Verdict Denied by Leonard Ruhl

Author:Leonard Ruhl [Ruhl, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-13T20:00:00+00:00

20

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Ben

AT TWO IN the morning a deputy called to tell me that the other judge in the county had suffered a stroke and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. When morning light came, I got a call from young Tommy Gerard, the local prosecutor. He said he hated to bother me at home, but wanted to know what my plan was for the child-in-need case that Judge Russell was supposed to hear at nine o’clock this morning. Last week, police had taken three children into protective custody and they were up against an unmovable deadline. A judicial determination granting the removal of the children from the home had to be made today, or they’d have to be returned to their mother. I told the prosecutor that would be the first problem I’d tackle when I got to the courthouse.

When I arrived at eight o’clock, Nancy hit me with the scheduling problem I already knew about, then told me that one of the jurors had just called in sick. She handed me a sheet with the phone numbers for the Office of Judicial Administration in Topeka and the other five judges in the district. I could ask OJA to send me a senior judge to handle the child-in-need case, but with the time constraint this wasn’t a realistic option. Since I was the chief judge, my best option for getting court coverage on short notice was to order a judge from one of the other counties in the district to drop everything and head this way. On the bottom of the sheet Nancy gave me were the schedules of the other five judges. Two of them were in jury trials on life-sentence child-molestation cases, two had full dockets, and one was in Belize on vacation.

I poured a cup of coffee, went into my chambers, and shut the door. I threw my feet on the desk and gazed out the window. Sunlight glittered off the elms in the stillness of the morning. I’d been given a plausible reason to delay the case for twenty-four hours and I was going to take it. When I finished my coffee I called the local prosecutor and told him I’d be hearing the child-in-need case myself. Then I got Nancy on the intercom and told her to call OJA to see if they could get a senior judge down here tomorrow and in the foreseeable future to cover Judge Russell’s cases, along with the cases he was slated to cover for me while I was in trial.

At 8:45 a.m. I called McMaster and Sweeney into chambers and gave them the news that I was sending all the jurors home for the day on account of the complications. If an absent juror had been the only problem, I said, maybe I would’ve been inclined to simply substitute one of the alternates and keep rolling, but Judge Russell’s stroke had really put the court in a bind. Both attorneys said they understood, but McMaster seemed to be evaluating my manner, his arms crossed and pressed tight to his chest.

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