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

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.

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)