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Justice served, with respect

June 21, 2005 1:06 am

OR 18 YEARS, Judge William H. Ledbetter Jr. sorted out other people's messes.

Their disputes, great and petty. Their poor judgment. Their calculated violence. Their honest mistakes, and their dishonest ones. The pain they caused. The pain they felt.

Such a day-in, day-out diet of trouble can be hardening, some lawyers say. Judges can fall prey to "robeitis"--amnesia about what it's like to be a practicing lawyer. They can be short with struggling attorneys, dense defendants, whiny civil plaintiffs or cagey witnesses.

Not Judge Ledbetter.

Judicial colleagues, lawyers and others involved in the legal system say that throughout his time as a judge in Virginia's 15th Judicial Circuit, from 1987 until his retirement this spring, Ledbetter set an example for courtroom demeanor. He listened, understood, empathized when appropriate, and made reasoned decisions, all without letting it change him.

They describe a judge perfectly in control of his courtroom, yet respectful to all who entered it.

"When you walked into his courtroom, he always made you feel like somebody," said Vernon Keeve, a Spotsylvania County lawyer who handles criminal defense and personal-injury cases.

Ledbetter is an exceptional legal scholar with personal skills to match, said Spotsylvania defense attorney Mark Gardner.

"It's a combination you don't encounter very often in any walk of life," Gardner said. "My clients have left his courtroom feeling like they were treated fairly."

William Hersten Ledbetter Jr. was born in 1941, right before Pearl Harbor.

His father had been a semipro baseball player. But when he married, Mary Katherine Ledbetter insisted on a steadier lifestyle. William Ledbetter Sr. became an optician, opened a business in Fayetteville, N.C., and settled his young family in the little town of Stedman.

There, the future judge grew up hardworking but with a penchant for mischief.

Maybe it was the pain of laboring under the nickname of Herky. People never connected it with his middle name of Hersten, but instead mistook it as short for Hercules. That was tough for a skinny boy who couldn't top 135 pounds, Judge Ledbetter recalled in recent interviews.

Whatever the reason, the kid was a handful.

In eighth grade, he'd leave class, slip out the boys' bathroom window and walk to a town a few miles away to play pool.

In high school, he and his friends made a game of throwing chalk when their teacher's back was turned. They weren't trying to hit the man, just graze him.

Ledbetter didn't realize he'd been caught until the principal stopped him as he got off the school bus one morning. He was told to go home for three days, at the end of which time he was to bring his father to a meeting at the principal's house.

"That was in the 1950s, not 2005. When you got expelled from school, your greatest fear wasn't the principal," Ledbetter said.

He recalled telling his parents with "fear and trembling," which was justified. He was too old to swat, but just the right age to suffer from sharply curtailed privileges.

Still, he was a mostly good kid, a decent student and tolerable big brother to his younger sister. And though neither parent had been to college, it was an unspoken assumption that he would go.

To earn money and stay out of trouble, young Ledbetter had summer jobs starting about age 11. He worked in a tobacco barn, hanging the broad leaves to dry.

"Nasty," Ledbetter recalled.

He tried picking cotton but got sent home after a few days, fired for using a half-filled sack to pillow-fight a friend.

He mowed lawns, pulling his father's power mower from house to house behind his bike.

At 15, he thought of a slightly less hot and dusty way to make money, by publishing a newspaper for his small town. He reported the stories, ran copies off on a mimeograph machine his father owned, and enlisted buddies to help deliver.

Even in 1950s North Carolina, he covered whites and blacks equally, which occasionally brought comments from older white neighbors. But people were people, and news was news.

The enterprise caught the attention of the Fayetteville paper, which ran a story on the teenager, then offered him a job. At 17, the cub reporter scooped everyone else in the state on an awful story, a fire in a tobacco barn that killed dozens of workers.

The story went out on The Associated Press wire with, he recalled, a Herky Ledbetter byline.

He thought of going to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to earn a journalism degree, but finances were a factor. When small in-state Campbell College offered him a full scholarship in exchange for editing student publications, he said yes.

He'd gotten high-school high jinks out of his system. While his freshman roommates partied and flunked, he poured his energy into work.

That led to a position in student government, where he discovered a knack for drafting rules and adjudicating conduct violations.

Maybe it was his serious college demeanor, but he was finally able to shed his Herky nickname for the much more satisfactory Bill.

Journalism was still a part of his life--in summers, he'd travel from one small-town weekly to another to fill in for vacationing editors--but by the end of college he knew he was more interested in law than newspapers.

He enjoyed taking a set of facts, determining the legal issue and applying reason to arrive at an outcome.

After a year of postgraduate study at Duke University, he started law school at Wake Forest University. He did well, but found it hard to get a law-related summer job in Winston-Salem. He sensed he'd have more success in a bigger city and transferred to the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond.

By the time he graduated, in 1966, he should have been utterly sick of school. Instead, he went on to earn a master of laws degree from Yale University and became a law professor at the University of South Carolina.

But something was still missing--practical experience in his field. "I wanted to do what I was talking about, at least for a while."

