WHO’S JUDGE COLE SO MAD AT?

Ten twenty-three in the morning and Judge Robert Cole is mad. This is nothing extraordinary, for Judge Cole has been mad before and he will be mad again. But it’s worth noting that he is not mildly irritated or slightly frustrated or just a little ticked off. He is mad. Nostril-flaring, fang-baring, fist-clenching mad. Mad enought to spit.

And he does spit his words as he dresses down a portly black woman who has made the mistake of transgressing some tenet of the law according to Robert Cole. Actually, all she did was raise her voice in excitement and exasperation while trying to explain her side of a $160 rent dispute with her landlord. But Robert Cole will have none of it.

“I’ll tell you this just once,” he hisses, his eyes clenching into a chilling stare. “You raise your voice in this court again and I’ll throw you in jail! You understand?”’ The woman nods tentatively, eyes wide and paralyzed, as if staring down the gullet of a king cobra.

“All right, there’s no reason for us to get upset with each other,” he continues, irony dripping from his words. “Let’s get on with this.”

What they’re getting on with is a simple disagreement over who owes whom for what, another of the tens of thousands of litigious trivialities that pass by Justice of the Peace Robert Cole’s bench each year. And as usual, Robert Randolph Cole has not hesitated to show his anger about something or other. In the past, he has spat his wrath at long-hairs, lawyers who want favor, common drunks, petty thieves, class action lawyers who question his practices and the Dallas County Commissioners Court. Among others. He has sued and been sued, questioned by official and private legal bodies and generally criticized more than any Dallas County judge in recent memory. He has made unabashed friends of the police, the Republican right wing, anti-gun control forces, the law’n’order folks and mainly, the voters in his Dallas County Justice of the Peace Precinct 1. He has made enemies of the criminal defense community, civil libertarians, he officialdom of county government and a lot of people who don’t like the way they’ve been treated in his court. At times the judge has sulked, at times he has lashed back at his critics, at times he has ignored them. But through it all, he has been mad. Mad enough to spit.

His anger defused, Cole listens dispassionately as the black woman and her adversary explain the problem. The woman says she paid her landlord $ 160, two months’ rent, only a day before she had to move out because of a “problem with my boyfriend.” The landlord owes her the $160, she says. The landlord says it’s not her problem that the tenant decided to move out on the spur of the moment and that she doesn’t owe her the time of day, let alone $160. “Is that it?” Cole says tiredly. Both nod. Cole sighs long and hard. “Well, I’m gonna rule that you owe this lady at least $80, because the law says you are supposed to give one month’s notice before moving out.” The black woman tries to protest. Cole cuts her off. “That’s what the law says and you don’t know the law. Judgement entered for $80. Next case.”

In the ensuing hour, Judge Cole will hear a public relations executive and a paper company salesman bicker over some poorly printed shopping bags and the $112 the company charged for them; an elderly woman complain that Coca-Cola owes her money because she bought a Coke with a plant root in it and can’t enjoy Cokes anymore; a young woman protesting that her car was illegally towed away by her apartment management; another young woman who wants her pool table back from her estranged husband; and a young Mexican-American who was arrested for driving an unregistered car and can’t seem to explain why. The next day he will hear a myriad of similarly petty grievances and disagreements, minor piques that people just can’t seem to work out themselves. No wonder Robert Cole is mad. Since 1968, his life has been like one long family argument – with him in the middle.



Two fourteen in the afternoon and Robert Cole is mad. The anger is more diffuse, more random now, as he discusses his life and times as a justice of the peace. First off, he is mad at the media; not much, but enough for his square jaw to have clenched like a fist and his eyes to have squinted again into that stare. “I’ll tell you what aggravates me about the press,” he says. “Instead of trying to understand why someone does something, they try to create a controversy and say that a man is not doing his job.” He pauses, allowing his deep, judicial tones to fill the office. The office, like the man, is stark and stern. And angry. One wall is adorned with three mounted animal heads, a sad-eyed deer flanked by two snarling wild boars. The wall to his right bears an inscribed plaque of the sort you might find at a Stuckey’s gift shop. It reads: “It isn’t how big (he man who fights is, it’s how big the fight in the man is.”

