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.
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Another lesson about JP court: nothing stays mundane for long. The tenant, a workingman in a blue polyester jump suit, is indignant. He insists he has a right to the house and has, he says, a document to prove it. He had signed a contract for the property long before Hunter came to town, but his loan had fallen through. In the meantime, his realtor had worked out an agreement that let him lease the house for six months while he tried to scrape up the money elsewhere. He had overlooked, however, that realtors represent sellers, not buyers. When Anne Hunter showed up, looking for a house, the agent knew just the place. She signed a contract and this time the deal went through. The house was hers. But the tenant’s six months weren’t up yet.
What is the legal effect of the crucial piece of paper? For the first and only time that day, the outcome of a case would rest upon knowledge of the law. Or would it? Richburg listens to both sides and studies the agreement. He shrugs; it is time for another bluff. “I’m going to rule for the plaintiff Hunter,” he says. “I base my decision on paragraph eight of the limited-occupancy agreement.”
Apparently that was satisfactory. But not even John Marshall himself could have found anything in paragraph eight that remotely applied to the case. Maybe a lawyer JP would have come up with a different answer. Maybe the outcome was a perversion of the law. But it was not a perversion of justice. Two people wanted one house; one had to lose. Is it not better, ultimately, that the one who had already squandered his chance suffer the loss? It is certainly better for the seller, and it is probably better for society as a whole. The outcome was JP justice at its best: common sense undiluted by law, the same formula Jack Richburg’s father followed for 29 years.
Folks used to call Bill Richburg “the law west of the Trinity”—notwithstanding the river’s west-to-east course through Dallas—and though the comparison with Roy Bean’s absolute rule west of the Pecos was not far from the mark, Richburg hated it. “Roy Bean was a tyrant,” he would grump. “I like to help people.”
During three decades in office, from 1944 until his son succeeded him on New Year’s Day, 1973, Richburg probably prevented more crimes of violence than the Dallas Police Department. He handed out 125,000 peace bonds, every one of them representing a volatile situation, and the vast majority of the bonds ended whatever quarrel was at issue. Many of his rulings were accompanied by lectures on parental duty, getting a job, responsibility. The precinct lines were different then; Richburg’s dominion extended far into South Dallas, the heart of the black community. He kept his court open seven days a week, and on Saturdays and Sundays the courtroom overflowed and the halls teemed with people seeking refuge. Some just came to hear secular sermons like the one Richburg preached to a man who had left his wife and four children, beating her up and stealing her welfare check as he departed. “You’re hurting your children and your legal wife and cheating us taxpayers,” Richburg said in a ringing voice, between puffs on one of the 25 cigars he smoked and chewed every day. “Every hungry child should be fed. I’m not going to allow anybody like you to starve your children just so you can live off another woman on welfare. You’re as strong as Cassius Clay, and you ought to be working and supporting your family. Go in my office and give her some money right now, and if you hurt her or those children, you’re going to jail.”
Richburg had no power, of course, to order the derelict husband to support his family. But he was dealing with people who weren’t sophisticated in the law, and he had a genius for mingling moral and legal obligations in a way that made them seem the same. It was, by today’s standards, a paternalistic system, and one that didn’t function exactly according to the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure or, for that matter, the United States Constitution. But when Richburg died last year, hundreds of black women came to his funeral and cried.
Every now and then a Richburg story showed up in the papers: the time he handed down a death sentence—on a rooster that had gaffed a child; the time on a hot summer day that he cooled off a sizzling family feud by sending out for ice cream; the time he emulated King Solomon, ending a quarrel over who owned a pig by ordering it barbecued and divided between the claimants.
Richburg was popular among Dallas’s politically conservative courthouse crowd because of his reputation for cracking down on welfare cheaters. Stories of welfare frauds would unfold in peace bond hearings as Richburg tried to find out what role money played in the inevitable love triangles. To reinforce his questioning, Richburg kept a “lie detector” in plain view on the raised bench. Actually it was just a tape recorder, one of the old-fashioned machines with a yellow light to indicate volume—the louder the volume, the faster the light would blink. But Richburg told peace bond litigants it was his lie detector, and as soon as he’d made up his mind who was telling the truth and who wasn’t, he’d turn the volume knob up at an appropriate time, the light would blink furiously, and the truth would come out. Richburg reported these confessed frauds to federal authorities, and in court he frequently railed against welfare cheats, but he knew too much of life in his precinct to be against welfare itself—something his downtown admirers never fully realized. “I’m not against the deserving getting welfare,” he said once. “Some ought to be getting it who aren’t. Some ought to be getting more than they do.”
