Arizona Attorney - March 2014

12 Angry Men) when from every possible portion of the courtroom there came people—very serious-looking people with earpieces wrapped around their heads and suspicious bulges beneath their too-tight sports coats. From every nook and cranny they came. From the back, from the front, through doors none of us even knew existed. I looked out at the crowd. All I could see was a forest of O’s—of two wide open eyes and a wide open mouth.

It was fun focusing on specific people.
One gentleman looked like a relative of the
guy in Munch’s “The Scream.” Another
lady’s eyes kept darting to and fro as her
brain tried to comprehend what she was
seeing. I probably could have fugued out
forever had I not heard a gentle “harumph”
at my side and a sotto-voce agent asking me,
“Judge?? Everything ok??”
What?

“You’ve been pressing the panic button
for five minutes already, and we thought
there was a revolution going on in here.”
It then dawned on me that there must
have been some new-fangled (for 1985)
security system underneath the throne I
was sitting on, and I must have been push-
ing it. Not that I admitted to
such clumsiness. No, in an
almost inaudible whisper, I told
the officer everything was fine
and they didn’t need to be
bothering with us anymore.

They disappeared as quickly
as they had come. Silence
ensued. All you could see was
the sea of totally rattled jurors,
and all you could hear was the
laughter of the agents down the
hallway. No time like the pres-
ent, so I told the jurors that the
trial would last for four months
and did anyone have a problem
with that? More silence. I’m not sure, but
I swear I could hear in the back the agent
who had spoken with me re-enacting the
scene to the Federal judge’s staff. Finally,
an elderly lady gingerly raised her hand.
“Yes m’am?” asked I, dreading what was
about to come. “Judge, I have a dentist’s
appointment two months from now,” the
lady said in a quavering voice, adding
quickly, “but I could change it if you
want.”
To make a long story short, the arrival
of the Mounties had so freaked out the cit-
izenry that we had a trial panel picked in
two hours. We didn’t have any witnesses
set for a week, so we sent everyone home
and spent the next few days in what was
the first mediation I ever did.
At the end, we emerged with a settle-
ment that became a national model for set-
tling cases of this type at that time. And I
discovered a calling in mediation.
Without my nervous knee, however,
none of it would have happened.
Come the day of
the trial, I dressed
in my finest and
hoped my robe
would hide my
running shoes.

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