Author’s Note: I’ve written a memoir about cases I tried during my 30-year career as a trial lawyer in Maryland. This one tells the story of a criminal trial held in Easton in 1992. It involves a fight on Tilghman Island between a group of men from the Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and watermen from the Eastern Shore. The facts and the law were uniquely challenging. During the trial, I felt as though I was participating in a dramatic play, one where the script was yet to be written.
Play on Maryland’s Eastern Shore
A TRIAL IS LIKE A PLAY. The participants have specific sorts of roles—some are cast as victims, others as perpetrators, still others as witnesses. There’s a script determined by real events, but susceptible to editing and interpretation. The lawyers are like directors, deciding the order in which cast members take the stage and how the script is massaged and presented. The judge is the stage manager and the jury, the audience. Often, there are props—a gun, a torn shirt, a vial of pills, a diagram of an accident scene, a plaster cast of a tire impression. And when it’s over, there’ll be a verdict, a bit like a critic’s review.
One of the strangest dramas I ever participated in involved events that occurred during a bachelor party held one hot August day in the summer of 1992. I gave it the title The Bachelor Party from Hell. By the time I found myself involved in this “play,” I had tried scores of jury trials. And yet, so much about this particular drama was entirely new to me: the location where the events took place; the cast of characters; the storyline; the courthouse where the case was staged; the judge who managed it.
The Location
The drama unfolded on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Though I had lived in Maryland for many years and thought I knew her well, this case demonstrated to me that I only knew one side of her.
The beautiful and bountiful Chesapeake Bay, North America’s largest estuary, bisects the country’s seventh state more or less longitudinally. Marylanders refer to the two sides according to the closest shore of the bay. The Western Shore includes the urban areas of Baltimore, Annapolis, and the heavily populated Maryland suburbs of DC. The landscape here also includes lush hills, valleys, and sections of the Piedmont and Appalachian Mountain ranges. The Eastern Shore is flat, low-lying, and dotted with small and midsized towns, farms, chicken coops, crabbers, and oystermen working the bay. The eastern shore of the Eastern Shore is comprised of thirty-one miles of coast along the Atlantic Ocean and the vibrant tourist town of Ocean City. The Eastern Shore was also the place of bondage for two of the country’s most famous African Americans—Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas.
Douglas, who was enslaved on a plantation twelve miles from the courthouse where I would try this case, described the area in his memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom, this way:
It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district . . . surrounded by a white population of the lowest order . . . and among slaves, who seemed to ask, ‘Oh! What’s the use?’ every time they lifted a hoe, that I . . . was born, and spent the first years of my childhood.
There’s always been a tension between Marylanders who live on the Eastern Shore and those residing across the bay. In fact, throughout the state’s history, people on the Eastern Shore have felt so alienated from the rest of the state they’ve threatened to secede. As recently as 1998, two state senators introduced a bill in the General Assembly to allow Eastern Shore residents to hold a vote on secession. Reporting on this effort, an article in the Baltimore Sun, described the senators as “frustrated by government regulation and big city ‘bullies.’” The particular subject that got under the skin of these legislators was a proposal by the governor for mandatory manure controls to combat outbreaks of Pfiesteria, a microscopic alga, in the bay’s tidal waters. This suggestion was made after scientists concluded that the runoff of chicken manure that Eastern Shore farmers applied to their fields allowed Pfiesteria to bloom and turn toxic. Given the importance of chicken farms to the shore’s economy, these senators’ concern was not surprising. Nevertheless, as with other calls for succession, this one didn’t go anywhere.
For over fifty years I resided in either DC or on Maryland’s Western Shore. My familiarity with the Eastern Shore was limited to vacationing in Ocean City. I remember the days before the Bay Bridge was built in 1951 when my parents, brother, and I would pile into our 1949 Chevy and begin the long drive to our beach rental. My mother packed sandwiches to eat along the way—salami and cheese on rye bread, my father’s favorite, and half-sour pickles, her home remedy for my carsickness.