Bill Richburg didn’t run for reelection in 1972, influenced in part, says his son, by the political woes of his friend, county judge Lew Sterrett, and in part by changing times. The elder Richburg would have snorted at JP deskbooks; he chided lawyers who brought lawbooks into his courtroom. He would not have taken kindly to the legal-aid and poverty lawyers who have been showing up more and more frequently in urban JP courts. There was a time when Richburg was one of three men in the county (Sheriff Bill Decker and homicide captain Will Fritz were the others) who could put a “hold” on anyone in jail, and every district judge in town would honor it by refusing to grant bail or a writ. In Richburg’s case the reason was usually to give a peace bond violator who had gotten only as far as making threats time to cool off. Those days are gone forever. Good riddance, perhaps, but when times change in some ways, they change in others as well: every Friday afternoon at five, Jack Richburg packs up his lawbooks, shuts the door on the courtroom where his father’s picture hangs, and closes up for the weekend.
The long day is coming to a close in Jack Richburg’s court. The last case is different—a jury trial over $47.50 in rent that a flea market owner says is owed him—and yet it is the same. The outcome is a matter of principle to both sides: the tenant says the roof leaked on his merchandise and the owner says the tenant stopped payment on a check. There have been threats of violence. Neither side has a lawyer. Richburg’s role is limited to helping both sides develop their cases; occasionally he interrupts, unprompted by an objection, to warn one side or the other about a gross violation of propriety, such as blatantly leading witnesses. His usual sensitivity to every nuance, unnecessary in a jury trial, is dormant: “I really don’t know how this will go,” he says in an aside while the jury is out. The jury, evidently, is not so ambivalent. They are back in ten minutes with a verdict for the owner.
The outcome is somewhat reassuring: after sitting in Richburg’s court for a day, one begins to wonder whether anyone in Dallas keeps a checkbook or pays rent on time or expects anyone else to. But the temptation to dismiss those who are summoned here as life’s losers, the wretched of the earth, is submerged in a flood of numbers. This year Richburg will make decisions in cases affecting about 25,000 people, enough to populate a city the size of Orange, too many to ignore.
The lingering question about JP courts, even those as professional as Jack Richburg’s is whether they are fair to the people they serve. There are those, notably in the legal profession, who cringe at the thought of a contested case where the judge is a layman and the opposing sides have no lawyers to carry their banners into battle. The specter of rights violated or ignored or overlooked cannot be dismissed lightly, and no doubt some cases, like the eviction of Anne Hunter’s unwanted tenant, are not decided according to law. But that is not the final answer. One could just as easily go to the county courthouse two miles away and find cases that are decided according to law but have little to do with justice. Criminals go free on technicalities; doctors win malpractice cases because no doctor can be found to testify against them.
Too often lawsuits turn out to be contests between lawyers, not real people. Lawyers can get so absorbed with precedent, procedure, and the adversary system that they lose sight of what is fair. Does it make sense for someone to lose a case because his lawyer failed to recite a magic incantation? The legal system has evolved into an institution that operates for the convenience of lawyers—except for JP courts.
That is, of course, precisely why the legal establishment wants to stamp them out. In fact what should happen is exactly the opposite: if anything, JP-type courts should have more responsibility. So many disputes—divorce, child custody, commitment for insanity or alcoholism, to name a few—could be better resolved by the methods of a Jack Richburg than by the skills of a lawyer. Where is the precedent for determining what is in the best interests of a child? Precedent is a myth; no case is truly similar to any other. Justice of the peace courts understand this; they are based on common sense, they work, and they work quickly. Perhaps it is too much to expect the rest of the legal system to function the same way, but the least it can do is leave what does work alone.
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