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LAW
& ORDER AT HAVERFORD, PART 2
Tom King’s Daily Rounds (in which the Director of Safety and
Security teaches Education Law; second of a series.)
Teaching
At around 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, Tom King checks
with his wife Debi, a district manager for Hallmark Cards, makes
weekend plans, then pulls out of the parking space behind the Doug
in his silver Saturn Vue, fast. Everything with him is amped up.
We’re heading for the Yardley campus of Holy Family University,
where he teaches one night a week. He has a master’s in education,
and so instructs grad students who mostly teach in high and elementary
schools, in Education Law...They’re very bright, but he pushes
them. “It’s a matter of metabolism,” he says,
chowing down on an iced coffee at McDonald’s... “When
I was a kid, I had a terrible bone infection in my jaw...We didn’t
know what was going to happen. Ever since, I’ve been
driven.” He screels into the Holy Family parking lot, having
gotten to Bucks County from Haverford on Rte 1 north, then I-95,
in 45 minutes, despite the heavy rush-hour traffic. “Come
on, Lombardi!” he urges. “My kids are waitin’.”
Seventeen of them, tonight: He fiddles with his audio-visual
slide set-up until a techno-minded female student fixes it for him.
He bounces around, sometimes sliding a little, setting up the whiteboard
with black marker: Civil Law, Tort Law, Criminal Law, Policies &
Procedures:
“Who was here last week?’’ he asks.
“Who remembers the basic stages of due process [in criminal
cases]?”
No one speaks: “Arrest!, right? That’s always
the starting point. Then?”
“Preliminary arraignment,” a spectacled student, slightly
older, volunteers.
“Right. They have up to 36 hours. You must be formally informed
of the charges. Then what?”
“The preliminary hearing,” the girl who’d fixed
the slide projector says. “Ten days.”
“To set a trial date,” King adds.
“Next comes the trial,” says a woman in the back row.
“Which can be a matter of hours or days, or can go for weeks,
like Enron, or the big organized crime trials...What’s next?”
“Plea bargain!” offers a curly-haired youngster.
“That’s if the defense knows it’s losing, and
if prosecution is feeling expedient...Then?"
“Sentencing,” says the same student.
“Right, Demetrius!” King jokes. “Then
– appeal. Which in murder cases, can last for 10
years, or more. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, went on and on, and
he committed his final crimes in Florida, which in his day [70s],
was a very tough state for executions, almost as tough as Texas
– though not any more...
“Does everybody have this as I have it?” – King’s
drawn a kind of due process bar diagram on the whiteboard –
“this is not only ridiculous-looking but kind of obscene,”
he snorts, and energetically erases it, drawing laughs . . .
“All right. Trials Court. Appeals Court. Supreme
Court. Appeals reviews Trials, then either rejects or sustains.
Defense can move all the way to Supreme, or sometimes, as in the
Missouri case that broke the juvenile death penalty law in 2005,
the prosecution, unhappy with Appeals Court rulings, may
push for a Supreme Court decision [Missouri Appeals courts had ruled
against the Missouri Trials Court’s death sentence in Roper
vs. Simmons, a 1993 juvenile murder case, on 8th Amendment
grounds (cruel and unusual punishment.)] “In that case, though,
the Supreme Court upheld the Missouri Appeals Court...” [And
the defendant got life]. He shrugs:
“Civil cases vs. Criminal cases. Standards of
probability and belief. Much different. Example: O.J. found not
guilty [in criminal court] by reasonable certainty. But in civil
cases, all you need is 51 percent reasonable certainty, and so Juice
lost his subsequent civil trial, brought by his dead wife’s
family . . .[In the criminal trial] the L.A. prosecutors had all
kinds of good stuff against O.J., but the defense team was able
to create ‘reasonable doubt’ – the little glove
deal, remember? Or was that before your time? Wasn’t that
long ago, was it?”
He gets another laugh.
He deadpans: “Lesson? The rich will receive due process. But
the poor may not get it.”
He turns to work on the whiteboard again, and a cup on the desk
clatters to the floor. “No throwing things at teacher!"