From the media, the judge moves on to other favorite foes. Longhairs: “Longhaired hippies just make me see red.” Dope smokers: “You know, I think marijuana may be the most dangerous drug we have today, because it leads to everything else, you know?” Lawyers who try to throw a monkey wrench into his well-oiled judicial machine: “Those kind of lawyers don’t make me an angry man. They make me a nauseated man.” And so on. Even his language is angry: peppered with profanities and slang; spat out like a mouthful of sour milk.

“I’m not an angry man really. Just frustrated,” he continues. “My job is to secure voluntary compliance with the law. I’m trying to stop crime. If I know a guy has done something wrong. I’m going to jar his ass.

“I think I’m fairly representative of the law-abiding community and their frustration with law enforcement. People want a clean city with some semblance of decency. People want something done and I’m in the do-something department.” He pauses again and unbuttons his thin-lapeled coat, revealing a small silver tie tack: It is a miniature replica of a .45 automatic pistol.

“People want vicious people off the street. If you were to put me in charge of martial law in the county, I’d have burglary cleared up in six months.”



From the beginning, Robert Randolph Cole has been an anachronism. In an era of unprecedented judicial leniency and sensitivity about civil rights, he has made himself the sole bastion of tough and uncompromising frontier justice. Modern judges have begun to question the tactics of the local police. Robert Cole still straps on his pistol and rides on drug raids with the Dallas vice squad. Modern judges have consistently reduced the bonds and fines they levy on criminal suspects in recent years. Possession of marijuana can still get you a stiff S1500 bond in Cole’s court; a repeated arrest for simple drunkenness can get you a S100 fine. Modern judges speak of “rehabilitation” and “justice tempered with mercy.” Robert Cole says flatly, “The law says a judge must be punitive. I want to do something to materially affect criminals. To punish them.” Modern judges have become extremely sensitive about processing a suspect without an examining trial or, ultimately, a trial by jury. Judge Cole will grant examining trials if he has the time and says without blinking, “I don’t think there’s a case in JP court worth a jury trial.” Modern judges aspire to the judicial compassion of an Earl Warren. Robert Cole seems hell-bent on making Judge Roy Bean look like a softy.

It has been that way since Robert Cole first took the bench in January, 1969. as the first Republican JP in the history of Dallas County. From the first rap of his gavel, Cole made it clear he was here not only in behalf of justice, but of law and order too. He would be an arbiter of the law, to be sure; but he would also be an instrument of the law.

Cole first tackled the matter of bond settings on arrested suspects. Though his background as an Air Force officer and a civil attorney during the past 18 years, by his own admission, gave him little grounding in criminal law, Cole quickly decided that most Dallas County judges were too lenient or too inconsistent in their bond settings. So he devised a system: Bonds would reflect punishment ranges of the crime. Period. Felony marijuana possession – then still a neanderthal statute packing a two-to-life sentence range – was worth a $1,500 bond; burglary, $2,000 to $3,500; armed robbery, $50,000 to $100,000. Only the most dire mitigating circumstances could sway Cole from this scheme, leading criminal lawyers across the city to echo the same complaint: Bonding is a pre-indictment, pre-trial procedure; it is designed merely to insure that a suspect shows up for his subsequent legal proceedings. It is not in any way designed to be a punitive measure: After all, the man at this point is still a suspect; presumed innocent until proved guilty. To force his imprisonment by excessive bonding amounted to punishment before the fact, a back-handed denial of due process. Cole, for his part, heard the criticism, but retorted simply: ’ I don’t want this bond thing to be punitive, but dammit, if someone does something wrong, we don’t owe him anything. He ought to pay his way.”

At the same time. Cole stiffened the fine schedule in his court, an early reflection of his credo: “Punishment doesn’t mean anything unless a man is materially affected.” An initial simple drunk could cost you $25; second time, $35; after that, $100 or more. And as with the bonds, Cole was rock-ribbed in his consistency of enforcement. Even the judge’s early critics could not chastise the man for favoritism or inconsistency: He stuck to his guns, no matter who stood before him. He even developed a scheme for punishing the wealthy. The poor, he decided, were best punished by a fine, something that would “hit’em where it hurts”; the rich, however, went unscathed by a fine, no matter how heavy. So Cole began slapping jail terms on them.

