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TALES OF THE CITY

Why Judge Buchmeyer must go
By John Bloom |

FEDERAL “JUDGE” Jerry Buchmeyer wanted to meet me at 5 p.m. at the Dallas Bar. This is perhaps the first reason he should be impeached. While thousands of Dallas lawyers were wailing for relief, begging for decisions, and overcharging their clients, Buchmeyer was settling in at the Belo Mansion, headquarters of the Dallas Bar Association, where he had ordered his first Scotch by 4:45. I found out later that he didn’t care about my coming to the Dallas Bar so much as he just wanted to find a Dallas bar.

There are many other reasons why Jerry Buchmeyer must go. Ever since 1979, when Jimmy Carter first allowed him to hold “court” in Dallas, I’ve been collecting a file on Buchmeyer. The first item reads as follows:

“Carter, Jimmy, President: ’You mean once they’re appointed, that’s it?’-April 4, 1980 (letter to Senator Lloyd Bentsen)”

No, that’s most definitely not “it.” There’s still time to restore sanity, decorum, and dullness to the bench. The Founding Fathers, with amazing foresight, knew that this might happen and provided safeguards. My bill of particulars against this clown in judges’ clothing follows:

● Buchmeyer first came to my attention in 1979. when he was still an alleged lawyer at Thompson & Knight, doing antitrust work and contributing scholarly articles to the Dallas Bar Association Headnotes. I suspected his legal training at once, especially when, in the space of three months, he made technical points through extensive footnote references to Ed McMahon and Karnack, the Mystic from the East (in aworker’s compensation case); the “classic” Yertle the Turtle (Dr. Seuss, 1958); and a very old Woody Allen monologue (in a divorce case).

● Fearing the damage such an individual could do, I continued to watch him upon his appointment to the bench. His first case was fittingly unusual, that of a Fired Safeway checker alleging reverse discrimination. After the verdict, Buchmeyer was relaxing in chambers when his secretary announced that “Twelve people are here to see you, your honor.” The jury foreman walked in and sheepishly asked if they could all have their picture taken with the judge. Not only did Buchmeyer participate in this travesty of judicial decorum, but some say he unabashedly “mugged” for the camera.

“Ever since then,” he admitted to me later, unaware of the dossier I was compiling, “I’ve invited every jury back to chambers after trial. They ask questions I never heard in twenty-one years of practice. But one thing they always say is ’How dumb do those lawyers think we are?’ I like to tell them that at the legal seminars.”

●Unfortunately, there are moral issues as well. Buchmeyer once wrote very admiringly of an opinion that declared a prostitute in Magnolia, Georgia, a public utility. Then, in his overpraised “landmark” decision in the Baker v. Wade homosexual-rights case, Buchmeyer went out of his way to embarrass the august members of the Texas Legislature with extensively footnoted discourses on the differences between “public bestiality” and “private bestiality”; the definition of “deviate”; and a gratuitous harangue about District Attorney Henry Wade’s brief defending laws against “a mole engaging in deviate sexual intercourse with another mole.” Buchmeyer refused to admit this was just a typographical error and speculated aloud with several law clerks about exactly what deviate mole sex is like!



I WISH THIS were all. Far from it. He looks harmless enough, this short, compact man with a throaty, understated delivery. But behind his shelf of Federal Supplements, Texas Law Reviews, and Uncommonly Silly Delaying Tactics, rests a stack of pirated Captain Marvel comics (Detective Comics, Inc. v. Fawcett Publications, Inc., 4 F.R.D. 237). Buchmeyer is the only living expert on the series of court decisions involving the titanic struggle between Superman and his courtroom nemesis, Captain Marvel, whom Buchmeyer describes as “the greatest superhero of them all and the world’s mightiest mortal”-contra the arguments of renowned attorney Louis Nizer and preeminent Judge Learned Hand, both of whom believed that Captain Marvel was nothing more than a plagiarized, copyright-infringing moocher off Superman. Captain Marvel was declared a ripoff and vanished from the landscape of human (and superhuman) history. This miscarriage bothered Buchmeyer when it happened (as an oilfield kid in Overton, he shouted “Shazam” and “Holy Moley!” long before kids had access to mind-altering substances) and it still bothers him now. “Captain Marvel was a muck better character” said the Honorable Judge Buchmeyer. “He had a sense of humor, too. Did Superman have a sense of humor? How can they say that’s plagiarism?”

