The Making of a Judge

Behind the bench, another perspective

Transition: A new judicial appointee is learning to shoulder the duties and responsibilities of an
honor she has spent her professional life working toward.

By Lisa Goldberg
Sun Staff

July 14, 2002

This is the first in a series of occasional articles.

It's May 23, just minutes to show time, and Judge Pamila J. Brown is in a tizzy.

It's her first day sitting in judgment, a moment she has worked toward all her adult life, but, in reality, only crammed for during the past few weeks.

It's the day she'll hand down her first verdict, offer her first admonition, assess her first fine. From this day forward - amid a crush of drug and assault and traffic and
minor civil cases - she'll be making decisions that, in a heartbeat, could set a life back on the right path or send it spiraling downward.

Pressure? What pressure?

It would help if something went right. It would help if she had a few more hours to spare.

She has barely had time to throw a few legal books and a yellow lined pad on her new bench in her new Howard County courtroom, and she still hasn't gotten the
hang of the traffic computer with only minutes to go before she attempts to deal with more than 50 speeding cases.

"I'm stressing," she mumbles, almost to herself, her voice tight, her angular face wiped clean of its usual smile.

With a wipe of her glasses, a hug for bailiff Bernice Galbreath and a glance at her lifeline - Judge Neil Edward Axel, who will be sitting mute beside her for a time this
day - she walks, heart hammering, out the chambers-area door and toward Courtroom 1, the one marked for the past two weeks with a new nameplate: "Pamila J.
Brown."

"All rise ... "

April 4

Brown is in the midst of an important conference call just before 11 a.m. when she grabs a ringing line at the attorney general's office on Preston Street in Baltimore.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening would like to speak with her, she is told.

"He says, 'I guess you know why I'm calling.' And I said, 'I hope so,' " she recalls. "I said 'Thank you' a thousand times. I was just babbling."

Six years after she first submitted her name for a District Court judgeship, she is Glendening's pick for the $111,500-a-year job.

Her 47 years of living and learning - from her childhood in Bel Air to her later life as a litigator, civic volunteer, wife and mother - are about to come crashing
together.

She is euphoric.

The reality of the challenge will hit in a day or two. Ask any judge.

You spend years working and learning the law, building a reputation in the legal community, volunteering for bar association activities, rubbing shoulders with those in
influence.

If you've impressed the right people, gained the right support and get lucky, the governor just might tap you to fill one of Maryland's 272 judicial slots. (In the past
year, 28 lawyers and judges in Maryland have been appointed or elevated from a lower court to a higher court seat.)

Suddenly, in a few short weeks, you've got to disentangle yourself from one life and learn a new one, aided only by a few procedural and legal books and the brief
guidance of busy colleagues.

Used to arguing a point, you've got to remember to keep your mouth shut. Used to letting your emotions show, you've got to keep a poker face. Used to taking a
stand for your client, you've got to remain neutral.

No one said making the transition from advocate to arbiter would be easy.

But first, Brown has to call her family.

Her husband, Christopher Robinson, gets an emergency page.

"When I saw 911, I said, 'I bet she got it,'" Robinson says.

March 1970

Pamila Brown was scared.

She had cut class at Bel Air High School, where her strict father taught, to steal a look at a piece of high legal drama.

Radical H. Rap Brown, charged with inciting violence in riot-scarred Cambridge on the Eastern Shore, was being tried in her hometown.

Outside the historic courthouse, the case had transformed sleepy Bel Air. There were roadblocks. A bomb detonated a few miles from the courthouse, killing two of
H. Rap Brown's friends in their car.

Inside, famed civil liberties attorney William Kunstler thundered for the defense. Something about the way the wild-haired, radical lawyer spoke amid the turmoil
stayed with the 15-year-old.

"I guess I was just drawn to it," she said.

The daughter of a social worker and a respected physical education teacher and coach, William "Bill" Brown, a world-class runner and medalist in the
Pan-American Games, she was living in a time of turbulent social change.

As an African-American child during the earliest days of educational integration in Harford County, Pamila Brown felt the taint of racism. And she had listened as her
parents participated in an interracial dialogue with a diverse group seeking ways to get along in a new world.

She would see Kunstler in action again in 1974 while studying political science at Macalester College in Minnesota.

His eloquence impressed her. So did his penchant for taking unsympathetic clients and cases that opened wounds and dealt with important social issues.

The political drama playing in courtrooms across America in those years and her growing awareness of the judiciary as an instrument of change pulled her toward the
law, she said.

After she graduated from Macalester in 1976, she enrolled at the University of Baltimore School of Law, working as a waitress and a clerk to help pay her way.

Learning the law was far from easy, forcing her to think in new ways, requiring her to look at situations rationally.

