The Law West of the Trinity
Our courts are a mess. Trials drag on, criminals go free, lawyers cost too much, judges ignore common sense. Can justice still work? Here’s a place where it does.
(Page 2 of 3)
In theory all this changed in 1973 when a constitutional amendment made JPs hand their revenue over to the county and in turn gave the county the power to set justices’ salaries. But out in the boondocks, where the major business of JP courts remains traffic cases, the reform has had scant effect. Rural county commissioners know exactly how much the JP contributes to county coffers, and if he wants a raise or another clerk, he is told to bring in more revenue. This is no small business. In 1978, JP courts reported pouring $38 million into county treasuries, and that’s with only 77 per cent of the justices reporting. Since two of every three cases filed in justice courts statewide are traffic offenses, it’s clear that the Arabs aren’t the only ones getting rich off highway driving. In some rural counties the haul from traffic fines is astounding. In Sterling County, northwest of San Angelo, for example, JPs take in $62 annually for every person in the county (Dallas JPs collect 80 cents). In the trans-Pecos along Interstate 10, Culberson and Hudspeth counties get a fifth of their income from JP courts.
The system forces the JP to rely on the lawman for his sustenance—an ironic twist, since English kings originated the office as a way of breaking the power and independence of local sheriffs. Legislative committees dating back to 1933 have issued reports calling for reform, but JPs and their influential friends resisted every effort until the late sixties, when the federal Department of Transportation began making noises about withholding Texas highway funds. In 1969 the Legislature put JPs under the less-than-strict scrutiny of the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, and two years later lawmakers started requiring all new nonlawyer JPs to complete forty hours of special training. That and the abolition of the fee system satisfied the feds, but a new and more serious threat was on the horizon: the legal profession. In 1972 an elite committee named by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court recommended abolishing JP courts. Armed with statistics—one in four Texas JPs had not completed high school; only 34 of more than 900 were lawyers—the State Bar carried the proposals to the 1973 Legislature. But the JPs were ready, and the bar suffered a rare defeat. The fight was renewed, with the same result, during the 1974 Constitutional Convention. By the end of the decade the momentum had swung the other way: the 1977 Legislature actually enlarged the maximum JP civil jurisdiction from $200 to $500.
But discontent with JPs continues. The Commission on Judicial Conduct says that more complaints are lodged against JPs than any other kind of judge. Last year three JPs were indicted on felony charges, and a handful more were reprimanded for skimming fines by charging, say, $50 and recording only $40 in the ledger. There are occasional reports of rural JPs exceeding their authority by trying cases involving title to land, or sums far in excess of $500. But the truly outlandish tales are rare today. Training and turnover have all but eliminated JPs like the Austin justice, now deceased, who was asked to marry a white woman and a Mexican American man. He didn’t much like the idea, the story goes, but he went ahead with the ceremony. A month later the woman returned, moaning that she’d made a terrible mistake. Could he give her a divorce? Legally the answer was no—that’s for district courts to decide—but the JP simply reached into his desk, pulled out the marriage license, which he had deliberately neglected to send to the courthouse, and shredded it.
The Commission on Judicial Conduct has never heard of Jack Richburg—a good sign—nor are they likely to. He runs his court by the book. More precisely, by two books. One is a thick blue volume Richburg shows off with evident pride. It is called the Justice Court Deskbook and contains every law and practice a JP is likely to have to know. The old-timers sneer at it—the work is a recent product of the new JP training center they hate—but to Richburg it is a symbol of the growing professionalism of his calling. The other book is a grimy, worn spiral directory that sits on his secretary’s desk. Inside is the name and description of every social-welfare agency in Dallas County.
Sarah Street, whose case follows Ramón Espinosa’s, doesn’t know it, but she will have to look to the second book for help. Street is a woman of too many years and too few teeth. Standing beside her is her landlord, a much younger woman in a black dress and diamond earrings, who looks as though she were on her way to a cocktail party. Her apartment leases for $141 a month, but the federal government covers $117 of that, leaving only $24 to be paid by Street—still too much, apparently, for this is an eviction suit. The tenant tell a long, rambling story: she’s been sick (to judge by excuses offered in Richburg’s court, Oak Cliff is second only to Cambodia in incidence of disease); she doesn’t get mail at home; she went to the HUD office for help, but the director wouldn’t see her. But the law, as Richburg explains, offers no solace. If the rent hasn’t been paid and the landlord has delivered written notice, he has no choice other than eviction. “I’m going to enter judgment for the plaintiff,” he says, “but if you’ll step around to my office, we’ll put you in touch with an agency that can find you a place to stay. And we’ll call that HUD director and see if we can’t straighten him out.”
