by Roy Exum
posted January 18, 2008
 Roy Exum |
We all do it, almost every day, and I have found as the years roll along I do a pretty crummy job of it unless I know “the whole story,” which is something a lot of us miss before we pull the trigger a bit too early.
My best example came some years ago when I got on a morning flight out of Birmingham and somebody had left a Detroit newspaper in the back of the seat in front of me. In it was the story of a man appearing before a judge after he defied a court order in a case I had followed closely some months before.
This guy’s kid had a ravaging form of cancer and, when none of the hospital’s medicines had worked, it was learned the man was intent on secretly taking his son to Mexico for some kind of serum that comes from apricot pits. The doctors went crazy and so did the news media and … well, so did I from where I sat so far away.
I thought the daddy was a crazy man and then I was incensed that he eluded police when he “kidnapped” his feverish child who, by that time, was a ward of the court, and snuck him across the border into Mexico. There the child eventually died and the father was brought back for trial.
I wanted to hang that guy by his thumbs. I thought he’d helped kill his child. But then I read in the Detroit newspaper what really happened as he stood shackled before the judge. It was a very moving account of a desperate daddy, doing anything he possibly could for his sick little boy.
The wise old judge, who had five sons of his own, gave a gentle and tender lecture and then said no punishment he or the courts could render would be worse than having one’s son die in your own arms. That judge then declared him guilty and fined him exactly one dollar, and had his chains removed immediately, and then cried with him from the bench.
That morning on the airplane I cried, too. I cried for the kid, I cried for the daddy, but, law, I cried for me because I’d pulled the trigger too early on a man who was desperately trying to do anything he could to save his son.
Bolstered by such an experience, I had watched two Tennessee cases in more recent days and I believe that Thursday the right kind of justice was rendered in both cases.
In Memphis Judge J. Daniel Breen looked at Ward Crutchfield, now a broken man who has quite possibly done more for Chattanooga than any other politician in recent memory, and sentenced him to two years probation and six months of home confinement for his part in the “Tennessee Waltz” scandal.
Ward Crutchfield had pleaded guilty, admitting he is a crook and a felon, and that in itself is indeed a dagger that he’ll carry in his heart for the rest of his life.
The former state senator is very sick and to put him in prison would serve neither him nor the state best. I guess I have known Ward Crutchfield all my life. I haven’t always agreed with him, but when I think of all he has done for so many people in so many ways, and then how all of that goodness was flushed away by a stupid act made by an old man, I believe we could cut off his head and it wouldn’t rest any heavier than the one now on his pillow.
Judge Breen wisely realized the people of the state hardly need a pound of flesh to be assured Ward Crutchfield will be adequately punished. What he will do to himself during his house arrest after a brilliant life as a lawyer and as a statesman will be more than enough.
The second ruling yesterday came from Chancellor Frank Brown who ruled an appalling “fantasy tape” made by a Cleveland judge should not be made public. In his 49-page opinion, the chancellor noted that no law had been broken.
But John Hagler has been. A well-respected and admired jurist by his peers, Judge Hagler has suffered repeated embarrassment since the tape surfaced some months ago. He’s stepped down from the bench because of a stupid moment when he apparently said some mighty dumb things on a tape recorder.
An overzealous newspaper had tried to obtain a copy of the tape and, in doing so, held Judge Hagler up to the public’s contempt with several page-one stories despite the fact several different law-enforcement agencies agreed no crime was committed nor any laws were broken.
I, for one, find the newspaper’s actions as tawdry and ill-advised as the tape itself and Chancellor’s Brown’s ruling, which will return the senseless tape to Judge Hagler, further confirmed that the only thing that comes from this whole sordid affair is, sadly, another broken man, one who had served us well until he made a stupid and costly mistake.
I’m all for hard-fisted justice. I believe in the death penalty and I am for making our jails so harsh nobody will want to do there, but I am also about fairness and doing what’s right. I believe Judge J. Daniel Breen and Chancellor Frank Brown struck that chord on Thursday.
royexum@aol.com
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