Bob Doyle Remembers His Days As A Massachusetts Assistant DA

I was an assistant DA for a small town which should probably remain nameless. And there was this police chief, a tall Irish man–– pigheaded, and bald––and I kept getting called up there to this town to do marijuana cases. The police chief was trying to arrest every high school kid in town for marijuana possession. And after about five trips on these marijuana cases, brought on the basis of affidavits for search warrants on essentially the same facts and the same unnamed informant––a confidential informant––I decided something was wrong. Talking to some of the police officers it finally dawned on me that there was no informant, that the chief was writing up these affidavits, and that they were totally false.

So one day I went in and I said, "You know, chief, this affidavit's no good." He started screaming at me--we were in a small room on the third floor of this converted building which housed the courtroom, and the clerk's offices which were nearby this little room we were in--and quietly, these middle-aged ladies who worked in the offices got up and shut their doors. And, when the police chief finally got around to threatening me, I remember telling him that if I had a tube of lipstick and painted his head red he'd resemble a perfect prick! As you might imagine, I insulted him grievously, and he came at me and we grappled with each other. I had him by the throat; he was trying to put my eyes out; we were thrashing around on the floor, banging into these hollow, rickety walls of his office. I attempted to throw him down a flight of stairs and luckily was unsuccessful. Finally some clerk came out and shouted, "Boys!? Stop it!" And we did, with some considerable chagrin on my part.

When I got back to my office I found out I'd been fired. I marched into the District Attorney, screamed a bit, told him that the police chief had been doing phony affidavits. Well, there were indictments, later, of folks in the police department--one of the policeman shot his wife's lover--it was quite a police department, a real sweet island of insanity in the great and liberal state of Massachusetts.

Somehow, I've never been all that able to just go along with things. One reason I loved practicing law is because you don't have to put up with too much. I loved practicing alone because... well, for example, one day I had a client who went to Boston  for a deposition in a civil case, and we went to... I want to say Ropes and Gray––a law firm where the dead Yankee partners have oil paintings on the wall––men who haven't been seen on this earth for 140 years. It had to be Hale & Doerr. Just another big name firm. We get in the elevator, and at each level––we're going up to the 6th, then the 10th floor, and it's obvious that each level of this building is filled with lawyers. And you can be sure, that as Boston lawyers, they got on their brown, ill-fitting, cheap suits, the more wealthy they are the worse the suit; they wear these god-awful bow ties, and you can just assume that the obsequiousness increases as the floors go up in number. Finally this guy gets on the elevator, and I said, "Hi, how are ya?" And he says, "Oh, hi Son! Are you here on business today?" And I said, "Yeah, I got a deposition with my client here." "Oh," he said, "if I can be of any help, just give me a call." And I said to my client, "That's why I'm a lawyer. And that's why I'm alone." I said, "We come down here, everybody else in this elevator is on his payroll." "He knows that I'm not. And he knows that I'm a lawyer, and it's "Hi, how are ya?" "And, you know, he'll try to beat my head in on your case or any other case, but we'll do it as equals. No bowing, no servility." And that's why I love being a small town lawyer. I ended up, eventually, meeting presidents, senators, and got in good with all the politicians, went to Washington, and did some things, but basically it's just the fact that you're an equal when you step on the courtroom floor, that's what makes being a lawyer worth doing.

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Bob Doyle was born, in 1937, at Northampton, Massachusetts. He attended public schools and graduated from Holy Cross College (1959), and obtained his law degree from Georgetown (1963). He served in the U.S. Navy from 1959 to 1961, mostly at the Pentagon on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. He has practiced law in Northampton from 1963 to the present and has been active in Democratic politics ("it seems forever"). He lives in the foothills of the Berkshires. With his friend and colleague, Peter D'Errico, he has for the past decade represented, among others, traditional native peoples and nations. He is married to Poppy McCluskey and they have eight children.

Note: The above is presented in commemoration of the long, American weekend known, for reasons almost mythical, as "Thanksgiving". In partial lieu of my long promised but not yet delivered bonus, daily publication of YBYL will be suspended until Monday. [Otis]

Comments

[Walter Renko]

One is tempted to read all sorts of analogies into today's -- where did *that* come from? --offering, but one inference seems to me worth restating less obliquely than Otis is so fond of (even if my grammar is not as sophisticated as his). o)

Until very recent times science and the law had in common the very thing Mr. Doyle grew rapturous about: In the journals as in the court room, a single set of rules applied to everyone regardless.

Imagine (shudder) what the US justice system would look like if it was run by the same rules that govern publication in today's Science.

[George Kimball]

Somebody associated with this weblog has a sense of humor that reminds me of my old compadre Ed Dorn.

The "Thanksgiving" graphic is a 19th C. engraving in the Granger Collection, entitled:

"Mary Dyer Led to Execution on Boston Common, 1 June 1660".