It's not Just Us At The Justice Center

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 28, 2008

The Chester County Justice Center has only been open two weeks now and I can report that one thing is clear: The place appears haunted.

Let me rephrase that: The place has a disembodied voice, eerie optical effects, and long, cavernous hallways that remind you of the corridors leading to Room 237 at the Overlook Hotel in the movie version of Stephen King’s “The Shining.” So while it might not be technically haunted, it does have some extra features the commissioners didn’t figure on when they ponied up $100 million plus for the place – much like getting the 10th anniversary DVD edition of “The Big Lebowski” wrapped up in a bowling bag.

Not to worry, though. There are many buildings in Chester County with worse poltergeistian problems than those we are discovering at the Justice Center. At least the howls of prisoners haven’t started plaguing the building, as they do on the full moon at Pennhurst State Hospital. But we can live in hope.

Now, some may say that there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the parapsychological phenomena we’ve noticed at the building, but as for me I tend to brush such reasonable explanations aside. I would much rather think of the place as existing on a supernatural plane. It’s so much easier to explain to my bosses why I haven’t gotten anything done today if I can refer to “the haunting.” They normally don’t have a quick reply for that.

So first, the disembodied voice.

It was initially heard in Courtroom 12, the home of Judge Anthony Sarcione and, coincidentally, the first courtroom to open for business in the new building. I was not there, but I am told that as a defense attorney and court translator were going over a guilty plea with a defendant who didn’t speak English, a voice could clearly be heard coming from the bench -- even though Sarcione was in his chambers and his chair was empty

“Madam, could you please button your shirt,” the voice intoned.

Not exactly, “Redrum, redrum,” or a foreboding howl from Jacob Marley, but starling nonetheless.

You may want to believe that the voice as actually that of Judge William Mahon, who occupies the courtroom directly a floor above from Sarcione’s and who regularly uses a wireless microphone to make his voice heard in the far reaches of his domain. And you may want believe that said wireless is – oops! - programmed to the same frequency as the speakers in Sarcione’s courtroom. And you may even want to believe that at the time the voice was heard Mahon was, in point of fact, telling a slightly disheveled defendant that a view of her décolletage was not helping him decide her case.

I would never begrudge you a pathetic clutch at the rational. We who have a broader mindset, however, are comfortable accepting the presence of the paranormal in our everyday lives.

What you will not be able to deny, however, is the spooky view of the historic courthouse clock tower as seen from the Justice Center’s sixth floor.

Stand in the middle of the hallway outside Judge John Hall’s courtroom and look east. The clock tower appears to fill the edges of the window. Now start to walk towards the window. As you do, the clock tower actually grows smaller as you approach – receding from view as you draw nearer. Try it for yourself the next time you find yourself waiting to throw yourself at the mercy of the court and see.

You may cry “reverse perspective,” but I prefer “demonic possession” to explain the illusion.

And don’t get me started on Courtroom 13.

Honey Just Allow Me, To Give You One More Chance

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2008

I know what you're thinking. I know that you're thinking that this is the last Sunday of the summer, that autumn officially starts tomorrow, and that the calendar thus indicates that this must be the date of the ever popular-slash-dreaded West Chester Restaurant Festival.

And you are also thinking that I am going to lecture you about how much we "real" West Chester folks — as opposed to those pikers who walk around town wearing "Dub-C" T-shirts — really don't like the restaurant festival and consider it an event more endured than enjoyed. Sort of an open-air colonoscopy, with crab cakes and crowds.

You are thinking that I am going to tell you how I would rather sit and listen to state Sen. Andy Dinniman describe the machinations of the state budget process, without bathroom breaks, than try to walk down Gay Street today after noon, when the festival is in full swing. That you would no more find me at the festival than you would find a wild elk in Elk Township. That I'm going to hunker down someplace as far away from West Chester as possible without spending more than $50 on gas until the crowds of soon-to-be unemployed Lehman Brothers executives have gone back to MortgageForeclosureLand.

But dear readers, that was then and this is now.

It is the season for change. I know that this is the season for change because every time I turn on the television and listen to the radio, a junior U.S. senator from Illinois or a senior U.S. senator from Arizona is telling me that. Change is no longer something you dump in a bowl with your car keys, but something you have to embrace, something you have to hope for, something you have to accept like it was a birthday card from your Aunt Louise.

So change we must.

This year, I'm going to give the restaurant festival another chance, even though I'm not certain it really deserves it. I am going to open my heart and take the festival back in, like a ex-girlfriend who dumped me on my birthday and now finds that she needs a ride to the airport. I'm going to allow it to make up for past transgressions, and to look for the shining pearl in the center of the grimy oyster.

Who knows? Maybe I will find that the restaurant festival isn't really all that bad. Maybe it will be the same as when I got tired of eating Indian food and vowed that I would never eat it again, that Indian food was the worst food on the planet, that I would no more eat Indian food than I would ask a Lehman Brothers executive for a sub-prime mortgage -- only to find years later that I really like Indian food, and could you pass the chicken tikka, please?

