Have you heard about this virus that regularly hits the local courthouses?
Black Robe Fever, they call it.
The malady affects only judges, though you sometimes see variant strains of it in other people who hold positions of power.
It’s unclear why some judges catch Black Robe Fever while others remain immune, even when they’ve been on the bench for decades.
Symptoms of a serious case include:
1. Noticeably swelled head.
2. Delusional thinking. Sometimes this occurs in the form of visions of oneself in crown and scepter, with bailiffs and judicial assistants acting as palace guards and ladies-in-waiting.
3. Memory loss, manifested in an inability to recall who put you on the bench and whom you serve.
I hope Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Stanley Mills has not come down with a case.
For the record, no one can blame Mills for getting annoyed. He arrived at work on a Monday morning to find an old maroon Oldsmobile sitting right there in his clearly reserved parking space.
Parking at the West Pasco Judicial Center has been a chronic problem. Courtgoers stop their cars here, there and everywhere rather than make the slow hunt for an appropriate spot farther away. And this wasn’t the first time someone had taken Judge Mills’ space.
(Judges, by the way, should have reserved parking. It’s more than a perk. They make serious decisions about people’s lives — what happens to their children, who gets what in the divorce, whether someone should go to prison. Where they park should be safe — or at the very least, as close to the courthouse as possible.)
So Mills pulls up behind the Olds, deliberately blocks it with his Cadillac and goes off to work. Now who wouldn’t at least want to pull this kind of I’ll-show-you move?
But then the judge made the Oldsmobile driver sit in his courtroom for more than three hours. She had to wait all day to finally be able to move her car.
The woman told Times reporter Jamal Thalji she was giving her sister a ride to a boyfriend’s court hearing. She said she thought the space was “reserved” for people going to court. (Note: When you happen upon a parking space that says “Reserved,” it almost never means “Reserved For You.”)
For his part, the judge opined that people who park in his space are the same as those who take handicapped spots — lazy and inconsiderate.
The judge even had his judicial assistant go out and move his Cadillac to clear the way for other judges parked nearby — but not for the woman who had made the serious mistake of parking in his space.
He finally left at 4:20 p.m. Only then could she move her car.
Another judge said he too has blocked people parked in his space. And Mills told our reporter he had done it to another parking scofflaw the week earlier.
That person got this lecture from Mills in the courtroom: “There’s two perks to the job. I have my own bathroom and I have my own parking spot, and you’re not going to get to use either.” Wow.
Hey, but this is just some schlub who got inconvenienced because of her own bad decision, right?
Come on. Surely there were more clearheaded, grownup options for dealing with this.
How about addressing the larger issue with courthouse employees for practical solutions? Something really high-tech, like an orange cone in his space until his arrival?
The bigger picture is this: any judicial action that can be justified with the words “because I can” bears watching.
We give our judges an immense amount of power. We want to trust their decisions. We need them to be steady, deliberate, thoughtful, measured.
We should be able to take a lesson from their professionalism and their decency — even in how they handle some mundane workaday frustration like somebody parked in their space. Do we expect them to act better than the rest of us?
Maybe we do.
The good news is, there’s a cure for a bout of Black Robe Fever.
Though not everyone has the stomach for it.
It calls for a shot of empathy, a dose of humility, and a little willingness to learn from a mistake.
Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com.