"We all think from the heart," she said. "It's a hard process of being able to look at both sides of the picture and being able to argue vehemently for all sides."

Call it the making of a lawyer.

April 30

Pamila Brown's Baltimore office is in chaos.

The walls are bare. The last vestiges of her 15 years as an assistant state attorney general are strewn on the table. The sugary smell of goodbye cake fills the air.

For most of her legal career, she has represented the state, arguing highway and workers' compensation and contract cases all across Maryland. For the past four
years, she has been the attorney general's top lawyer for the Department of General Services, the agency responsible for procurement, construction and property.

Now, her professional life as an advocate is hours from over.

There will be no more routine trips around the state for trials. Affiliations with political overtones must end. And the robe may raise a social barrier.

"Most of the friends I have are friends I made before I became a judge - in terms of lawyers," said Howard Circuit Judge Dennis M. Sweeney.

To say that the 26 days since her appointment to the bench have been a whirlwind would be an understatement.

Becoming a judge may be an honor, but the judiciary doesn't put together state-sponsored fetes to celebrate a swearing-in. Neither does it supply the black robes.

If she wants a party, she has to plan it herself.

If she wants a robe - and she does, of course - she has to make the trek to Franklin Uniform on West Saratoga Street.

Both of her $250 robes will be gifts - one from the staff at the attorney general's office, the other from the Howard Bar Association.

As co-workers visit the Baltimore office to say goodbye, she works to tie up loose ends - answering e-mails and warding off last-minute crises. She's nervous,
over-extended and sleep-deprived.

Last night at the University of Baltimore's Angelos Law Center, her colleagues made her cry.

As co-workers and friends heaped her with praise, she played the part of yo-yo, jumping out of her chair to accept gifts.

"We are losing a superstar," Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. said.

Early 1980s

In the early days of her career, Brown wasn't inclined to say no when asked to volunteer.

For one thing, she was a people person. For another, her parents and her mentors had always stressed the importance of giving back.

And, in the early 1980s, when minority lawyers were scarce in the legal establishment, she didn't turn down overtures for fear that organizers would not ask another
"person of color" to take a leadership role. She hoped her competence might open doors for other minority lawyers.

As her career progressed - from a stint at the Baltimore city solicitor's office in the early 1980s to the attorney general's office in 1987 - her affiliations mushroomed.

Now, friends joke about the many entries in her eight-page resume - Baltimore City Bar Association, national and state bar associations, Baltimore YWCA, St.
John Methodist/Presbyterian Church, Howard County Board of Social Services, to name a few - and the number of activities she left off.

May 8

You could say Judge Brown - and it is Judge Brown now, thanks to her swearing-in just 17 hours ago - is running on coffee grounds.

The ceremony had been a family affair: Her father, William Brown, held the Bible as she recited the judicial oath of office. Her twins - son Matthew and daughter
Marissa - and her mother helped her don her robe for the first time as a judge. Her husband escorted her to her new seat beside the district judges assembled in the
Banneker Room of the George Howard building.

"I truly believe I became a better person because of this journey," she told a standing-room-only crowd.

At 9 a.m. - and after only three hours of sleep - she grimaces as she steps into her judicial robe backward, flipping it around to zip it up. Axel will be running the
criminal docket this day with her observing, silent to his right.

It is the first of several days spent on the bench as an onlooker - the start of trying to make sense of paperwork that threatens to overwhelm and learning what works
and what doesn't in the state's front-line court system, a mass of minor criminal, civil and traffic cases that race through the process as if on an assembly line.

Axel and Howard District Judges Louis A. Becker III and Alice Gail Pollard Clark will become teachers of sorts for the next two weeks, explaining the minutiae of
the system, revealing their personal styles and giving her a glimpse of that brief window they get - maybe five minutes - to make a difference in a person's life.

Any formal training has to wait. The orientation for judges will be in October.

Forget the hard decisions about jail time and the law. It's the process that threatens to overwhelm on Day 1. There are so many required recitations about
defendants' rights and voluntary pleas to learn. There are so many forms to fill out.

Being a judge is starting to look like one continuous "In" box.

Early 1990s

Pamila Brown and Christopher Robinson first crossed paths in 1987 at a Monumental City Bar Association Christmas party.

Robinson, a recreation administrator with Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, had come to the African-American city lawyers event with a
friend and remembers watching his future wife work the room.

Brown had arrived solo. "But you'd never know it the way she was hobnobbing all over the room," he said.

Three years later, in November 1990, they married and moved to Columbia. Thirteen months after that, on New Year's Eve 1991, Matthew and Marissa were
born.

"She's a loving mother to have been as busy as she's been and never neglected her duties as a mom and a wife," said her mother, Gloria Brown.