I hope you’re beginning to understand what we’re dealing with here.

● Buchmeyer is also an enemy of the family. In a carefully reasoned opinion, he onceventured the view that all Dallas Countycourts dealing with marriage should be abolished on the grounds that they make thecounty “a party to gambling contracts.”

● Despite having lathered four childrenhimself, Buchmeyer once authored a seriesof pornographic nursery rhymes, fashionedby taking beloved children’s verses andblacking out certain words, as in “GeorgiePorgie, pudding and pie/ -ed the girls andmade them cry.” Buchmeyer has never revealed the exact words he had in mind forthese rhymes, but suffice to say that his complete version of “Peter, Peter, PumpkinEater” will never appear in this magazine.

But it’s in the courtroom itself that the real travesty has been allowed to proceed these past six years, and it is in Buchmeyer’s courtroom that the nation has been repeatedly embarrassed:

● Ruling on a class-action suit broughtagainst the Army and Air Force ExchangeService, Buchmeyer rendered three pages ofhis opinion in rhyming iambic hexameter, in apparent homage to “The Raven.” He should have been prosecuted forthwith for failing to scan.

●Buchmeyer, whose job involves decidingwho is and is not an expert witness, offeredthis definition: “A specialist really doesn’tknow any more than you do, but he’s betterorganized and has slides.”

●In the case of a former member of theU.S. Army elite Rangers, suing the government because he had been “brainwashed”into a new identity and then the bureaucracyhad “given away his identity to someoneelse,” Buchmeyer took a personal interest inthe case, hoping that someday he would beasked to rule on a) whether a man has a rightto trial if he refuses to answer the first question asked him {“State your name, please”),b) whether an identity can be repossessed(Buchmeyer sought references in Camus andSartre), and c) whether it would beestablishing a bad precedent to award reliefto the ex-Ranger, just because his identitywas forcibly removed, when there are thousands of people walking around in NorthDallas who have never had visible identiti esand never will. Unfortunately, the world vvasdeprived of Buchmeyer’s landmark thinkingon this case. The ex-Ranger, who for severalmonths believed he was the illegitimate sonof Mike Todd, suddenly remembered that hewas Phillip II. With impeccable legal reasoning, he then realized that his suit was not against the U.S. but against the British government. He dropped his action and disappeared, presumably headed for London.

● Finally, Buchmeyer’s death sentence comes from his own lips. When I asked him what his favorite case in law was, he went into a long dissertation on the fine points of the Dockery Case, the legendary 1934 case in which one Hattie Beatty, a prostitute, asked an elderly Katy Railroad signal-tower operator named Dockery if she could go into the tower with him in order to learn about “the mechanical mechanism and operation of defendant’s said signal tower.” When her knee touched an open electrical switch, she was thrown to the floor, injured her back and spinal column, and sued for $10,000. The answer to her complaint stated that “in all truthfulness the only mechanical contrivance or unique lever about the said tower in which the plaintiff expressed any interest whatsoever was that which hung on the person of the said Dockery.” It goes on to say that if Hattie had handled her professional responsibilities in “the good old American way,” instead of doing it in an upright position, thereby “departing from well-recognized precedent,” she would not have left Dockery “unrewarded and bewildered” as a fast train suddenly appeared on the horizon, and caused considerable alarm. Result; the railroad’s attorney read the answer aloud to the jury, and poor Hattie, humiliated by the laughter, dropped her suit.

“My courtroom is not a serious courtroom,” says Buchmeyer shamelessly. “Most courtrooms are dour and dictatorial; therefore, they’re unnatural. A courtroom will always breed humor, because it’s full of human beings in a totally artificial environment. If you accept that, if you acknowledge the human reaction, then everyone relaxes. And that makes for a better trial and a better decision. The more natural the lawyer is, the more persuasive he is. The more relaxed a jury is, the more it retains and the more it listens. I’m always honest with a jury. If we’re gonna bore the hell out of the jury because we have to read something to them, then I just say, ’We’re gonna bore the hell out of you now. Sorry.’ And then they’re comfortable with it. Juries are always smarter than any lawyer thinks they are.”

You see what I mean?

“Being a judge really isn’t too difficult,” he once told his old friends at Thompson & Knight. “The secret seems to be to act as if you have known all your life what you just learned ten minutes ago.”

How long will the man be allowed to demean the office?

“I still can’t overcome the feeling,” he admits, “that the real judge is going to walk into the courtroom and tell me what to do.”

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