Liberty Bell Award presented to Dianne Sandman for her work with the elderly

Posted May. 1, 2015 at 3:16 PM
Updated May 2, 2015 at 2:06 PM 

WORCESTER — U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor, the guest speaker at the Worcester County Bar Association’s annual Law Day breakfast Friday at the Beechwood Hotel, used a note from a disgruntled juror to drive home the point that although those engaged in the pursuit of justice have made headway over the last 800 years, they still have a long way to go.

Working off this year’s Law Day theme of “Magna Carta: Symbol of Freedom Under Law,” Judge Ponsor started out by providing a brief history of the Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and widely regarded as one of the most significant legal documents in the history of democracy.

He then addressed the difficulty faced by modern-day lawyers and judges in their ongoing efforts to uphold the Magna Carta’s principles.

 “The effort to take these rules, these principles of due process and equal protection, and make them effective in people’s lives is the most creative, the most profound, the most difficult thing humanity has ever tried.

“It is not easy, inevitable, or even natural. A fair legal system is an act of imagination that we keep aloft just by our continuing belief in it and commitment to it. It always needs fixing,” Judge Ponsor told about 150 members of the local legal community and their guests.

To emphasize his point, the senior U.S. District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts, who was appointed to the bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, shared with the audience a note from a juror in a civil case over which he recently presided at the federal courthouse in Springfield.

The note from “Juror 5” was never actually delivered to the judge, but was discovered by his clerk in the deliberation room at the conclusion of the case.

It read as follows:

“Your Honor, I am tired of spending day after day wasting my time listening to this bullcrap. This is cruel and unusal (sic) punishment. The plaintif (sic) is an idiot. He has no case. Why are we here? I think my cat could better answer these questions…And he wouldn’t keep asking to see a document.

“I’ve been patient. I’ve sat in these chairs for 7 days now. If I believed for a second this case was going to end on Thursday, I might not go crazy. This is going to last for another 4 weeks. I cannot take this. I hate these lawyers and prayed one would die so the case would end. I shouldn’t be on this jury. I want to die. I don’t want to be thanked for my patience. I want to die. Well not die for real but that is how I feel sitting here.

“I know I’m writing this in vain but I have to do something … for my sanity. These jury chairs should come with a straight jacket,” Juror 5 said in the hand-scrawled missive.

“But we got a verdict,” Judge Ponsor told the audience.

“Our legal system, like the Magna Carta, is a glorious mess, both exalted and humbled by the character of the human beings who have crafted it and who try to put it into effect. I am very proud to have spent my life trying to make this system work, but I have no illusions about its shortcomings,” he said.

Citing what he considered another flaw in the system, Judge Ponsor lamented the fact that a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding that federal sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional as applied and interpreted for more than a decade was not made retroactive.

A Minnesota native, Judge Ponsor said he is a big fan of radio personality Garrison Keillor and his mythical town of Lake Wobegon, the so-called ‘gateway to Central Minnesota.’

“One of the features of this town is Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, whose motto is: ‘If you can’t find it here, you can probably get along pretty well without it.’ Over the years, I’ve often had the fantasy of putting a sign on the Springfield Courthouse that reads: ‘Ponsor’s Pretty Good Justice.’

“I don’t intend to denigrate what happens in my court by describing it this way,” the judge said. “Pretty good justice is pretty darn good. It takes everything you’ve got. It’s precious. Pretty good justice is, in history and in the world today, pretty rare.

“We’ve probably made some progress in the past 800 years, and we need to be extraordinarily vigilant just to retain that progress. We also need to be aware of the challenges we face to vindicate our most basic principles, clumsily set forth in the Magna Carta, and redouble our efforts to improve how our law works.

“After 800 years, we’re just getting started,” he said.

A former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Judge Ponsor is the author of “The Hanging Judge,” a fictional work released in 2013 focusing on a death penalty trial in Western Massachusetts. He is now working on another novel.

The Worcester County Bar Association’s Liberty Bell Award was presented at the breakfast to Dianne Sandman, a paralegal at Community Legal Aid, for her work with the elderly. The Massachusetts Bar Association’s Community Service award was given posthumously to Worcester lawyer Gerald F. “Jay” Madaus Jr., who died Jan. 1 at age 52. A presentation was also made to the winner of the local bar association’s annual Law Day essay contest, Nothando Khumalo, an eighth-grader and straight-A student at Our Lady of the Valley School in Uxbridge.

As an additional part of the local Law Day observance, a three-judge panel from the state Appeals Court held a special session at the Worcester Trial Court. Invited guests included a group of students from North High School.

Law Day was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 as a day to recognize the principles of government under law.