I am, after all, capable of changing. I am not so stuck in my ways that I would avoid going to the restaurant festival just because I ridiculed it in the past. After all, if John McCain is capable of embracing tax cuts that he once denounced, and if Barack Obama is capable of backing off a pledge to take public financing, than I am certainly capable of standing in line for 35 minutes to order a crab cake the size of an iPod Mini and paying $7.50 for the privilege, and enjoying myself in the process.

No matter what you think.

Courthouse Memories, The Final Chapter

This column originally appeared on Sept. 14, 2008


The deputies were taking Bruce Johnston Sr. from the courtroom to a waiting van outside the courthouse to take him back to state prison. He’d just sat through another in the seemingly endless series of hearings on his appeals over his six murder convictions, and my editor at the Daily Local News had sent me over with a spare camera to try to get a picture of the infamous killer.

I spotted the group on the second floor making their way to a set of back stairs that no one used. I had just enough time to run down the front marble staircase and scurry down the hall, fumbling with the camera to get it out of its case. Seeing their heads disappear down the stairway, I leaned over the railing above them and shouted, “Hey, Bruce!”

Handcuffed and in a prison jacket, he looked straight up at me on the landing above, and I snapped one shot.

The picture appeared in the paper the next day. It was grainy and not entirely in focus, but the light above him left two shining white dots in his eyes as he stared directly into the lens. He looked exactly the way you would think a man who would order the shooting of his own son to look: demonic and scary.

That’s my first and best memory of my years in the historic Chester County Courthouse, which I’ve covered off and on since the late 1980s. In case you hadn’t heard, they’re moving the courts to a new county Justice Center (Motto: “It’s Not The County Prison, But You Can See It From Here”) down the street. The movers took all the stuff from the courtrooms Thursday, leaving only an eerie ghost town-like vibe to the place. Which, I suppose, is why memories came flooding back as I waited out my last jury in the courthouse Friday afternoon.

I remember standing outside the magnificent confines of Courtroom One near the end of the first Andrew Byrne trial in March 1992. Pat Carmody, the lead prosecutor in the highly publicized case, was getting ready to deliver his closing argument, in which he would try to convince the jury that John Duffy, the attorney representing Byrne and one of the county’s most gifted closers, had got it wrong. Every seat in the courtroom was taken, with people lining the sides and rear or the room. Carmody was pacing nervously and with a sigh looked over at me.

“I knew I should have been a film critic,” he said. The jury found Byrne guilty.

I remember some choice comments from the bench, sometimes directed at me. Although judges have largely gotten used to seeing me come and go from their courtrooms, some wonder why I choose to visit them. “Slow news day?” Judge James P. MacElree II usually inquires when he sees me sitting in the front row with only a DUI or two on the docket. “Is there something going on here that I should know about?” Judge Phyllis Streitel asked me the other day as I settled into a seat in her courtroom.

Once, a lawyer had been giving Judge Robert Shenkin a not-very-brief recounting of his view of the law and I kept ducking in and out to see if the next case, the one I was interested in, had begun. “Look,” Shenkin told the attorney in mid-sentence, “if you’re boring the press, what do you think you’re doing to me?”

On Friday, I snuck into a hallway from Courtroom Six’s jury room to the courtroom itself, and poked my head into the half-dark emptiness. It was a view I’d never seen before -- from the bench towards the gallery – and is what a juror sees when he or she is about to render a verdict on another human being. It is a picture I’ll keep in my head for a long while.

All Things Must Pass

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008

Judge Anthony Sarcione’s chambers were a bit of a mess last week when a visitor stopped by to say hello. Dead smack in the middle of one trial and getting ready for another one, he was in the process of packing boxes for the move down to 201 West Market Street and his new digs in the soon-to-be-occupied county Justice Center.

Sarcione wasn’t too busy, however, to display for his guest one of the marvels of his chambers he would be leaving behind: a ceiling-high bookcase crammed with legal texts dating from the earliest days of the Chester County Courthouse. Taking one leather-bound volume down from the top shelf, he opened it to the title page where the signature of Judge William Butler (1822-1909) was scribbled alongside a date from the 1860s. Sarcione, and his guest, stood in awe of the way history always catches up with you around here.

But that does not mean times – and judges – have gone unchanged at the corner of High and Markets in West Chester. That thought struck me Tuesday as I stood outside the front steps of the historic courthouse and watched a gathering of judges and attorneys pose for a farewell picture.

The last time anyone took such a photo was in 1967. In that black and white shot, only one woman is present – Helen Wade Parke, standing crowded between two male colleagues in one of the back rows. In the group assembled Tuesday, there were four women judges – including the front and center figure of President Judge Paula Francisco Ott, the first person with two X chromosones given the pleasure of riding herd over our Common Pleas Court.