Hours later, after the sandwiches were long gone; after we’d played as many car games as my parents could create to keep us amused; after my father had admonished my brother and me numerous times to stop fighting over who was taking up more than half of the car’s back seat, we’d arrive in Annapolis where we’d wait on line with all the other car loads to board the ferry that would take us to the other side of the bay. The wait was usually longer than the voyage itself. That short “sea” crossing on a rusty old ferryboat made it feel as though we were going to a different world, a place strange and exotic. But Ocean City proved itself to be neither strange nor exotic. It was a tourist town filled with other vacationers just like us. It was only in preparing for and trying the case of The Bachelor Party from Hell that I came to see how different the “real” Eastern Shore was.
The Cast of Characters
The case involved my client and five of his men friends. I don’t remember what they did for a living, but they all were college graduates from upper or middle-class homes in Montgomery County, located on the Western Shore and among the wealthiest counties in the country. One of these men was getting married and a plan was hatched to throw a bachelor party at a participant’s family vacation home on Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore’s Talbot County.
Separated from the mainland by a small drawbridge over the Knapp’s Narrows Channel, Tilghman Island is less than three miles long and about a mile wide. The island is named for Matthew Tilghman, a merchant, planter, and a delegate to the Continental Congress. English settlers first arrived on the Island in 1656. Beginning in 1741, Mathew Tilghman and his descendants owned the island for over 100 years, farming fruits, vegetables, grains, and raising livestock on the land. In the 1830s, the Tilghman family began to sell off portions of the farm to people who were interested in harvesting the bounty from the bay. By the end of the Civil War, farming had taken a back seat to a booming oyster industry.
Now considered a tourist destination, at the time of my trial the island was known mostly as a watermen’s community. These were not recreational, but rather commercial fisherman—most of them oystermen supplying a local processing center. Fishing was serious business here, and the men who did it were a hardworking, hard-drinking lot.
ACT I—Scene I: Harrison’s
The Western Shore men arrived on Tilghman Island around midday on a hot Saturday in August. After a baseball game and after a performance by the obligatory stripper, they were still looking to “party.” So they walked to Harrison’s Chesapeake House, located at the opposite end of the island from where they were staying.
At the time, Harrison’s Chesapeake House was the only restaurant and bar on the island. It was owned by Levin (“Buddy”) Harrison. Buddy was born on the south end of the island in a boarding house, established on the island in 1898 by his great-grandparents. Harrison’s parents bought a house on the north end of the island that Buddy would turn into a restaurant and inn. He also captained a charter fishing boat moored at that location. In his 2014 obituary, Buddy Harrison was described as warm, personable and a “keen businessman.” But, as skilled as Buddy was at diplomacy, what happened on the evening of the bachelor party was more than even he could handle.
When the Western Shore men arrived at the bar, they found it packed with watermen and a few women. It was never clear how the fighting started. One version was that it had something to do with one of the Western Shore guys dancing with one of the watermen’s “gals.” Another version involved an exchange of provocative words and challenges. What was clear was that the watermen were none too pleased with these interlopers on their territory. The large amount of alcohol consumed by both factions, no doubt, amplified the animus.
I always envisioned the fight in the bar, better described as a brawl, as something you might see in an old B-Western. Not only were there fisticuffs, but also, at least one person was hit over the head with a beer bottle. Though Harrison had no control over the scene, he did manage to call the police and get the crowd to leave. There’s no police presence on the island. The lone cop who ultimately arrived had to come from Easton, twenty-two miles away.
ACT I—Scene II: The Island Road
Leaving Harrison’s in a hurry, the bachelor partyers decided to hightail it back to the house where they were staying at the far end of the island, about two miles away. Leaving the island, a better choice, was impossible. They’d left their cars at the house, and, in any event, they couldn’t count on the drawbridge being down. So they walked the island’s only road, followed by a crowd of over fifty angry, highly intoxicated people, mostly men.