The heavy bonds and fines in Cole’s court would turn out to be only a hint of a more ominous characteristic of his judicial style. Barely two years after he took the bench. Cole presided over the most active court in the state. His bench alone accounted for 27,000 cases a year – a full 40 percent of the workload of all ten Dallas justice of the peace courts. Some of this had to do with his unflagging energy and businesslike approach to the judiciary: Robert Cole has always taken pride in the “profit” his court shows each year. But a lot of it had to do with a less savory part of his style: His unabashed chumminess with law enforcement officers.

Cole, it turned out, was what attorneys call a “night rider” or a “closet cop.” Soon after taking office, Cole began strapping on his pistol and riding with Dallas police or DPS officers on drug busts and stolen property raids. His aim, he claims, was to familiarize himself with the inner workings of law enforcement. Whether that was his real motivation or not, there is little question the relationship turned out to be a beneficial one for the police: Not only could law officers rest assured of little hassle and a substantial fine from Cole on their tickets: they also found in Robert Cole a magistrate willing to arraign suspects only minutes after he’d participated in the arrest. As one criminal attorney has said: “Now you tell me if that’s going to be an arraignment by a ’fair and impartial’ magistrate, which is what the law says. It’d be like getting a ticket from an officer and then showing up in court and seeing that He’s going to be your judge.”

Cole’s unique judicial personality quickly began to raise eyebrows among attorneys and his judicial colleagues; but they were questions more of style than substance. Judges and lawyers tend to be stodgy stick-in-the-muds anyway, like any professional group – they don’t like people who are different. Courthouse whispers about Robert Cole during these early years tended to be more snobbish than anything else. Certainly Cole’s back-slapping relationship with police, his stiff and uncompromising bonds and fines, his occasional abusive outbreaks at suspects from the bench were different; perhaps they were questionable forms of conduct. But they did not in any fundamental way raise questions about the quality of justice proffered from his bench.

Cole’s next bout with public controversy, however, would. It would, in fact, bring into question the entire direction of his judicial style.

A good part of any JP’s workload is so-called “forcible entry and detainer actions” – legalese for landlord evictions. A court as productive as Cole’s can process as many as 7,000 such cases in a year. FED’s, as they are known at the courthouse, are to the JP courts what parking meter violations are to the police department.

As with traffic violations, Cole quickly set a pattern of disposing of FED’s with little judicial fanfare. Evidentiary arguments from tenant and landlord were brief: trials were avoided at all cost. There was nothing nettlesome in this, per se: Even the most rock-ribbed civil libertarian will agree that swiftness and efficiency are cornerstones of contemporary criminal justice. The rub was, Cole apparently had a clear and unwavering bias for the landlords in such litigation. Tenants began to complain of outright denial of due process in Cole’s court. If you want a rubber stamp on an eviction, courthouse rumor went, go to Bob Cole’s court.

The matter came to a head in November, 1975, when the East Dallas Tenants’ Alliance filed suit in federal court against Cole, alleging the judge systematically discriminated against low income tenants in judging FED’s. The brief read like most class action suits: vague and snip-pish, like a legal molehill trying to build itself into a mountain. After all, it probably was true that low income tenants tended to be tardy or entirely negligent in paying their rent. On the surface, at least, it appeared that Judge Cole was simply cutting through a lot of legal red tape with his quick and uncompromising judgements for landlords.

But the fine print of the suit – and a deposition Cole was forced to give – carry serious implications that Robert Cole was conducting the affairs of his bench in an arrogant and biased manner. The suit alleged that Cole systematically refused to grant jury trials to tenants, even when they paid the requisite jury fee; that Cole freely supplied pleadings, bonds, affidavits and other materials to landlords filing FED’s and did not provide the same privilege to tenants; and that Cole allowed landlords in FED’s to appear in court through a non-lawyer agent – generally an apartment manager – but would not extend the same right to tenants.