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| John
Castrege, One Card Systems Administrator |
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“Okay. Education and the American legal system.
Who should control education? State government interests? Answer:
State government, largely...Federal government interests? An issue
with developing science...Parents? They think they do.
Students? No say, like non-tenured teachers. Teachers and others?
Not a lot – though this varies by institution and school district...
“What happens in a difference of opinion? Mediation.
Arbitration. Prior court decisions. Two forms of ADR [alternative
dispute resolution]. In mediation, you have a way to avoid the courtroom
in civil matters. Non-binding suggestions, by a knowledgeable, neutral
party...Arbitration is more formal, handled by more ‘official’
authorities and is often binding, though not always...Who has jurisdiction?
Only as good as the state – you’ll be marinated
in these things...
“Let’s say you’re a teacher, and
you have a dispute with your school district. Do you have the right
to sue? Or appeal a ruling you don’t like? 8,000 writs of
certiorari! [petitions for appeal.] You may never see them
again, but they’re good for parties...”
“Yeah,” snickers Demetrius. “Confetti.”
“Give you two cases: Cameron vs. Bd. of Education
in Ohio; Boring vs. Buncombe County in North Carolina."
“Jane Cameron [an elementary school teacher],
was ‘not terminated,’ but her contract was allowed to
lapse. No reasons were given. She sued for false dismissal on the
grounds that the school district objected to her being an unwed
mother, but wasn’t able to legally demonstrate motive. School
officials denied it! Nothing she could do.
“Margaret Boring, a high school English and
drama teacher, was transferred to a less desirable school from the
one near her home because, she charged, she was being punished for
staging a play about a divorced mother with a lesbian daughter,
and another daughter with an illegitimate child. [Some students’
parents had objected.] When she filed a complaint [1994] that she
was being retaliated against [for exposing students to harsh reality],
thus violating her freedom of speech under the 1st and 14th amendments,
and her due process rights [she was transferred without consultation],
she was at first denied, but later upheld on the grounds that in
selecting and directing the play, she was constitutionally protected.”
The board’s action against her was ruled as illegitimate pedagogical
concern...
“So you see, Demetrius, and all of you guys?
The system isn’t perfect, but you’ve gotta keep punching
. . .
“All right. That concludes the first half of
today’s class. Only two more hours...”
King, hands on hips, looks around amusedly at all the dismayed faces...It’s
7:55 p.m., and he’s been talking since 5:30. He laughs and
waves his arms:
“Only kidding. Go on, pack up. See ya next week.”
*
He’s been up since six a.m., talking to his
son Michael, 21, who’s doing a bit in community college before
returning to Penn State. He’s had a morning of meetings –
Dick Wynn, Haverford VP for Finance and Administration and Treasurer,
his direct boss, and with some faculty (concerned about parking!);
he’s talked to Debi about buying a house closer in, since
their Bucks County home is a long haul every day; he’s done
a full workout in the new gym around the corner from his office,
and now he’s shepherding me down to the Warrington train,
so I can connect with 30th Street Station:
“Talking is the whole thing,” he says
seriously. “When I was a cop, I was a good ‘closer’
not a tough guy. I’d get somebody in the room there and find
a way to break their story...A woman who’d drowned her baby
in the bathtub because her husband couldn’t stand its screaming...Cooked
up a lie about some black teenagers in a car snatching the kid from
her on a corner in NE Philly, but why would they do that? And where
was the baby? Then she switches and says it was white teenagers.
Next she says ‘I did a bad thing,’ and she’s ready
to take the fall herself, even though her husband was eventually
found guilty of disposing of a part of his child’s body...So
he gets some time for filing false reports and another misdemeanor,
and she gets life without parole...
“You talk to people. You see through them, but
not in a hard way. You select the right people for the right jobs,
and you help them to do what they want to do – like Nora,
Mark and John.
“My only talent here is doing that – seeing in Security
that we have the right fit. It takes some time to get there. And
it’s an ongoing thing...”
— John Lombardi
*for Steve Heacock
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