Not far from Langer’s

There’s at least one person out there who’d say that, during my time on the bench, I committed assault and battery—and maybe worse.

I offer this incident to light up a cliché—that things are not always what they appear to be. Roughly twenty years ago, a then-presiding judge and I had lunch at Langer’s Deli. I violated protocol by eating turkey instead of their signature pastrami sandwich. We had some laughs and once we left, we walked down Seventh Street, the one block between the restaurant and its parking lot. At South Westlake Avenue, we left the curb. About a yard ahead of us was a woman, crossing in the same direction.

Anyone who knows the area knows the rutted, jagged pavement. I tripped. I started falling forward until a natural impulse kicked in, the instinct to survive, to grab anything I could hold onto. In this case, anything meant the woman ahead of me. My hands shot forward. They seized both sides of her waist. She broke my fall, and while my landing wasn’t dainty, she saved me from getting hurt.

I’m sure the woman felt two hands grip her—hard, without warning. She probably thought the hands were pulling her down to the street. She screamed. Then she ran. In the thirty or so seconds it took for me to recover, she’d reached the other side and already was too far off to hear me shout, “I’m sorry!”

My judge pal laughed. So did I once I dusted myself off.

To this day that woman has no conception of what really happened. She never saw me. She continues to imagine, I’m sure, that she fled from some beast who wanted to rob her or rape her or both—in the middle of the street no less. I always wonder what she would have thought had she looked back and seen two aging white men in suits, one picking himself up from the ground. Would she still believe that person planned to assault her?

Whoever this lady was, she’s probably told dozens of friends about how close she came to being violated. Meanwhile, I too have shared the event, with the result that two versions of what happened exist in the universe and for all I know, may still be circulating, two logical slices of life in the Southland. If this incident had reached a courtroom, then what? Armed with a presiding judge as a witness, I’d probably win. But what if I’d been alone? What if it had been 1 a.m., not 1 p.m.? What if I hadn’t been wearing a suit? What if…?

Many cases present some form of this narrative. I recall a misdemeanor trial in which a driver meandered his convertible down a narrow side street as he listened to a hit song on the radio. His boss had just promoted him. The ecstatic driver balled his hands into fists and, to the beat of the tune, bounced them on the steering wheel. The sun was out; the air felt like velvet. He looked with glee at the trees and quaint bungalows. He said he’d never noticed the ten-year-old girl on the sidewalk, but she noticed him. Certain he was staring at her, the ten-year-old memorized his license plate, and when she got home to her family, she said his fists were moving “up and down” near his groin. Her parents called the police. A week-long trial ensued. The charge:

Penal Code section 647.6, annoying or molesting a child under the age of eighteen. A conviction could force the driver to spend ten years as a registered sex offender.

No other person in my court has cried so hard as that defendant did after the jury found him not guilty.

Anyone on the bench can describe this type of trial, a matter in which one side isn’t telling the truth, but neither side is lying. It’s the soggy marshlands of the law where we—and jurors—must be extraordinarily careful and hope the result squares with what only God knows are the facts. They’re close cases, but not to that lady on the street or the girl on the sidewalk.