As the day goes on, it becomes clear that Richburg is less an adjudicator than a social worker with power. In virtually every case the law is no mystery; it is the facts that are unclear. In peace bond hearings, eviction suits, even in hot-check cases, he uses his training as a former investigator with the Dallas DA’s office to probe deeper into the circumstances. Sometimes the truth can be startlingly unexpected. Maggie Williams, a sixty-year-old widow seeking a peace bond against Ivory Joe Pate, relates how Pate, a strapping young man in his twenties, harasses her at night by throwing rocks at her window and crawling on her roof. “He lives on the street, he don’t have no job, he’s bad,” she says. As if to confirm every word, Pate slams his cap against the front of the judge’s bench and starts muttering under his breath. Richburg rebukes him sharply, picks up the phone, and calls for a constable to come upstairs in case Pate needs to be restrained by force. After waiting a few minutes for Pate to cool off, Richburg starts asking questions: When did her husband die? September. This September? Yes. When did the harassment start? Immediately. Nothing earlier? No. Had she been seeing a doctor? Yes. Taking medicine? Yes. The case is turning around now. Suddenly it is apparent that the woman, lonely and lost, is imagining everything. A few questions of Pate—he mentions a steady nighttime job—make up the judge’s mind. No bond. But, as in the Espinosa case, he runs a bluff. “This won’t be happening anymore,” he tells the woman. “It’s over.” She walks out smiling; she thinks she’s won.
More peace bonds. After a while they fall into categories: love triangles, jilted lovers, mother disapproving of daughter’s boyfriend, neighbors that even good fences couldn’t help. A woman shows up at her ex-husbands house at three in the morning challenging the current wife, “If you love him, you’ll fight.” Wife Two wants a peace bond, but the questioning brings out that she won’t let her predecessor talk to the husband, not even about the serious problems Wife One is having with her son from the terminated marriage. No bond, and lectures to both women. Another woman wants protection from her former boyfriend. He’d lent her money to buy Christmas presents for her children, then they’d had a fight over repaying the loan. She kicked him out, he seized the presents; later he threatened to burn her house down. It takes a lot to astonish an urban JP, but this case succeeded: “You mean you repo’d the kids’ Christmas presents?” Richburg asked, wide-eyed. Bond granted. A woman wants a peace bond against her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, who, the mother asserts, is a heroin addict. “He hit her up the side of the head with a pool cue, and she don’t want to go with him no more,” she says. But Richburg has heard it all before. When did that happen, he wants to know. Six months ago. And when did they have their last date? Night before last. “That’s what I thought,” he tells her. “Your problem is with your daughter, not him.” No bond.
After hearing the last of the peace bonds, Richburg turns to misdemeanor hot-check cases. There is nothing to do here but crank out the fines, but the process matters a great deal to the merchants involved. If they had to bring charges in district court, the arrest warrant would join 33,000 other in the sheriff’s pile. Once it was served and the defendant was slapped in jail, he would get out on bond (“The jail makes more money in a day than Clint Murchison,” Richburg says), and it would be months before the case came to trial. By that time the clerk who took the check would have moved on long ago—no witness, no case. In JP court the entire process takes only a few weeks, no one goes to jail, and most of the time the defendant makes the check good. Today Richburg hands out small fines of $10 to those who plead guilty but have paid off their checks, and a bigger one of $50 to a defendant who pleads innocent on the grounds that he doesn’t keep a checkbook balance.
The truants are next. One does not have to sit long in JP court before hearing another improbably tale of woe. This time it comes from the mother of the sad-eyed girl (parents can be fined for failing to send their children to school). The girl has been present 56 days, absent 63 days, according to school records; her mother attributes it to asthma. Has she been to a doctor, Richburg wants to know. No. Why not? The family doctor is in Fort Worth. How long have they lived here? Thirteen years. Richburg shakes his head, orders them to find a Dallas doctor. It is a typical case; if there is any lesson that can be learned from a day in JP court, it is that the sins of the parent are suffered by the children.
On to the mundane: Richburg picks up a foot-high stack of brown folders and begins reading off the names of defendants in eviction suits. Almost no one answers; they have in all likelihood already moved out. One man does answer when his name is called. It is Anne Hunter’s unwanted tenant, the man who is living in the house she bought.
My Library
