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.