I’ve never been in a physical fight myself—never even witnessed one. The men I got to know in this case taught me a lot. They told me that they were terrified and hoped to get to the safety of the house as soon as possible. Running, they thought, would only make things worse. It would show fear, which they were certain would trigger greater aggression. As the crowd behind them grew closer and angrier, they decided they could not escape. So instead, they chose to defend themselves. “Defend” is the operative word here, from both a practical and legal perspective.
Thankfully, no one had actual weapons. These were the days when carrying a gun in Maryland was illegal. But, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Western Shore men made their own weapons. One of them pulled up a flagpole; another found a beach umbrella lying in someone’s yard. My client uprooted a post, atop of which was a mailbox. And then these men turned around and faced the mob. My client picked as his target, the biggest guy he saw, someone who seemed to be leading the charge. Though there was, at trial, some testimony that this man, E.M., may have been carrying a tree branch, it is more likely that he was completely unarmed. I can’t now remember them, but I’m sure words were exchanged before my client hit E.M. over the head, fracturing his skull and stunning the rest of the crowd.
Moments later, the lone policeman arrived and threaded his way through the crowd. Managing to calm everyone down, he called for a helicopter to transport the victim to a trauma center in Baltimore and arrested my client for assault.
ACT II: The Trial
The Stage—The Courthouse
The Talbot County Courthouse was built in 1794 and remodeled in 1958. In front is a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier carrying a Confederate battle flag. Erected in 1916, it’s known locally as the Talbot Boys statue. On its granite base are the names of ninety-six local Confederate soldiers. The inscription reads “1861-1865 C.S.A.” In 2021 the Talbot County Counsel voted to take it down. But it’s yet to be removed. Though I don’t remember seeing it, I must have passed this extremely large statue a number of times as I entered and left the courthouse. I’m glad I didn’t take note of it since it would have made me feel as though I not only was in a strange land but also that I had traveled back to an unfamiliar time.
The courtroom itself is unremarkable. While not the largest, nor the smallest courtroom I’ve ever been in, it’s ample in size. The jury box sits under a window. The table for the prosecution is positioned, as is customary, close to the jury. The defense table is adjacent to it with a narrow space in between the two. The witness stand sits above the jurors and below the judge’s bench. There’s no witness waiting room, so witnesses come in directly from the hallway outside the courtroom.
The Stage Manager—The Judge
The chief judge in the jurisdiction at the time, Judge H., had previously been the chief prosecutor in Talbot County. I’d never met him and didn’t know much about him. A couple of weeks before the trial date, he scheduled a conference to go over voir dire, the questions he would ask prospective jurors to ascertain if they were biased. In my prior experience, lawyers gave these questions to the judge the day of the trial since in the jurisdictions where I routinely practiced, judges weren’t assigned to cases until then. But here the chief judge had assigned himself the case and wanted the questions ahead of time.
I worked diligently on these questions because the case had gotten a great deal of local publicity. Additionally, given the relatively small size of the county’s population, it was possible that some of the members of the jury pool had family or friends with personal knowledge of the events. Pretrial publicity and personal knowledge have the potential to influence a juror to the extent that he or she needs to be excluded.
At the pretrial conference in Judge H.’s chambers I presented my voir dire questions. When he rejected all of them in favor of the “boilerplate” ones he always used in criminal cases, I wondered why he had bothered to request them in the first place. He must have seen the displeasure on my face because looking down at an antique jade ring on my finger, he said: “Is that a mood ring? If so, I seem to have put you in a bad mood.” Had I answered him truthfully, I would have said, “A bad mood doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel. I’m furious.” Instead, I just smiled politely and forced a chuckle.
The reason Judge H. gave for not being willing to ask the questions I formulated to locate people with potential bias was something along the lines of, “If I ask your questions, we won’t find anyone to serve.” This is a bogus reason since high-profile cases are tried all the time in this country. Judges and lawyers are able to eliminate biased jurors with a properly formulated voir dire and follow-up questions. The real problem is when questions designed to smoke out bias aren’t asked. That’s when a verdict may be tainted and unjust.