The last allegation, in fact, was the catalyst of the suit. The Tenants’ Alliance had been pushed to court action when one of its members, Peter Stein, was thrown in jail by Cole for attempting to counsel a tenant in a FED litigation. Stein had been advising a tenant that he had the right to a jury trial and ought to ask for it, if he wasn’t satisfied with the proceedings before the bench. Cole didn’t like that at all, and told Stein to sit down or he would consider citing him for contempt. Stein apparently acquiesced, turning to walk to the rear of the courtroom. On the way, however, he stopped to remind the tenant one last time that he had a right to a jury trial. That was enough for Cole: He slapped a contempt charge on Stein, resulting in a 72-hour jail stay and a $100 fine.

If the allegations in the Tenants’ Alliance suit tended to raise further suspicions about Cole’s judicial arrogance, Cole’s own deposition in the matter tended to confirm them. It is a striking document, a glimpse of Robert Cole rarely seen since he took the Dallas County courthouse by storm in 1968. The judge, pugnacious as always, began by refusing to offer his wife’s name: “I’m not going to give all that information. I don’t want my family involved in this.”

Next, Dallas Legal Services attorney John Jordan established that Cole owned rental property himself, suggesting a sympathy for landlords.

Jordan: “Have you ever owned rental property yourself?”

Cole: “Yes.”

Jordan: “Do you own rental property now?”

Cole: “Yes. I do and I don’t. Yes, I suppose I do.”

On the matter of evidence in eviction suits, Cole and Jordan had this revealing exchange:

Jordan: “How long do you spend on each forcible detainer suit?”

Cole: “Usually two or three minutes, four minutes.”

Jordan: “Do you swear the witnesses?”

Cole: “Sometimes.”

Jordan: “Sometimes?”

Cole nodded: “If there is a contested issue of fact.”

Jordan: “Do you swear witnesses every time there is a contested issue of fact?”

Cole: “No, I wouldn’t think so.”



Jordan: “If a landlord approaches your bench, being his turn, do you call for the defendant in the case?”

Cole: “Certainly.”

Jordan: “If the tenant, or defendant, is not present, what is your procedure?”

Cole: “I enter a default judgement for the landlord if that is what he is seeking.”

Jordan: “If the defendant in a forcible detainer suit comes forward to your bench and the plaintiff is not present, what is your procedure?”

Cole: “I ask him what it’s all about and try to determine what the facts are. Sometimes dismiss the case; sometimes grant judgement for the plaintiff [the landlord].”

Jordan: “You grant judgement for the plaintiff even if the plaintiff is not present in the courtroom?”

Cole: “I have, yes.”



Jordan: ” If a tenant is late, do you ever make any effort to let the landlord come back into the courtroom?”

Cole: “No.”

Jordan: “When you are calling your docket, do you have the names of the absent parties announced in the hall?”

Cole: “No.”

Jordan: “Is this a policy of yours, not to announce it in the hall?”

Cole: “I understand it’s not a requirement of the law.”

Jordan: “So your policy is if it’s not required by law, you’re not going to do it?”

Cole: “That’s right.”



Jordan: “Is my assumption that you have developed a routine for handling forcible detainer suits false?”

Cole: “Possibly.”

Jordan: “Do you or any of your employees keep statistics on requests for jury trials filed with you or your court?”

Cole: “No.”

Jordan: ” How many trials were held in your court in 1975?”

Cole: “I have no idea.”

Jordan: “Do you remember any jury trial in a forcible detainer suit in your court in 1975?”

Cole: “No.”



Jordan: “In a docket-call for forcible detainer suits, do you allow individuals who are non-named defendants to approach your bench in the company of the defendant?”

Cole: “Not normally.”

Jordan: “You allow . . . persons who were not the named plaintiff who are only standing for the plaintiff to approach the bench?”

Cole: “Uh-huh.”



Jordan: “Has there been any disruptive activity from the East Dallas Tenants’ alliance, its members, in your court?”