There were lots of female attorneys standing there too, including the head of the county Bar Association, in that second group, and people of color as well, something not found at all in the 1967 assembly. And although there are familiar faces in both shots – I counted eight who appear in both 1967 and 2008 versions – the hair they display is of a different shade.

It is not, however, simply the gender or the hair color of the judges who serve today, but the way they carry out their duties. The jurists in the 1960s were men who focused their sights largely on the letter of the law and the way it applied to those who came before them. Human nature was not generally their concern. If you were guilty, you went to jail; if that didn’t straighten you out, well, you went to jail for even longer.

Not any more.

On Thursday, as evidence of this, I sat in Judge William Mahon’s courtroom for a session of Drug Court, the intense program that attempts to prevent non-violent drug users and alcohol abusers from becoming dead-end criminals. In one case, a young man from Downingtown arrested for drug possession fought mightily against having to go into an in-patient treatment program, saying he could do better on the street, on his own.

Mahon was having none of it, and spoke to the defendant like a cross between a stern uncle and a licensed addictions counselor. He sought the help and participation from the young man’s frustrated and emotional parents, who stood up and lay open their family pain as if on the set of an episode of “Oprah,” but without commercial breaks or tidy endings. In the end, the young man agreed to go into treatment instead of risk a trip to prison, and Mahon thanked the parents and they thanked him.

In 1967, I thought, that no more would have happened in a Chester County courtroom than a chicken would have driven the sheriff’s van back to the prison. And as much as I am sure Mahon values his law degree, I’ll bet he wishes he’d taken a few more psychology courses at Fordham.

The books in Sarcione’s chambers are going back to what may have been their original home, the judge’s chambers in Courtroom One, first open for business in 1848. There they will stay preserved, as impressive today as they are irrelevant.

The Lady On The Sign

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008

Not many people ride in my car.

It’s not that I‘m a bad driver. I am a good driver, despite the complaints of some of my fellow motorists who simply haven’t gotten used to the fact that single lane roads can at times handle the presence of two cars going in the same direction at the same time in approximately the same location, the laws of physics notwithstanding.

It’s mostly my personal situation, being a single father of none, that keeps my car in the passenger free zone. The soccer moms out there who probably keep an extra kid or two hanging around in the stockroom just in case they have to get in the minivan and their actual children are not anywhere to be found may not understand this, but some of us are just naturaly unaccompanied when we jump behind the wheel.

It is not that I don’t want to have someone else in the car. I wouldn’t mind having someone else in the car, keeping me company, so long as they kept their paws off the iPod and their comments to themselves when I start singing along to Tom Waits and drumming the steering wheel like John Bonham of Led Zepplin. Because, after all, there are times when we want a human connection alongside us as we motor from place to place.

And that, I should explain, is how I became enchanted with the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

You, of course, know the one I’m talking about if you’ve been driving anywhere in the Chester County area in the past two years. She’s the smiling doctor/nurse/medical technician who looks out from behind the message, “Ahead of the curve. And just around the corner.” She has been smiling at us from advertising billboards and road signs, enticing us with her seemingly refreshed, breezy bedside manner and just exuding this air of professional healthiness.

The first time I spotted her over there on East Marshall Street in West Chester, I knew exactly where I wanted to go when, or if, I got sick. By the third or fourth time I saw her, I had started making plans on how to get just ill enough to be admitted into her presence, but not so out-of-sorts that I couldn’t throw off some charming witticisms that would impress her oh-so-healthy heart.

There I was, hoping to make come human connection as I drove along alone in my Subaru Outback, and there she was, waiting to welcome me to the emergency room or the surgery room or the ambulatory care unit or wherever it is that she worked. We were made for one another.

What captivated me was the whole casualness of her. In the photo, she just stands there, arms crossed and stethoscope slung jauntily around her neck, telling us with her big dark eyes that she doesn’t make judgments about how badly we might have been taking care of our bodies, that she’s just there to be a friend, a healer, a caregiver. And to make sure we don’t feel too intimidated by the fact that she’s a dozen times smarter and healthier and better paid than we are, her hair is sort of mussed up, as if she’s too down to earth to constantly check her coif in the mirror.

Hey, you have to have something to occupy your imagination while you’re driving alone. Some people dream of winning the Daytona 500; I’ve got the Lady on the Hospital Signs.

So recently I figured I would call over the hospital and find out what floor she worked on so I could arrange to be admitted there with some non-life threatening ailment and begin the process of chatting her up.

And didn’t I learn the cruel truth? That the object of my adoration is not a doctor at the hospital, not a nurse at the hospital, not a med tech or a rehab specialist or an EMT or an occupational therapist, but a standard issue model who was paid to pose for that photo.

My dreams were dashed, my hopes quashed, my plans for the future disposed of like a used latex glove. The passenger seat in my heart was, once again, empty.