In lieu of accepting my questions, Judge H. advised me to watch out for people with certain surnames. These were families that were longtime residents of Tilghman Island who wouldn’t take kindly to anyone from the Western Shore, like my client and maybe even me. There were only a few names because, he said, “Tilghman Island people swim in a limited gene pool.” The judge’s comments were completely inappropriate.
I wrote down the names anyway.
Judge H. was equally unsparing in his characterization of E.M., the victim—the man whose skull my client fractured. The judge knew him as someone who had gotten in trouble before, mostly for minor crimes and mostly when drunk. The judge said E.M., who had completely recovered by then, “probably didn’t even feel the blow.” Besides, he said, it was “unlikely that any damage to his brain would be noticeable.” When a judge, particularly one you don’t know, makes a joke, you laugh even if you don’t think it’s funny. I did, even though I didn’t.
The Audience—The Jury
In many jurisdictions in this country, the process of jury selection is long and drawn out. In California, for example, lawyers ask questions of individual jurors one at a time. One question leads to another with seemingly no limitations. Not so in Maryland. Here, lawyers are given sheets of paper with scant information about potential jurors—name, spouse’s name, address, level of education and occupation, if any. That’s it. The judge asks the questions he or she deems appropriate. Prospective jurors may be struck “for cause.” For example, people with connections to law enforcement or people who have themselves been victims of crimes similar to the ones being tried are generally asked follow-up questions to see if they can nonetheless be fair. When it’s clear, through questioning, that a person’s background, life experience, and general views will make it difficult or impossible to be fair, they are removed for cause.
I’ve heard prospective jurors say all manner of things that resulted in them being struck for cause. Maybe they harbor strong negative feelings against police, or they believe someone wouldn’t be accused unless he was guilty. I remember one woman who said she didn’t believe in the criminal justice system. I suspected she lied because she just didn’t want to serve. It worked.
In a child abuse case, a man came to the bench to disclose for the very first time that he had been a victim himself: “I’ve never told anyone this,” he said, “but I was sexually abused as a teenager.” I might have thought, here was someone lying to avoid serving. But one look at his face dispelled that notion. Imagine disclosing that for the first time to total strangers in the formal setting of a courtroom. On a much lighter note, I remember a judge asking the general question, “Is there any other reason that you think you cannot sit on this case?” A middle-aged man, so short he had to stand on tiptoe to get his head above the bench, came forward and said: “Your honor, I have a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut!” Try to keep a straight face after that one.
After jurors are eliminated for cause, they are called and seated in the jury box. Each party or side of the case then has a certain number of what are called preemptory strikes where, with rare exceptions, no reason need be given.
For public consumption, lawyers say they’re looking for a jury that’s fair and impartial. But that’s not true. An advocate is looking for as partial a jury as she can find as long as they are partial in her client’s favor. But how to figure that out? It’s pretty much a crapshoot. We’re playing our own prejudices about other people’s prejudices. People in real estate—conservative and pro-government. Social workers—sympathetic to the accused. Engineers—looking for unequivocal forensic evidence. And on and on. But we’re just as likely to be wrong as right. I once tried a case where I worked hard to get a particular man on my jury. He was a scientist, so I assumed he’d be looking for hard, indisputable evidence of my client’s guilt. During closing arguments, I knew for sure he was on my side as he smiled at me and nodded after every point I made. Boy, was I wrong. After the jury hung, I learned he was the sole holdout for conviction. Not only that, but as he walked out of the courtroom, he passed close by me and uttered under his breath, “sleazebag!”
After my experience with the judge at the pretrial conference, I decided I better hire local counsel to help with jury selection. The woman I asked did a ton of criminal defense work in Talbot County. I knew I’d made a wise choice when a number of prospective jurors nodded her way as they filed into the courtroom. She knew some of them personally; with others, she knew the neighborhoods where they lived or the places where they worked—clues to their relationship to the island.