Cole: “Several times, yes.”

Jordan: “What were these disruptive activities?”

Cole: “Oh, just their attitude about wanting to represent people that they are not authorized to represent.”



Jordan: “How do they indicate they want to cause trouble?”

Cole: “Just their persistence.”

Jordan: “Do you remember any disruption of your courtroom before the Peter Stein incident?”

Cole: “Yes.”

Jordan: “What was that?”

Cole: “The highway patrol brought another disreputable punk in there about 3 o’clock in the morning with about five charges on him and he didn’t want to be quiet, and I just told him to be quiet.”

Jordan: “Do landlords who file in your court pay for each forcible detainer when they file it?”

Cole: “Most of them, yes.”

Jordan: “But some don’t?”

Cole: “Some time ago we had accounts with several big filers. I don’t know whether we have eliminated that. We’ve restricted it some… The issues in most forcible entry and detainer cases are so narrow and usually so agreed, there is no need for a jury trial in these cases. People simply do not seek jury trials unless they are advised by disruptive influences to seek a jury trial.”



Jordan: “Have you ever alleged that the East Dallas Tenants’ Alliance wasa Communist group?”

Cole: “Gosh, I don’t recall. That’s crossed my mind.”

Jordan: “That they are a Communist group?”

Cole: “They attempt to harrass the wealthy people or the people who might have property or something like this.”

Jordan: “Other than advising tenants of their legal rights, are there any other activities at all the East Dallas Tenants’ Alliance engages in that is har-rassing the wealthy?”

Cole: “Oh, I have no idea. I don’t follow them around and know much about them. They are very unattractive to me because of their long hair, for one thing.”



Jordan: “Under the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure isn’t it true that the jury is both the judge and the law in the facts?”

Cole: “That is right.”

Jordan: “So that in effect if a tenant or a defendant in a FED wanted to argue that the law was anything he wanted to argue, he would be in the right to have a jury hear that, wouldn’t he?”

Cole: “No.”

Jordan: “Do you have any authority for that?”

Cole: “Well, cases that are presented to a justice court have the same issues problem that they have in the county or district court…. I tell these parties that the facts that don’t bear on the issues won’t be presented in court. And I explain to them that if they cause a mistrial, they are going to be held in contempt of court and the whole thing is going to start all over.”



Cole capped his stunning testimony by retorting to a reporter who asked if he hadn’t once called the East Dallas Tenants’ Alliance “trash,” “No, but I so regard them.”

The East Dallas Tenants’ Alliance suit eventually ended with a whimper: It was transferred to Sarah Hughes’ federal court, where the irrepressible jurist hand-slapped Cole for excessive use of so-called “writ bonds” – legal instruments which allowed landlords to make an eviction stick within six days of filing initial notice. But the larger questions raised by the suit went unanswered: Did Robert Cole perceive himself not only as a judge, but as the law itself? Had he made his modest, basement-level courtroom a judicial fiefdom? Had his zeal for efficiency of justice turned to mere expediency?

These were questions that would never be fully answered. But two more situations that Cole became embroiled in would shed light on them. In 1975, a longstanding feud between Cole and the Dallas County Commissioners Court finally came to head: Since 1971, Cole and the commissioners had been at odds over the judge’s staff needs. Cole had asked for an additional clerk as early as 1970, citing the huge increase in productivity in his court. The commissioners had said no way. Cole, never one to back down from a fight, had retaliated by cutting his daily felony filings in half- creating a logjam in the DA’s office.

The commissioners court, in particular Jim Tyson, was not impressed. Indeed, Tyson took it upon himself to climb on Robert Cole’s back. Daily, the husky, wavy-haired commissioner trudged from his office in the Records Building to Cole’s court in the basement of the new courthouse. He took a chair in the corner and watched quietly as Cole’s minions processed the court’s gigantic workload. He noticed one very interesting thing right away: One of the judge’s clerks seemed to be spending a considerable amount of time on matters not related to the court – specifically, paperwork for Cole’s small but active private legal practice. Tyson wasted no time informing the commissioners and the press of his discovery, a move which, of course, made Robert Cole mad enough to spit.

