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.