Even with her help, actually seating a jury was a nightmare. There were prospective jurors who came to the bench to disclose that they themselves had been on the Island and heard the “ruckus” or actually witnessed it. Some of them revealed having friends or relatives with first-hand knowledge of the events. None of these answers fazed the judge, however. As hard as it was for me to believe, he accepted their assertions that they could evaluate the evidence fairly. I’d have been surprised if my anger by then didn’t show on my entire body, not just my “mood ring.” I wanted desperately to use a different finger than my ring finger to indicate my displeasure with Judge H.
Thankfully, the jury that was eventually seated did not include anyone from Tilghman Island or anyone who had given problematic answers to the judge’s questions.
ACT II—Scene I: The State’s Evidence
The victim testified. But he had little recollection of the relevant events. Whether that was due to the blow on his head or his alcohol consumption wasn’t clear. But there were plenty of other witnesses who saw my client strike him. Besides, my client didn’t deny it. It was a self-defense case.
The Comic Relief—A Witness for the State
There are often moments in a serious trial where the jury gets to take a breath and is allowed to smile, even laugh, just like an audience watching a serious play. Except in a play, it’s planned, while in a trial it most often is not. I’ve sometimes gone out of my way to make a jury laugh in an effort to get them to like me. I once heard a juror say, “I didn’t like the lawyer, so I didn’t like his client.” I took that to heart.
Mostly, when I make jokes, they’re on me—a comment here and there about my messy table or an editorial remark about a question of mine that doesn’t make sense. A witness says, “I don’t understand your question,” and I might say, “You know what, neither do I.” If I say, “One more question,” and then ask three, I might turn to the jury and shrug my shoulders and say, “Oops, my bad. I guess that was more than one.” Early in my career, I was the butt of that joke. In a courtroom, where my table sat in front of the opposing counsel’s, I said, “I have one more question.” The lawyer seated behind me, somehow knowing there would be more than one question, held up one finger in full view of the jury. As I plowed ahead with the next question, he held up another finger, another question—another finger. At about question four, jurors started to snicker, and I finally turned around to realize why they were laughing. More importantly, they weren’t listening to me anymore. That, of course, was the other lawyer’s objective.
In the bachelor party trial, there was much that I might have found amusing had the weight on my shoulders not been so heavy since my client was facing serious jail time. For example, there was one witness for the prosecution whom, after the case was over, I would refer to as Daisy Mae—the voluptuous, scantily clad character from the cartoon, Li’l Abner. She had been at Harrison’s when the commotion started and followed the crowd outside. I judged her to be in her early twenties. Wearing a sundress and high heels, she walked the entire length of the courtroom to get to the witness stand. Clip clop, clip clop, I watched her bare feet slip and slide out of shoes a size or two too big for her while her short, skimpy, ill-fitting dress swished from side to side.
When she started to speak, I was floored. I barely understood a word she was saying. She had an accent unique to that part of the Eastern Shore that was unintelligible to me. I didn’t know what to do. A criminal defendant is Constitutionally entitled to confront the witnesses against him. This means that if they are speaking a language foreign to him, an interpreter must be brought in at State expense to translate. And it doesn’t matter whether the defendant or the witness is the one who doesn’t speak English.
I’d represented a number of defendants who needed interpreters brought to the courtroom so he or she would know what was being said. But this? Daisy Mae was speaking English. But neither I nor my client could understand her—not entirely. I did pick up a couple of things as she spoke. First, she needed clarification from the prosecutor about which incident he was questioning her about: “Was this the fightin’ this year or last year?” she wondered. And then I heard her say something about “ ‘dem ditches.” The land on the island is flat and low-lying. The shoulders on either side of the road are depressed in what this witness called, “ditches.” As the mob gathered and skirmishes broke out, she described: “‘Dey was fightin’ in ‘dem ditches!”