Asked about Tyson’s allegations, Cole was ready with this salvo: ” The next time [he comes down here] I’m going to tell him to get out, and if he doesn’t, I’m going to put him in jail.” Tyson responded by marching down to the sheriffs office and asking which of the deputies would like to throw him in jail if Cole made good his threat. There were no takers.

The situation continued to fester through the next four years, culminating in the commissioners’ reduction of Cole’s staff from 10 employees to 9 in 1976. Cole hit the ceiling. This time he vowed to stop taking all felony filings. As an afterthought, he also sued the commissioners court, proving once and for all that the wrath of Robert Cole knows no sacred cows. The suit was eventually decided by Judge Dee Brown Walker, no stranger to controversy himself. Walker, in that grand judicial tradition, issued a non-ruling for both sides: The commissioners could not, he said, abolish the tenth staff position in Cole’s court; but when and if vacated, Cole could not fill the post either.

Many observers found that an appropriately silly conclusion to just another silly round of political hijinks at the county courthouse. When stripped of its rhetoric, the Cole/commissioners brouhaha seemed to be little more than a Democrat-dominated courthouse picking on a Republican JP, and a tough, no-nonsense judge fighting back the only way he knew how – angrily. But allegations that Cole used county employees for private business should not have been taken lightly: If true, they are serious breaches of the public trust. Moreover, they tended to confirm what a lot of observers suspected of Robert Cole all along: That he runs his court like a personal kingdom.

The question did not rest long. In the spring of 1976, Robert Cole’s judicial style was once again called in question. This time, the questions were a good deal more serious than mere use of county employees for private business. They involved, in fact, the most serious allegations that can be levied against a member of the bench: That a judge, like the criminals he processes, was capable of taking the law into his own hands.

Specifically, a Dallas County grand jury, spurred by press reports, began digging into a host of allegations of misconduct in the Dallas Police Department’s vice division. Most of the allegations centered on the activities of the vice cops: Former officers indicated that members of the vice squad frequently “stashed” narcotics confiscated in raids; that they “planted” the contraband on unsuspecting victims just to make busts; that they used the dope to pay off informants; that they employed phony or doctored warrants in making drug raids.

The last area of allegation was, in its way, the most troublesome: It called into question not only the police, but the Dallas judiciary. If cops were using phony warrants, some judge had to be making them available.

Two judges were called before the grand jury. One was Robert Cole. Though the proceedings of the grand jury remain cloaked in secrecy, it is a safe presumption that Cole was queried about the matter of providing blank signed warrants to officers. It also is a more than safe presumption that he categorically denied any such activity. The grand jury believed him: No official action was taken against Cole, or anyone, involved in the investigation. Robert Cole was exonerated.

But the exoneration was more than a little backhanded. The grand jury in its final report said only, “In some instances [regarding the matter of falsification of search warrants] there was insufficient evidence to support indictment, and in others the Statute of Limitations had run.”

Cole, for his part, still adamantly denies the charges, and is more than a little mad that the grand jury even bothered him with it. As he says, “Maybe I am a little tough on people in this court. But by God, I’m decent.”



Just how good – or how bad – a judge Robert Cole is, will likely remain an unanswered question. For one thing, Cole has always been able to thumb his nose at his critics, saying, as Vince Lombardi might have, “You can question my methods, but not my results.” And it’s true: On the matter of productivity, Robert Cole has always been irreproachable. Barely a year after taking the bench, his court absorbed between 25 and 40 percent of the entire Dallas JP workload. During 1976, Cole’s court disposed of more than 22,000 cases – twice the output of the county’s next most productive court; seven times as productive as JP Vernon Chowning’s Lancaster-area court. Moreover, Cole’s court was once again the only JP bench of the county’s 12 to run a surplus on fee and fine income over expenses. Cole’s court turned a nifty $112,000 “profit” in 1976 – while the 11 other JP courts ran anywhere from one to 75 thousand dollars in the red.

