Enter, Laughing

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010

I don’t know whether it was Lowell Ganz or Balaboo Mandel, or both together, who wrote the following, but it doesn’t matter. If either of them never writes another worthwhile paragraph again they will nonetheless have entered the world of American letters.

(I am paraphrasing here for propriety’s sake, but this is a dressing down that Manager Jimmy Dugan gives a poor-performing player on his Rockford Peaches squad in the film, “A League of Their Own.”)

“Are you crying? Are you crying? Are you crying? There's no crying! There’s no crying in baseball! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pig slop. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry? No! And do you know why? Because there's no crying in baseball. THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL! No crying!”

There is, however, crying in the courtroom.

If you spend enough time visiting courtrooms when criminal cases are being heard, you will see a lot of crying people. There are crying defendants, crying victims, and crying parents and siblings of defendants and victims. They cry tears of grief, tears of fear, tears of rage, and tears designed simply to win a favorable outcome in their case. There is a reason that every courtroom in the Chester County Justice Center comes equipped with a tipstaff and a box of tissues. People will cry, and someone needs to hand them the Kleenex.

I once saw a woman, who was called to testify in a trial against the man who attacked her at her home on her birthday in her bedroom, walk into Courtroom 7 in the Historic Courthouse already in full sob. She cried taking the witness stand, cried taking the oath, cried during her direct testimony, cried during the cross-examination, and cried as she left the room. The only time I didn’t see her cry in the courtroom was when her attacker was sent to state prison for his crime. But she wasn’t smiling, either.

You never get used to the crying, because so much of it comes from the heart. But you come to expect it and accept it for what it is.

So yes, there is crying in the courtroom. What there is not a lot of, however, is laughter. I was reminded of that last week.

Generally speaking, being in court is not a laughing matter. People who stand before a judge with a criminal defense attorney on their right and a prosecutor on their left, more or less, aren’t having a picnic. You don’t normally come to court because you’ve completed high school with perfect attendance. Jocularity is pretty much never on the docket.

The absence of humor is even more profound if you are appearing at your probation violation hearing from, say, SCI Greensburg. Incarceration at a state prison is, on the whole, a fairly good indication that whatever you were supposed to be doing to show probation officials you were living up to your end of the bargain, something was missing in the total effort. So what happened on Wednesday as Judge William P. Mahon was wrapping up a video VOP hearing with a man whose name and crime escapes me but whose image will remain in my memory for days, was remarkable in its own way.

Mahon is the only judge who makes it a regular habit to come down off his bench and shake the hands of defendants who have lived up to their part of the bargain, so he’s more used to relating to those in front of him on a one-to-one basis than others. As such, he was being about as pleasant as he could be with the fellow in SCI Greensburg, even though he’d given the fellow a few extra months to consider the wages of sin and/or civility.

“Thanks judge,” the inmate said. “Thanks.” Not at all, the judge responded. Just remember to keep away from those knuckleheads in the cellblock with you. They’ll only get you in deeper. “I’ll try, judge,” the prisoner responded. “I just want to get back on the right track.” The hearing done, Mahon started to move on to the next case on his list. Until the microphone in the video link, still live, picked up something from SCI Greensburg.

“I think I just got railroaded,” the aforementioned inmate remarked to a fellow prisoner next to him. “Did you get a load of that?”

The courtroom, full of probation officers, attorneys, defendants, sheriff deputies, exploded with laughter. For once, they had heard a defendant speak honestly, not just truthfully. Mahon, his Irish eyes wrinkled in delight, kindly cautioned the inmate not to take it any farther, and the fellow’s defense attorney quickly turned off the connection. The chuckles lasted a few minutes afterwards, and then the next case was called.