is the owner of B. Ashley Andrews, Attorney at Law, PLLC and serves as privately assigned counsel for Indigent Defense Services. She received her bachelor of arts from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her juris doctorate from the Elon University School of Law.

Andrews joins judges Cynthia Dry, Beth Dixon, Chris Sease and James Randolph, and is also running unopposed for the seat come November. That term will begin in January so she will continue in the seat she has been appointed to fill.

Andrews wasn’t allowed much time to celebrate, as she was on the bench in administrative court Friday morning. She had family come from Edgecombe County for the ceremony and they could have visited her in that court Friday.

Superior Court Judge Michael Adkins, who performed the ceremony after Judge Dixon came down with COVID, said he’s “observed and admired” Andrews work for some time. “She has tremendous attentiveness to clients and an investiture in the system,” he said. Andrews is “very special and deserving of this post,” he added.

Barbara and Gus, Andrews’ parents, were on hand for the swearing in and helped her put on her robe for the first time in the Superior Court room after she took the oath of office with her daughters, Sophie and Audrey, holding the Bible.

“She’s always been concerned about others and about doing the right thing,” said her mother. “We are extremely proud. It’s been a hard journey at times but she has earned this.”

“She has two outstanding children she raised as a single mother,” added her father. “She had opportunities to join other firms, but parenting can interfere with schedules and her children were her priority, so she continued running her own practice. But she has always given phenomenal representation to every one of her clients. She’s so understanding and empathetic.”

Andrews got her JD from Elon in 2010 and opened her own firm in the fall of that year and has operated her own firm for the last 14 years.

Asked about the fact that the bench now has a female majority, Adkins had a simple response: “The majority of people in this country are female, so why would the bench not reflect that?”

He added that in truth, he was taught that “color, gender, whatever, none of that matters, it’s what you do. And Ashley is good at what she does. We’ve been colleagues all along, and she’s been invested from the start.” He said he was very happy when she decided to pursue a seat on the bench.

As for her own thoughts, Andrews said when she realized she was running unopposed she was stunned. “I really expected someone to challenge me,” she said, and when the governor made the appointment, she was more than a little surprised. “It’s a humbling experience,” she noted.

Standing before one of the largest crowds at a swearing in, with a nearly full courtroom, Andrews thanked everyone who helped her reach her new post, including those in the clerk’s office, the deputies, the staff, defense attorneys and “all who helped me when I didn’t know what I was doing” at the beginning. “The hardest thing is going to be not being a lawyer any more, but that does not make the work anyone here does any less important than it has always been.”

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