A lot of lawyers will argue that quantity of justice has no relation to quality; that, in fact, Cole’s zeal for numbers is precisely the problem. But Robert Cole doesn’t buy that. The bottom line of justice, he says, is that it simply be done – one way or the other. Numbers do mean something: They mean a judge is doing his job. Businessmen, politicians, police officers, even artists are judged by their productivity. Why shouldn’t judges be?

Cole can make that argument even more compelling by adding one simple question: Why does Dallas have twelve JP courts, when one is handling a good third of the workload, and several others only two or three percent of the burden? It is a question the Dallas County Commissioners Court certainly has never answered; in fact, the court has rather flagrantly ignored it. Despite the fact that simple administrative reforms could provide as few as six courts a busy, but manageable Gocket, the commissioners have allowed JP courts to swell to twice that number. And in some cases, the expansion has smelled distinctly of raw politics: Is it any accident, for example, that a new JP slot was created for a black judge, just as retiring city councilman George Allen was making noises about running against Commissioner Jim Tyson? Another unanswerable question. But we do know that George Allen is now a JP and not a particularly productive one – and we do know that Tyson ran unopposed in 1976.

Those who don’t buy Cole’s numbers argument cannot ignore his ultimate defense: the voters in his JP Precinct 1. Cole likes to point to another impressive bottom line here, two successful re-election bids, despite the widespread carping about his judicial style. Even the Dallas Criminal Bar Association’s well-organized and well-monied attempt to unseat the judge in 1976 fell on deaf constituent ears. Cole smothered challenger Pat Robertson by landslide proportions.

All of which gives Cole the last laugh on his critics. The judge is probably right when he says his style reflects the general public mood about crime and punishment. If Robert Cole is so Godawful terrible, let the voters say so. Otherwise, button your lip, or the judge is liable to get mad.

Cole detractors, of course, quite reasonably argue that the root of the problem is that judges are still elected in Texas. The bench requires a special kind of man, they say, and a popular vote does not always ensure that that man winds up in the courtroom. More often, in fact, it allows demagogues and ideologues to administer the law, men who use it to build personal political fiefdoms and to proselytize for their personal prejudices. Politics and the law never have and never will mix well.

That may well be right, but if so, it is only one of several serious questions that can be raised about the JP system in general. Whatever else one thinks about Robert Cole and his judicial style, he does reflect a well-rooted historical tradition. He is, in his way, a justice of the peace to the letter of the law. If there’s a problem with Robert Cole, it may not be the man, but the system.

Justice of the Peace courts reach back to 14th century English common law. In 1361, King Edward III created “keepers of the peace” to quell disturbances caused by homecoming soldiers from the Hundred Years’ war and social and economic turmoil caused by the Black Death plague. Like our modern JP’s, Britain’s keepers of the peace were laymen – in most cases, wealthy landed gentry – who were given broad and informal law enforcement authorities. Early keepers of the peace were given statutory authority in 22 different areas, ranging from punishment of fugitive laborers to inquiries into weights and measures.

More importantly, the original JP’s were curious judicial hybrids: They were arbiters of the law, to be sure, mandated to “chastise” lawbreakers. But they were also charged with “pursuing, arresting and taking” criminals. To this day, Justices of the Peace are allowed to carry guns on the job and sanctioned to make arrests when necessary.

Most importantly, keepers of the peace were required to “make law.” Because they were created out of crisis, in many cases the conflicts and transgressions they had to arbitrate had no clear remedy in the law. Often, they were faced with matters of so-called “private law”: Disputes between individual citizens as opposed to disputes between a citizen and the State. Such matters rarely had clear answers set forth in the law. The JP was forced to resort to his own horse sense about the matter, or in some cases, to order the parties to work it out themselves, with the threat that if no compromise were reached he would punish both of them.

This tradition sustained well in the United States, particularly in the Southwest, where JP’s were needed to keep control over a wild and reckless frontier. And even during the wholesale specialization of courts during the 20th century, the JP court has retained a good measure of its original vagueness of authority and informality of procedure.