Besides, he'd married and started a family, and he needed to make some money. Since Virginia was where he had his law license, and small towns appealed far more than big cities and giant firms, he looked for jobs in Culpeper, Waynesboro and Harrisonburg. None felt quite right.

One October morning in 1971, he drove into Fredericksburg for a job interview, taking in the dairy farms and pastureland that characterized State Route 3 west of town.

"I decided almost immediately, I really hope these people offer me a job. I'd really like to live here."

As a partner in the firm of Whitticar, Sokol and Ledbetter, he quickly felt at home in Fredericksburg.

In his legal practice, he handled civil and a few criminal cases as well as non-trial law. He represented the Cafaro Co. as it prepared to build Spotsylvania Mall, and did legal work for GM Delco, now Powertrain.

When they first came to Fredericksburg, Ledbetter and his family lived in the Old Greenwich townhouse complex, which was popular with young professionals.

One of his lawyer neighbors was James Haley, now a judge on the state Court of Appeals. The two became friends, and in 1979 Haley joined the same law firm.

Each was a godfather to the other's youngest daughter, Haley recalled, and they played two memorable one-on-one basketball games. In 1973, Haley beat Ledbetter. In 1985, Ledbetter beat Haley. The tiebreaker, Haley said last week, "will be from our wheelchairs."

Ledbetter was named to the bench in 1987. New judges get training before they take over their courtrooms, but the most meaningful learning comes by doing the job and figuring out what works.

Cathy Doggett, who had worked as a legal secretary for Ledbetter's firm, became the judge's professional assistant. His confidence was catching, she recalled. He knew he'd learn his new duties, and he fully expected that she would grow comfortable in hers.

In criminal matters, Ledbetter said, he soon began to distinguish among types of wrongdoers.

"You do have evil people, but they're a very small percentage of the people you see in court, quite frankly," he said.

Many of those whose actions land them in serious trouble, he said, are utterly irresponsible to the point of being parasitic. But they're not mean or evil.

And some are good people in conflict--they want to do what's right, but something stands in the way. Often, Ledbetter said, that roadblock is drugs.

While recognizing the havoc drugs wreak in people's lives, Ledbetter didn't think blanket lenience was the answer. Early on, before the advent of regional drug court, he determined that cocaine crimes had to be addressed with at least some jail time.

Cases involving home burglaries were not treated lightly in Ledbetter's court. Sentencing guidelines called for "no incarceration unless the person had a pretty bad criminal record," Ledbetter recalled, "and I just disagree with that." Home burglaries are dangerous, he said, because even if no confrontation is planned, the crime can quickly become violent if someone is in the house.

While giving his full attention to the cases, Ledbetter knew he had to maintain an emotional distance.

"To be a member of the judiciary you can't be a computer. You are a human being. You do feel all these emotions, but you have to keep them in check," he said.

When people in his courtroom were unhappy, Ledbetter refused to get sucked in.

"I always reminded myself that I didn't go out and find this controversy. They brought the controversy to the court."

Though he didn't dwell on his cases, he said, "of course you've got decisions that bother you."

One example was a bench trial in which a man was accused of molesting his stepdaughter. Ledbetter convicted the man based on the girl's testimony, but "when I sentenced him, he was still pleading with me that he didn't do it," Ledbetter recalled. "That can bother you to the point of driving you nuts."

No judge ever wants to send an innocent man or woman to prison, Ledbetter said. He's glad of a recent change in state law that allows newly discovered evidence to be brought to light even years after a conviction. Virginia's procedure safeguards the finality of a court's decision, he said, while leaving open an avenue to correct a genuine injustice.

He praised two other recent legal trends.

One is the idea of "therapeutic justice" in nonviolent drug crimes, turning the court system from adversary to advocate in cases where defendants demonstrate a will to go straight.

The other, in civil cases, is out-of-court mediation as a way to avert trial. Ledbetter believes in mediation to the point that he's now going to be doing it. He's associated with h the Richmond-based McCammon Group, made up of highly respected lawyers and retired judges.

Helping opposite sides compromise will feel a bit strange, he said.

"As a judge, I'm inclined to say, 'If you can't agree, I'll make the decision for you.' That's what I've been doing for 18 years."

Ledbetter, 63, decided with his wife, Susan, that it was time to retire while both are in good health.

They want to travel, and the judge would like to learn to fly fish, rediscover golf and possibly take up an old hobby, growing roses. Susan Ledbetter is a self-taught artist who's created dozens of oil paintings that hang in their impeccably decorated home near Fredericksburg.

The Ledbetters are planning a trip to Barcelona, Spain, where they'll rent a car and set their own itinerary.

There are grown children and grandchildren to spend time with. A cat and a dog, too, demand plenty of attention.

Ledbetter plans to make himself available as a "judge designate" when a colleague is ill or takes a vacation. And he's already committed to writing for legal publications.

He doesn't plan to put a beloved career aside altogether.

"If you asked me to write out what I wanted to do with my life," Ledbetter said, "I don't think I could come up with a better job description than being a circuit court judge in Virginia in the latter part of the 20th century."

To reach LAURA MOYER: 540/374-5417lmoyer@freelancestar.com