by admin » Fri Oct 04, 2013 12:09 am
PB&J WITH THE JUDGE, by Charles Carreon
October 17, 2005
Most people know Allen Drescher from his role on the bench as the Ashland Municipal Court Judge. I have known him since 1978, when he gave me my first paying job in town, peeling linoleum off the floor of a basement room in his office building in downtown Ashland. Another lawyer, Jim Osher, had given me a place to stay in exchange for cleaning his house, and had recommended me to Allen for an afternoon’s work. Allen paid a fair wage for my somewhat unsuccessful efforts at linoleum removal, and I formed a good opinion of him based on that, and on Jim Osher’s positive remarks about his fellow liberal lawyer. Osher, as I recall, also had been to a fine back east law school, sported a beard, sometimes cackled with zesty glee, and ran his office out of a tiny room in a house that he’d built out extensively to house young people up to the rafters. Allen, I understood, wore wide ties, but was more mainstream than Osher.
I got settled with my family and lived in and around Ashland for six years, picking up an English degree at the college, and only once appearing before Judge Drescher for executing not quite stopping as I rolled downhill on Granite onto the main drag. He gave me a break, as I remember it, cutting the fine to a bearable level in response to a genuine plea of poverty. In 1983, I moved to LA for law school and a stint in the fast lane, and in 1993 returned to Ashland. After becoming an Oregon attorney and opening a practice in Ashland, I only once crossed swords with Allen in litigation, and he referred the matter to a local litigator, with whom I resolved the case with a quick settlement that made no one any richer except on paper, as I recall.
I’ve represented a handful of clients in Ashland Municipal Court over the years, and found it easy to work with Judge Drescher. He is cordial to a fault, considerate of my clients’ concerns, and respectful of my arguments. One cannot, however, make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and dispensing justice is similarly destructive in the service of a positive goal. Over the years, I had heard my share of stories about Judge Drescher’s sentences, some of which seemed creative. As a Deputy District Attorney, I occasionally heard of Ashland jail sentences being summarily commuted by the jail staff to a one-night stay, because the gravity of the convicted person’s crimes often paled in comparison with those of other “lodged individuals.” Put simply, Ashland criminals weren’t bad enough to keep in jail for more than a night.
So it was that the years had rolled by, and I had never really had a chat with Allen about anything besides the legal matters before us. Last month I requested an appointment to interview him, and after we discussed my expected topics, he agreed. We picked a date, and I offered to take him to lunch. In reply, he offered this quotable clue to his character: “Since I became a lawyer, I have made it a habit to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my office for lunch.” I perfectly understood. I had eaten a sandwich in my office plenty of times, so I said I’d bring my own PB&J, and we both marked our calendars. Then I wondered if he really only ate peanut butter and jelly, or if he sometimes ate other sandwiches.
When we got together and settled at the oval conference table in his quiet, comfortable office, Allen extracted his PB&J from a paper bag, and I had no further doubts on the matter. No cheese sandwiches or hoagies for this man. He seeks to embody Yankee simplicity, I decided, even if he was born in the Midwest. Sitting next to Allen, I realized he was genuinely enjoying this most recent in a long sequence of identical, yet unique sandwiches, roughly equal in their number to the number of days he had been practicing law. I understood the poetry of it, and felt the mad indiscipline of my own ways. I bit into a scone from Dave’s coffeehouse and began taking notes.
Allen was born and raised in Michigan. He went to Columbia during years of serious student unrest, graduating in 1968. He went on to graduate from Columbia Law School, then and now one of the top schools, in 1972. He spent 1970 in Eugene, taking a break from law school, and after he graduated, he moved to Portland, where he worked in Legal Aid for a year in 1972 practicing civil rights law under Laird Kirkpatrick, now on the faculty at U of O Law School, and the author of the fundamental treatise on Oregon Evidence. In 1973 Allen accepted a job to establish a Legal Aid office for Coos and Curry Counties. He’d fallen in love with the Oregon coast during the summer, so it was inevitable that the day he moved into his new home, it would start raining, and not stop for thirty days. After setting up the office as he’d agreed, he opted to move to drier places inland, and settled in Ashland in 1975. In 1976 he was elected to a City Council position, the same year Jim Sims, another progressive lawyer, ran for mayor.