The modern JP court, like its predecessors, is the very bowels of the criminal judicial system. It handles just about anything and everything other state courts don’t want. Even its constitutional definition is amorphous, at best: “Justices of the peace shall have jurisdiction in criminal matters of all cases where the penalty or fine . . . may not be more than two hundred dollars, and in civil matters where the amount in controversy is two hundred dollars or less; and such other jurisdiction as may be provided by law. . .”

That includes a multitude of sins. JP’s handle arraignments and bonding of arrested suspects; they process all manner of traffic violations, and other minor crimes, such as “drunk and disorderly”; they arbitrate eviction suits, and a myriad of other petty disputes between individuals, some over only a few dollars; they file peace bonds, tax suits, write up search warrants, conduct drivers license hearings, issue birth and death certificates, adjudicate mental illness warrants and conduct examining trials in criminal cases. Justices of the peace are not judges; they are legal ward heelers.

Which makes Robert Cole right when he says, “The police are not law enforcement. The courts are.” In a sense, his court is, both in historical tradition and constitutional sanction. Robert Cole is not arrogating his authority when he listens to both sides of an eviction suit, and quite blithely decides neither side is right. He is operating within his legal sanctions. Robert Cole is not flaunting his power when he rides with police and participates in arrests; he is well within the letter of the law. Robert Cole is not prostituting his bench to his personal whim and fancy when he slaps a $1500 bond on a young marijuana offender. He’s exercising his rightful discretion as a judge. When Robert Cole refuses to marry a racially mixed couple – which he has done in the past – he is not flexing his prejudice outside the limits of the law. “I don’t have to marry anybody if I don’t want to,” he says. And he’s right. Indeed, there are a lot of things a JP doesn’t have to do, and Robert Cole has always been one to take advantage of that. “My job is to enforce the law,” he says. “Nothing more, nothing less.” The way the law stands, Robert Cole is doing his job as well as anyone.



Three forty-six in the afternoon and Robert Cole is mad. He still rambles from topic to topic, but his anger is slowly coming into focus. He is mad at people who don’t understand him.

“People get all upset because I won’t marry a black and a white. Heck, a Catholic priest won’t marry people if they’ve been married before.” His stern, handsome face turns inquisitive. Robert Cole, despite his pugnaciousness, desperately wants people to see his point of view. He is a loner, but not necessarily by choice.

“Sure, I ride with police. Have for years. If I was with the police and some criminal fired on me or a policeman, I’d shoot him. I’d kill him. Wouldn’t bother me. I’ve shot all kinds of animals, and that’s how I’d look at him – as just another animal.

“Lawyers, it’s always the lawyers who criticize me. You see, there’s a professional difference between a lawyer who represents criminals and lawyers who represent crime. When a man like Jim Mattox reduces the penalty for possession of marijuana, he’s representing crime. When lawyers go headhunting for the leading symbol of law and order here – and I’m talking about myself- they’re representing crime.

“Am I an angry man? I don’t know. Don’t think so. Just frustrated.” He pauses to collect his thoughts. “When I mellow a little, it’ll be time for me to leave . . .”

With that, the judge pulls his sagging but still athletic frame up from his desk and marches military-style into his courtroom. A young black woman awaits him with anxious eyes.

“Where were you the last time we called you?” Cole thunders.

“I was at home,” she says meekly.

“Hmmm.

“You do realize that you were judged against for the money you owe this man, and presently are in contempt of court for not showing up on the 30th?

“What do you do for a living?”

“AFDC.”

“What?” His voice rises.

“AFDC. Welfare.”

“You went down and bought furniture on welfare?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t you reckon you ought to find any kind of job since you don’t have any?”

The girl is silent. Cole’s urge to lecture recedes, and he asks the girl if she’s willing to pay her creditor on the spot. She nods. Cole’s face grows pensive, as he shuffles through her file.

“Okay, well then I’ll dismiss these contempt citations and you won’t have to go to jail.” A smile crosses his lips and then the judge bursts into a wide-mouthed rumble of a laugh. He looks to a visitor in the rear of the courtroom, and says, “How ’bout that? Just old compassionate me, right?” He laughs again, robustly and sincerely. It is not clear, however, what or whom he is laughing at.