It was early 1972 and I was an intern assistant public defender defending one of my first cases. Because I was an intern, the rules required that I be accompanied by a live, licensed lawyer, in this case an assistant public defender I’ll call John Mason. The trial was proceeding and the prosecutor was presenting his case, asking his questions of one witness after another.
One of the things a new, inexperienced lawyer has trouble with is, first, recognizing when the other guy is doing something objectionable and, second, knowing how to object to it. My philosophy from the beginning was only to object if there was a good reason because, in my mind, jurors get perturbed when lawyers object a lot. They think he’s trying to hide something.
John had a different approach, I guess, and he was popping at the seams to raise an objection if I failed to do it myself.
John had a unique courtroom presence: he had lost his right forearm to an explosion as a youth. When addressing jurors, he often pounded his stump into his left palm for emphasis and, not incidentally, for the sympathetic impact that it had on jurors. I’d even seen him pound that right stump on the front of the jury box itself, mesmerizing the panel.
The particular courtroom we were in on this occasion was uncarpeted and the counsel chairs had little wheels on all four legs. Finally, John could stand my silence no longer and moved to leap to his feet to object, losing his balance as the chair shot out from under him and, unable to catch himself because he only had the one hand, falling clumsily and loudly to the floor beneath the table. There was a hushed and concerned silence across the courtroom for a long moment or two. Then the judge and the jury saw John’s reddened, round face rise up from behind the table, embarrassed, unhurt, and unfazed.
“Damn, Judge,” he said, smiling slightly. “I forgot what I was gonna say.”