In 1978, Allen was elected to the Municipal Judge position. Since then, he’s run successfully for re-election every four years. Being a lawyer, but never a judge, I’ve of course contemplated how pleasant it might be to have the last word in every argument, to always be the person who, by definition, is right. While judges are sometimes reversed on appeal, it is undoubtedly an extremely rare occurrence for Judge Drescher. His judgments go largely unquestioned and are effectively unquestionable. It is total power in small matters.
I asked Allen to describe his philosophy of judicial independence, and he responded that having to stand for election every four years, and being re-elected each time, had given him a sense of confidence that his judgments in court met with community approval. Roughly half of his judicial races have been contested ones. The elective process has put a fine point on his efforts to do the job well. As he stated, “The people who you are judging are going to come around and judge you next election.” I found this interesting, since it is usually thought that judicial independence is best secured by granting judges lifetime tenure, as is done with all federal judges appointed by the president. There is no doubt that lifetime-tenure system has produced some very independent-minded judges, and also some monsters. It was interesting to hear that the voice of public opinion, coming from the ballot box, can provide a different kind of independence. The risk of losing the next election didn’t deter him from convicting the guilty or imposing fines, he explained, but it caused him to exert himself in performing the job of judging.
“The hardest thing,” the judge noted noted, is to “really apply the presumption of innocence” in a criminal prosecution. He reminisced about a DUI defendant who had been using an alcoholic mouthwash to treat the hole he’d pierced in his tongue for his new ring, noting that while he couldn’t recall how he’d resolved the issue, “People do dumb stuff, but dumb stuff is not always against the law.” When, I asked him, do attorneys ask for a jury trial? Very rarely, he responded, about once a year. And why do they ask for a jury instead of trial before a judge? Because, he admitted wryly, they stood a better chance of acquittal if tried by a jury. In a jury trial, he said, “My role is to be stonefaced and not give them a clue what I think.”
Volunteering an answer to a question I hadn’t asked, Allen explained that he hadn’t sought to climb the judicial ladder, and had enjoyed the caseload of misdemeanors and traffic infractions. “I like dealing with the people. Most often, in municipal court, there are no attorneys. I like not getting the orchestrated, filtered version. They just say it from their heart and mind.” Further, he observed although the cases concern small matters, “to the people involved, it’s important.”
Turning to the subject of political activity and citizen participation in government, he said that he believed democracy does work in Ashland, and we can “save our schools and playgrounds.” As I pressed further, though, I asked him to remark on the difference between the seventies, when we both arrived in Ashland, and the mood these days. He agreed that inspiration is lacking, and explained why it was different then: “I was inspired by JFK. He really appealed to my generation in a powerful way. The Vietnam war affected us directly. We were being killed. The cultural revolution of the sixties – long hair, strange clothes, the Beatles message of love and peace, that really had an effect on a whole generation. You can’t overlook the effect that cultural movements have on how people relate to society. So a whole generation felt it could make a change, and we did. The kids I see in municipal court are not getting a message from the top – national leaders are so cynical. People believe the government does bad stuff. It’s powerful and you don’t want to go there. It’s 180 degrees from the 1960s and 70s. The music’s not inspiring. Once I heard Martin Luther King speak to a mixed-race audience, and it was so inspiring. We’ve achieved racial equality and some people are doing great, but some people got left behind. We have an underclass and we’re not helping them.”
With the larger problems of the world looming over our discussion, we turned again to the place we call home, and the town that calls Allen its judge. He returned again to the theme of listening to people and their problems. He expressed satisfaction with many young people who have successfully completed drug and alcohol education programs, and praised Jan Janssen’s work helping young people to meet the challenges of growing up in Ashland today. Allen spoke contemplatively, “Maybe I can help individuals. I can get them when they are still young and still amenable to change.”
The interview actually turned from one lunch into two, and the second time I didn’t even bring a scone, just coffee. Allen had his PB&J, though. Some things don’t change, and maybe that’s how we like them.