There is a certain amount of risk associated with any
calling, including the calling to be a prosecutor. I never worried that much
about the risk associated with being a prosecutor, but occasionally I was
confronted by the threat of violence. There were a number of death threats made
over the years, but I never paid much attention to them and nothing came of
them. I do recall one case I tried where a member of the audience came to me
during a break and warned me that the defendant’s family was talking about
accosting me and beating me up after the trial was over. I wasn’t particularly
frightened by the warning, but I decided to take some precautions. After the
trial was over and the defendant was on his way to prison, I went back to my
office and got my State Attorney issued .38 revolver out of my desk drawer. I
dropped it in my pocket and drove home without incident feeling safe and
secure. When I got home, I decided to unload the revolver before taking it into
the house I shared with my wife and three children. I pulled the revolver out
of my pocket, popped the cylinder open, and discovered that the gun was empty.
I once tried another case against two ruffians who had
sexually assaulted another man. The case was very contentious, and when I cross
examined the defendants I was particularly rough on them. In final argument I
raked them over the coals pretty well, and by the time the jury returned the
verdict finding them guilty, I could tell that they didn’t like me very much.
To my surprise, the judge released the two on their own recognizance pending
sentencing. I prosecuted in a rural circuit, and the courthouses were widely
separated from each other. I had a trip of some thirty miles down lonely
country roads to get home. I drove those thirty miles with the defendants’ pickup
truck on my bumper almost the entire distance. I didn’t have my revolver that
day, but I did have an axehandle that I habitually carried in my car. I must
admit that I was just a little nervous during the trip.
On another occasion I was leaving the courtroom after
getting a first degree murder verdict. I had been assisted in the trial by ASA
Dana Brady, and we were walking out together. When we got into the hall, I
looked toward the elevator at the end of the hall and saw a burly young man
standing in front of it with a group of people. He yelled something
inarticulate and began down the hall towards Dana and me. The people he was
with tackled him and pulled him back. Just about that time the elevator door
opened and they pulled him into the elevator. “I wonder what that was all
about,” I casually remarked. Dana, who had gone to school with the defendant
and knew his family, replied “That was the defendant’s brother, and he was
attacking you.”
Then there was the time that I was escorting a victim out of
the courthouse when she was attacked by the person she had complained against.
The victim ran out the front door of the courthouse and across the park, and I
never saw her again. There were no officers around, so I grabbed the assailant
and got her stopped. She said something to the effect of “Let me go, I’m gonna
put some knots on her head!” That was when I noticed she had what looked like
an enormous butcher knife in her hand. I let the woman go, but stood in front
of her to block her exit from the courthouse and told her to give me the knife.
It seemed like an eternity as we confronted each other on the courthouse steps
and I tried to get her to put down the knife. The courthouse was usually
crawling with law enforcement officers, but that particular day there were none
anywhere. Eventually the woman told me, “Well, if you’re going to carry me to
jail, go ahead and do it.” As a Florida Assistant State Attorney, the law
recognized me as a law enforcement officer but I was a law enforcement officer
without arrest power. I decided that would be no problem because the woman had
consented to the arrest, so I told her to come with me. She threw down the
knife and I marched her into the Chief Deputy Sheriff’s office, explained to
the Chief Deputy that this woman needed to be carried to jail, and if he would
watch her a few minutes, I’d go get the necessary paperwork. I went to my
office, typed up an arrest warrant, and took it to the judge. When I got it
signed, I took the warrant directly to the Chief Deputy and told him to arrest
her. Having made my “arrest,” I went to where she had thrown the knife to
collect it as evidence. You can imagine my relief when I discovered that she only
had a red-handled file and not a knife.
I mentioned that as an Assistant State Attorney, I was
recognized by Florida law as a law enforcement officer. That status figured
prominently in this next story. I was trying a bodybuilder on misdemeanor
indecency charges and had just got a conviction. As I stepped to stand before
the bench and ask the judge to impose sentence, the defendant jumped up and
suckerpunched me. He loosened a couple of teeth and either knocked me down or
tackled me to the floor, I don’t know which. He assumed what the UFC would call
the full mount position and began to engage in the MMA maneuver known as “ground
and pound.” I fishhooked him with one hand and threw punches back at him with
the other, but you can’t throw a very heavy punch lying flat on your back. If I’d
had any sense, I would have covered up and waited on the bailiffs to subdue
him. By the time they got him subdued and I regained my feet, I had changed my
mind about recommending probation. The judge gave him 18 months in the county
jail, and when that sentence was over he went to prison for the felony of
battery on a law enforcement officer.
I had meant to conclude this post with an account of the one
time that I really felt that I was in danger, but the story of that case is a
little too long. In my next post I’ll talk about the Wrong Man Murder, why I
believed that I was being stalked by gangsters from Chicago, and what I did to neutralize
the threat.
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