And then there was the moment when the State wanted her to step down from the witness stand and, while standing before the jury, place a mark on a map indicating where she was on the road. I objected on technical grounds. So, the judge called the prosecutor and me up at the bench to discuss a point of law. The judge listened to our arguments. However, he seemed more impressed with Daisy Mae’s revealing décolletage, which he kept staring at from his perch above the witness stand. With a smirk on his face and looking purposefully down at her, he said, “Oh . . . I think I’ll let her testify to that.”
So, she clomped her way down to stand before the jury box and look at a map. As she leaned forward, all the male jurors rose out of their seats to get a better look. They too seemed impressed by her “testimony.”
Since Daisy Mae didn’t actually see my client do anything, there was little reason for the State to call her and thankfully little need for me to cross-examine her. But she was entertaining.
ACT II—Scene II: The Defense Case
When it was my turn, I called all the Western Shore men, including my client, to testify. Trial lawyers are storytellers. But we are limited by the medium in which we get to tell a story. I wasn’t directing a docudrama where I might hire trained actors to recreate the events. In that version, there would be anxious music building to a crescendo, as I filmed the mob closing in on a small group of defenseless men who were trapped with no way out.
The story I was charged with telling would instead have to be told in the safety of a quiet courtroom on a calm fall afternoon. I could not replicate the tense atmosphere on that narrow road as the sky darkened that hot August evening. And I had only the words of the witnesses who were there to try to show the chaotic energy of an angry mob bearing down on them; the desperation they felt by being overwhelmingly outnumbered; their limited options and their fear of impending harm.
The Props
When I asked the woman who helped me with jury selection if she knew someone who could make a drawing of all the relevant locations in the case—the drawbridge, Harrison’s, the house the men were staying at, “ ‘dem ditches,” she volunteered her husband. Had I known he was a political cartoonist, I would not have been surprised at the drawing he produced. It looked like something you might see in the “funny papers.” Everything was a caricature. Harrison’s was drawn as though it was a huge blimp, floating in the air. A church along the road was depicted the way a child might have drawn it with a cross disproportionately large. The houses were lopsided. There was even a cartoon character on the side of the road who looked remarkably like Popeye. This map was colorful and clever, but not drawn to scale or professional looking. “No way,” I thought, would the judge allow me to use it. But I was wrong. The prosecutor didn’t even object and, after the case was over, the judge asked me if I would allow him to keep it. He wanted to hang it in his chambers.
The Dramatic Climax
Every good plot has a dramatic climax—the moment when a story’s main conflict is resolved. Will Hamlet kill the king or not? Will Willie Loman realize his dreams? Will Stella forgive Stanley Kowalski? What exactly was the relationship between Brick and Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
The dramatic climax in the story of the bachelor party came when my client hit the victim over the head with a mailbox. Until then, it was a mob scene, a bunch of skirmishes, a drunken melee. But then the driving force of the plot line stopped and reached a turning point. It was only an instant. But for my client—and then a jury—only that instant mattered. The sole question was whether or not that one hit was justified. The jury would be given information and context. An audience in a play determines if the dramatic climax makes sense. My jury would have to decide if my defense made sense.
ACT III: Closing Argument
The prosecutor argued that the defendant wasn’t entitled to a jury instruction on self-defense. The victim was unarmed and, though he may have seemed menacing, he personally did not physically threaten my client. If the judge agreed with the State, that would be the ball game. The jury would really have no choice but to find my client guilty. But the judge gave the jury the following standard self-defense instruction:
You have heard evidence that the defendant acted in self-defense. Self-defense is a complete defense, and you are required to find the defendant not guilty if all of the following four factors are present:
- the defendant was not the aggressor;
- the defendant actually believed that he was in immediate and imminent danger of bodily harm;
- the defendant’s belief was reasonable; and
- the defendant used no more force than was reasonably necessary to defend himself in light of the threatened or actual harm.
