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Charles M Sevilla - Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History

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Charles M Sevilla Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History
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Sit back and enjoy a collection of verbatim exchanges from the halls of justice, where defendants and plaintiffs, lawyers and witnesses, juries and judges, collide to produce memorably insane comedy.

A: You mumbled on the first part of that and I couldnt understand what you were saying. Could you repeat the question?

Q: I mumbled, did I? Well, well just ask the court reporter to read back what I said. She didnt indicate any problem understanding what I said, so obviously she understood every word. Well just have her read my question back and find out if there was any mumbling going on. Madam reporter, would you be so kind?

Court Reporter: Mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble.

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Disorder in the Court
Also by Charles M. Sevilla

WITH RODNEY R. JONES AND GERALD F. UELMEN ,
Disorderly Conduct

AS WINSTON SCHOONOVER ,
Wilkes: His Life and Crimes, A Novel

Disorder in the Court

Great Fractured Moments In Courtroom History

CHARLES M SEVILLA W W NORTON COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON Copyright 1992 by - photo 1


CHARLES M. SEVILLA

W W NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 1992 by Charles M. Sevilla
Illustrations copyright 1992 by Lee Lorenz
All rights reserved

First published as a Norton 1993; reissued 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sevilla, Charles M.

Disorder in the court: great fractured moments in courtroom
history / by Charles M. Sevilla.

p. cm.

Excerpts from the authors column, Great moments in courtroom
history.

1. TrialsUnited StatesAnecdotes. 2. CourtsUnited States
Anecdotes. 3. LawUnited StatesAnecdotes. I. Title.

K184.S48 1992

347.73'1dc20

[347.3071] 9140416

ISBN: 978-0-393-31928-6

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION

Joseph Conrad described life as birth and death separated by struggle. For me, humor has been the lubricant to make the struggle a bit less rough, a survival instinct against lifes rigors.

Striving to see humor in the world in childhood helped me cope with my many inadequacies: like catching a football with my mouth in the third grade (I not only failed, I lost part of a tooth), or getting picked off first base in Little League and not even knowing it, or having my fourth-grade girlfriend swear eternal love which lasted only until the afternoon recess.

You had to laugh so as not to cry. I did both. That was all long before law school. In fact, were it not for its pre-law honing, I think that whatever sense of humor I had would have been suffocated to extinction in the numbing, obscure, and far too serious world that was my law school education.

Law school was a procession of nauseatingly overwritten rubbish, like the following sample discussing the doctrine of double jeopardy:

There must be some legal necessity basic to one acquittal, not involved in the next trial, to justify a superseding conviction. We cannot permit initial trial deficiencies to be cured by subsequent trials. There are only four quarters to a football game. The exorcised double jeopardy is the constitutional eliminator of the might have beens. Puristic parallelism is not an absolute in the law of double jeopardy. Multitudinous criminal charges may spring from the same incident. The States argument in the present case would nullify the doctrine of double jeopardy because any slight deviation in the indictment would give the State another Monday morning quarter.

Johnson v. Estelle , 506 F.2d 347 (5th Cir. 1975)

This was the standard fare. The study of dirt would have been more interesting. This dulling experience only enhanced my search for humor over the years of my legal education and practice. I have collected transcripts of cases that either ring a funny note or are ridiculous or absurd. For many, you had to be there. (I tried to eliminate the latter from this collection.)

For the past twelve years I have written a column with the pompous title of Great Moments in Courtroom History where many of the offerings reprinted here first appeared. Those columns have been running in the Forum and Champion , and I have many thanks to give the members of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers for their continued contributions to the column and to the organizations which have kept the column in print.

The magazine column has thrived because the readers have sent me their own favorites, which then became the grist for future columns. My only editing has been to remove the names of the guilty parties, to add identifying words to aid comprehension, and to trim the prose (you may be surprised to learn that lawyers can be verbose, a malady that has as its source getting paid by the hour).

Also, as you will read from these excerpts, the work of the criminal lawyer often involves a courtroom argot that might be thought more appropriate to a shipyard locker room. Where the wording is raunchy, I have keyed the selection with an asterisk so that the squeamish may look away, and everyone else can head straight for those passages.

A previous batch of these Great Moments in Courtroom History may be found in Disorderly Conduct (1987), a W. W. Norton publication which combined my collection with those of my co-editors, Dean Gerald Uelman of the University of Santa Clara Law School and attorney Rod Jones.

My thanks go to my wife Donna for her help in assembling the manuscript. Also, many thanks to my editor Hilary Hinzmann of Norton and my literary agent Joe Vallely, for their advice and support. My apologies to those early contributors whose identities I lost and who are now given my equivalent nom de plume of Anonymous Bosch, of Paris, Idaho (and a few other pseudonyms).

Enjoy.

Disorder in the Court
DEFENDANTS SAY THE DAMNDEST THINGS

His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. Atticus had urged them to accept the states generosity in allowing them to plead guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycombs leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was good enough defense for anybody.

HARPER LEE , TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Defense Counsel compliments the Public Prosecutor on his brilliant presentation of the indictment; the Public Prosecutor expresses his admiration for the Defense Counsels eloquence; the Presiding Judge congratulates both speakers; in short, everyone is more than satisfiedexcept the accused.

HONOR DAUMIER , LAWYERS AND JUSTICE, NO. 16

You have heard testimony that the day in question was cold windy and with - photo 2

You have heard testimony that the day in question was cold, windy, and with above-average precipitation. Do you still maintain it was a nice day?

PRO PER MOTION

(E. Grossman, Berkeley)

T HE C OURT

Do you understand, sir, that if I permit you to represent yourself, it will be without the assistance of an attorney and that youre going to be held to all the technical rules of evidence in criminal procedure?

D EFENDANT

Yeah. Ill have to stop at the library and get a book on law.

T HE C OURT

And you understand you will get access to the jail library?

D EFENDANT

Yeah.

T HE C OURT

Do you understand that the case as presented by the State will be handled by an experienced district attorney whos very specialized in the area of criminal law, who has had extensive court trials and jury trials, and that you wont be entitled to any special consideration?

D EFENDANT

All I really need is the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, a Holy Bible and a handgun.

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