A Tribute to Judge Sugerman

This appeared on Aug. 6, 2006


Sitting on my front stoop last week, watching the asphalt on South Church Street melt like a bar of cheap chocolate, I found myself thinking of another August.

Nine years ago this month, Leonard Sugerman spent his last full day on the Chester County Common Pleas Court bench. I sat in the courtroom that day, writing down as much of what he had to say as I could capture, as I had been doing since taking over the courthouse beat for the Daily Local News some years before.

On Wednesday, looking over the story I wrote about that final day, I smiled at the memory of Judge Sugerman walking from the bench to his chambers, in the sort of half-step shuffle his 69-year-old legs had grown accustomed to.

"Well, that was exciting," he said dryly, of the rudimentary tasks he completed that day -granting a continuance, checking on an attorney-client status, conducting a quick sentencing. I asked him if he thought there should have been more fireworks for his finale. He chuckled. "I've had 25 years of fireworks," he said.

He did.

You can believe me or not, but for my money he was the most compelling and significant figure in the world of Chester County law for the last half of the 20th century, at least. Look at his case list: The trial of the murderous, infamous Johnston Gang. The hearings on Richard Griest's sanity. A precedent setting First Amendment case. The contentious first Byrne murder trial.

He had his faults, of course. Sugerman joked from the bench quite a bit, especially when he saw a local reporter sitting in the audience. He could be as courteous as a blushing schoolboy when someone he respected came in the courtroom, but bitingly caustic when someone he didn't entered.

Just a few days before he stepped down, I watched as he sentenced a man who had taken the life of a promising West Chester University student in a pathetic drunken driving accident. The prosecutor was demanding hard time, but the defense attorney made an eloquent, forceful plea for leniency.

Sugerman spent more than 10 minutes telling everyone in the courtroom how deeply impressed he had been with the defense's argument. Then he calmly ordered the man sent to state prison for 10- to- 20 years, the maximum allowed by law, the term to start immediately. "We hope that the defendant will learn something from this sentence, as well as the public at large," he said.

"That was the most polite, gentle, considerate mule kicking I've ever seen," I thought to myself after the man was led from the courtroom in cuffs. He's probably still wondering what happened.

Four months after his last day, Sugerman was dead. Figuratively speaking, it was as if he couldn't live without the bench.

Next year maybe, the county's new court building will open. When it does, the day-to-day judicial life of Courtroom One, where Sugerman spent the pinnacle years of his leadership on the court, will come to an end, I'm told. All the judges will move from the courthouse to the 200 block of W. Market St., and only on ceremonial occasions will the red-cushioned seats of that wonderful courtroom be filled.

They're calling the new courthouse the Chester County Justice Center. You will excuse me while I state for the record how much I despise that wretched, generically bureaucratic name. It reminds me of something the folks in Uzbeckistan would call the newest state brainwashing structure.

So, I'm proposing right now that the county pay its respects to his legacy by naming the building the Leonard O. Sugerman Courthouse, and that in its grandest courtroom - the one where future president judges will sit to hear cases - a portrait of Sugerman hang for all to regard.

I've got the photo they can use as a model right here on my desk.