It was my job to persuade the jury that this definition was satisfied. But how was I going to do that? Wasn’t my client the aggressor? Did he honestly believe he was in imminent danger of bodily harm from an unarmed man? Would such a belief be reasonable? And, even if the first three requirements were met, wasn’t hitting E.M. over the head and fracturing his skull more force than was warranted?
As a teenager, my father introduced me to Gestalt theory, a major tenet of which is the idea that the whole of something may be more than the sum of its parts. What if this theory is applied to a mob? Could its dangerousness be viewed as more than the sum of that of the individuals who comprise it? Suppose E.M. alone was not the aggressor, but the mob he was part of was. Couldn’t the mob itself be seen as a weapon?
This idea would be the basis of my argument to the jury. It wasn’t one man who presented a threat to my client. It was he and the mass of people behind him, moving toward my client, angry, and threatening. The mob was the victim’s weapon. It made him an aggressor who posed an imminent threat of serious bodily harm to my client. And the way he defended himself, namely hitting one of the most aggressive mob members on the head, was a reasonable thing to do.
At the time, there were several instances of mob violence in the news that helped illustrate my argument. I drew on images of the Los Angeles riots that erupted that year after Rodney King was beaten. Also, that year, 300 Africans were massacred in a township called Boipetung while demonstrating against South Africa’s apartheid government. Both of these cases involved violent mobs. These examples may not have been exactly on point. But I hoped they might be close enough to evoke enough empathy for my client that the jury would be persuaded.
ACT IV: The Verdict
Much to my surprise, the jury took very little time to find my client not guilty. After the jurors were dismissed, they filed slowly out of the courtroom, stopping momentarily to wordlessly nod in the direction of my client and me. As I was gathering my things to leave, the judge called me up to the bench and said he hoped I would come back and try more cases there. “It was,” he said, a “real pleasure having you on the shore. I hope to see you again.” I thanked him but couldn’t bring myself to return the compliment.
After the Curtain Fell
I said goodbye to my client in the courthouse parking lot and headed to my Western Shore home. The roughly two-hour drive would give me plenty of time to reflect on the experience of the last few days. When I first began trying cases, a lawyer friend told me: “There’s the case you think you’re going to try, the one you actually try, and the one you wish you’d tried.” Over the years I learned that this was true regardless of whether I won or lost. Perhaps the participants in a play feel the same way. Even if it’s a smash hit, they still question if the audience reacted the way they expected; could they have done something better; were there mistakes or miscues; what might they take away to inform the next performance?
As I drove, I pondered these questions. The case I thought I’d try was one with standard self-defense questions—who was the aggressor, was more force used than was reasonable? The case I actually tried was one where I crafted a novel self-defense theory. I asked a jury to consider a mob itself a weapon that entitled my client to lash out at one of the participants. And what of the case I wished I tried? As always, I ruminated about the questions I should have asked but didn’t and those I asked but shouldn’t have.
As I approached Salisbury, the largest city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I found myself wishing that I had felt more comfortable in this drama, more self-assured, less a stranger. I wished also that I had taken the opportunity to explore the area. Instead of staying at some cheap, nondescript motel on the outskirts of Easton, I might have stayed at the beautiful and historic Maryland Inn. Instead of eating carryout from a fast-food joint, I could have sampled the crab cakes at one of the many fine local restaurants. Instead of closeting myself in my room, I could have browsed the town’s eclectic galleries and antiques shops or explored the nearby shores of the Tread Avon River.
As I drove onto the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and put the Eastern Shore in my rearview mirror, I vowed that one day I would return to investigate the Shore’s intriguing character—her picturesque shoreline, her wildlife, her food, her unique history, and her people.
♦
Judy Catterton, a retired Maryland trial lawyer, lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware where she teaches memoir for the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild. Her essays and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a 2015 recipient of the Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship for her nonfiction writing.
The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org
Sharon Smith says
Great tale. I loved it.