Robinson knew from the start that his wife was reaching for what he calls "the prize."

It's not as though she had always wanted to be a judge. Early in her career, judging seemed sterile, another world altogether, a world she wasn't sure she'd enjoy.

But by the time she and Robinson married, her goal was set. She hoped to don the black robe and play the part of "peacekeeper" instead of warring party.

"The bar was set high. And I guess when I started to understand the scope of what Pamila Brown was all about, that was ... one of the things I admired most about
her," Robinson said.

There were times when he felt a bit left out as his wife juggled family, work and her various volunteer responsibilities. But it was hard to begrudge her dreams.

"When you know it's for a good cause, it's not hard to be supportive," he said. "The fact of the matter is, she loves the kids. She loves me. What's the problem?"

Spring 2002

During the two weeks between her swearing-in ceremony and her first day sitting in judgment, Becker, Axel and Clark offered her a window not only to the process
of judging but also to judicial style.

The judges say the view is different from the bench, a few feet off the ground. Judging is about looking at life from both sides, weighing all arguments. It's about
affecting lives. A speeding ticket could lead to a suspended license. A suspended license could cost someone his or her job.

"I think Judge [Russell] Sadler gave me the best advice. Handle your case and forget it. Don't worry about your decisions," Clark said. Sadler retired in 1996. "That
being said, I think there's always something you worry about that sticks in your head."

It's also tough to stay out of the fray, to avoid helping one side over the other when two parties face off in court - particularly when one side is represented by
counsel and the other isn't.

Clark has a handwritten sign, "Don't say a word," taped to her bench. The note, like words of wisdom she has taped up in the past - "There's nothing funny going on
here" and "Don't play with your hair" - is a reminder of the gravity of the job.

The judges offer more advice: Trust the courtroom clerk; take the time you need to make the best decision; your focus is no longer on the client.

"Your role, I guess, is to see the bigger picture," Axel said.

May 23

Axel is seated by Brown's side on this first official judgment day, a comfort on a day packed with speeding cases.

Some who stand in front of her during this first docket are out of luck.

A five-point motor vehicle violation is going to be a five-point violation until she figures out the complicated system, unless she decides to hand down a probation
before judgment or a not guilty.

Her first judgment on her first day is for a speeder traveling 38 mph in a posted 25 mph zone.

Guilty.

A few folks are angry, particularly when they learn the number of points about to be added to their driving records. Four pick up the paperwork to file a Circuit
Court appeal.

By the afternoon, and with a better understanding of the points system, she is reducing the speeds on tickets of guilty offenders - a judicial allowance that
corresponds with a decrease in motor vehicle points assessed - as well as fines.

She's also dispensing admonitions.

To a speeder heading to church: "God does wait for us all. ... Getting there in one piece is more important than getting there."

May 31

The divide between Pamila Brown and Judge Brown is startling.

Off the bench, she's gregarious and prone to calling folks "sweetie," with a readable face that shows everything from joy (wide eyes, broad smile) to sadness
(furrowed brow, grim mouth).

On the bench, she's stern, complete with a poker face, a more strident tone in her voice, and a steady and set green-eyed gaze - thanks to colored contacts - that
bores into defendants and lawyers from above.

On this day she's judging the heavy hitters in traffic: the drunken drivers.

A man who violated his probation gets one month in jail: "You were given a break. Then you betrayed the court's trust. You really don't have many alternatives."

A young man who drank too much at a party, then fled in his car because he had been beaten up, gets probation before judgment, a $500 fine and a strong
admonition.

In the past week, she has ordered youngsters caught drinking and driving to read an unsigned poem, "Prom Night," about an innocent girl who dies after being hit by
a drunken driver, and write an essay. She has also had her first taste of District Court's unpredictability: A woman in renters' court shouted at her and urinated on the
seat.

To say the first days have been easy would be wrong.

She's just beginning to figure out her style, her speed, her standards.

She's still getting used to sentencing, to figuring out which defendants are worthy of a break and will use it to turn their lives around, and which need jail time. She's
still trying to figure out what works and what will send a defendant on a more destructive path, stripping away hope for rehabilitation.

And she's still second-guessing herself, wondering if her decisions were right. She still needs to figure out, she says, how to leave the job at the courthouse when she
leaves for the night.

Folks tell her, she says, that the judge she will become will be different from the judge she has been these past few days, that her stance will soften as she begins to
see a range of cases and of human nature.

Her heart still hammers every time she walks into Courtroom 1, every time the bailiff says "All rise."

"It's life. It's life in a microcosm," she said. "At the end of the day ... I hope justice was served and people came away thinking I heard what they had to say."

Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun