This article is reprinted with permission of the Concord Monitor. The article was published Dec. 27, 2004.

In private correspondence with his boss last year, Judge Arthur Robbins gave himself average marks and even compared himself to Wonder Bread, "bland and (of) little nutritional value." Last week, under the weather and three days from retirement, Robbins showed why others saw more substance.

Robbins didn't hesitate to fine a public urinator $150 or give a young driver clocked at 100 mph a lecture about his "death speed." But he also reduced a fine for a contrite and unemployed drunk driver and talked an 18-year-old out of pleading guilty to an alcohol charge he didn't understand. (The teenager went home innocent when the police said they couldn't prove their case.)

"In the district court, you are going to see everyone from the kid in the shirt and tie who is getting his first speeding ticket . . . to the people who are half in the bag from the previous night," said Concord attorney Tom Cooper."And you have to know how to make a difference in each person's life while also taking care of the state's interest. Arthur is able to shift gears very easily through all those interests."

Robbins, 62, retired Thursday {Dec. 23] as a judge in Concord District Court after 26 years of deciding what to do with thousands of greater Concord's lawbreakers and mistake-makers. He has been called both a "knee capper" and a champion of defendants'rights. Robbins preferred something in the middle: "I'd like to be known as the guy who calls them like he sees them and tries very hard to be as fair as I can be," he told a reporter in 1985.

Robbins would sit for interviews in his two-plus decades on the bench when the questions concerned how judges use alternative sentencing, set bail and decide punishment. But he declined to be interviewed for this personal piece (just as he refused a public send-off), and instead offered to share a self-evaluation all district court judges were required to prepare last year. "They are people being left behind by a self-absorbed society fixated by money, power and status,"Robbins continued. "And what they want from me is basic. To be heard and understood."

Robbins was appointed to the bench in 1979 by the late Gov. Hugh Gallen, a Democrat. He was a 37-year-old Concord defense attorney with a reputation for common sense and a direct manner, remembered Cooper, who was Gallen's legal counsel. In fact, he was such a regular guy that some were surprised to see him tapped for the bench.

"He didn't speak like a high-minded person. He used regular English," said Concord defense attorney Dennis Pizzimenti, who has known Robbins for almost 30 years. "He was never impressed with the fact that he was a judge. He was a real down-to-earth person who happened to be a judge."

On the bench, Robbins quickly became known for his wit.

In 1983, Robbins didn't mince words when George Whiting of Concord stood before him, guilty of firing a shotgun at a police cruiser. "This incident is a goddamn outrage," he said. "I hope your appeal goes right down the tubes."

He didn't tolerate attorneys who postured to impress their clients, and he once cut one attorney off after he'd made the same point a few times. "I'm not a mule," Robbins said. "I don't need to be hit between the eyes with a two by four."

Robbins was one of two full-time judges in the Concord District Court, which handled about 14,700 criminal and civil cases last year. In the course of a single morning, he was routinely asked to decide guilt or innocence and - more important -the right balance of intervention and punishment. Robbins was reminded many times a day that giving people a hefty fine or taking away their driver's licenses could further impoverish them, putting them out of an apartment or behind on their child support.

It didn't stop him for leveling the maximum penalty in many cases. But if he thought a punishment was too harsh, he'd lighten it and tell the prosecutor that penalties weren't meant to "carpet bomb a person out of existence."

Robbins acknowledged the weight of a judge's work in a 1985 interview with the Monitor. "I'm not sure if it's natural for man to be judging man, but we do it every day, and it can be tiring," he said. "Some days you feel like a piece of you has been chipped away, and you wonder whether it ever will be replaced."

Still, Robbins wrote several times in his self-evaluation of his obligation to the people he was called on to judge. He said he tried to fulfill the public's expectation that he be "the good foot soldier who won't blow them away simply because they are poor, homeless, addicted and represented by a public defender." To that end, Robbins told Kelly that he did not keep the Code of Judicial Conduct in his office but instead found inspiration from "Desiderata," a poem he kept taped to his office closet: "Listen to others," it reads in part. "Even the dull and ignorant; They too have their story."

Kelly said last week that he appreciated Robbins's honesty and approach. "We talk about the standard of the reasonable person in the law, and I think Arthur Robbins epitomizes that," Kelly said. "There is absolutely no pretense about Arthur Robbins, and I think more than other (judges) he saw himself as a regular person."

Scott Murray, Concord's prosecutor, has tried cases before Robbins for almost 22 years. They work in the same building, but Robbins never allowed the relationship to get inappropriately friendly. (Similarly, Robbins trained police officers early on not to tell him what evidence they had on a defendant before he heard the case in court.)

"Judges in New Hampshire are referred to as 'justice,'" Murray said. "Arthur Robbins really personifies the concept of justice."

Hopkinton police Chief David Wheeler was among several police officers, prosecutors and defense attorneys who packed Robbins's courtroom to say goodbye Thursday. "Above all else, he was fair, and that is the best thing you can hope for in a judge," he said.

In his self-evaluation, Robbins downplayed his legal knowledge and said the unrelenting pace of district court didn't allow him to do much research. The lawyers who worked in his courtroom remembered otherwise. Quentin Blaine, the clerk of Concord District Court, said it wasn't unusual to find Robbins still at the bench after a day of court with law books spread before him.

"Before he takes the bench, he has a good idea of where the evidence needs to lead and has a tendency not to let litigants try to move it down a path he does not think it should go," Blaine wrote in an e-mail.

Robbins's rulings did not typically make news, but one did. In an 1984 arraignment, Robbins reduced bail for a Maine man who had been charged with criminal restraint for abducting his estranged wife, Emma Mae Waters, in Concord. Murray had asked for $3,000 bail and Robbins set it at $1,000. The man posted it, left the court and killed his wife.

Murray did not recall the case last week, but he said at the time that no one expected the man to come up with the bail money. Women protested outside Robbins's courtroom, complaining about lax bail and sentencing laws. A few days after the protest, Robbins agreed to speak with a reporter about how a judge decides bail, although he declined to speak specifically about the Waters case.

He said his job was to weigh a person's record and potential for harm to himself or others and to consider bail laws, which he said favored a defendant's right to make bail. He said the public's feelings on a crime cannot be part of a judge's decision. "Your responsibility is to be as neutral and detached as you can be," he said.

A few months later, during a visit to a Concord elementary school, a student asked Robbins to name the worst case he had dealt with. The Waters case wasn't it. "Children who have been abused are the worst cases," Robbins said. "They are always sad. They're always hurtful."

The answer doesn't surprise those who knew Robbins well. Kelly said Robbins had a "huge dedication" to young people and often allowed them to join him at the courthouse to see how justice worked. He was an adjunct professor at the Franklin Pierce Law Center in the 1990s and said recently he loved the work. Students' minds are like blank sheets of paper, he said, on which good teachers can write something permanent.

In juvenile cases, Robbins used alternative sentencing whenever he could, allowing teenagers to write essays about their offenses or do relevant community service to avoid fines. He figured it made more sense than asking the juvenile's parents to pay a fine.

In one case, Robbins wasn't sure what to do with a boy charged with stealing until the boy said he cherished his baseball card collection. Robbins took the cards long enough for the boy to miss them.

Gerry Boyle, a Plymouth lawyer, has been appointed to fill Robbins's vacancy. Robbins has not shared specific retirement plans, but his colleagues predict he'll find more time for the hobbies he's always enjoyed, hiking and canoeing. Kelly said Robbins will have an easier time leaving his work than most because he never let it identify him.

In his self-evaluation, Robbins sounded like a man ready for quieter days. He complained that society has become less patient and more obsessed with winning. "All of this is washing in under the courtroom doors, and I admit that from time to time it is tempting to join in and start barking with the pack," Robbins wrote. "But so far, so good, I think."

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