1. WEIRD CASES
When Miguel Aragon-Concha was recently sentenced to 70-months imprisonment for being a
persistent illegal immigrant in the United States, he might have been worried about whether
his sentencer, Judge Wesley E Brown, was up to the job.
Judge Brown, you see, is 103 and sometimes uses a mask attached to an oxygen-tank under
the bench to revive himself.
By all accounts, though, Judge Brown, is as sharp and alert as he was 20 years ago, when he
was delivering lucid judgments at 83.
Judge Brown, a federal district judge in Kansas, will become the oldest judge in American
history if he is still giving judgments next year.
In his earlier career, Judge Brown was known as a fearsomely punctilious character who
became very angry if people appeared in his court late or casually dressed. He rebuked
advocates if they ever used unacceptably imprecise words like “indicate”. He was very
demanding and one eminent counsel admitted he habitually took a Valium tablet to ease the
stress. He called them “Judge Brown pills”.
He has mellowed, though, as he’s progressed into his second century.
Judge Brown was appointed to the federal bench by President John F Kennedy in 1962. He’s
been in the business so long that one of his former clerks who worked for him when Brown
was first a judge is now a judge himself in the same federal court building.
Judge Brown still hears a full range of criminal cases and some civil litigation but has asked
his close friends to tell him when they think he’s no longer fully capable of carrying out his
duties. “And I hope that when that day comes” he has said “I go out feet first”.
The oldest person to have been a judge in Britain was Sir William Taylor who was on the
bench in Liverpool aged 93. Judge Brown might well take a deep inhalation from his oxygen
tube, smile, and recall the easy days of presiding in one’s 90s.
In Britain, judges retire at 70. The Council of HM Circuit Judges recently opposed a
suggestion that citizens over 70 should be empanelled as jurors. That would, the council
warned, mean that people who had been compulsorily retired as judges at 70 could go on to
perform a similarly critical service as jurors.
The law might indulge elderly judges but it hasn’t always been sympathetic to aged people
who aren’t judges. In Ireland, Lord Justice Holmes once sentenced a very old man from a
farming community to 15 years. The convict cried for mercy saying he would not live to finish
the sentence. “Well,” said the judge, “try to do as much of it as you can.”
Gary Slapper is Professor of Law at The Open University. His book Weird Cases is published
by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill
These articles were published by The Times Online as part of the weekly column written by
Gary Slapper