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Bar News - April 18, 2003 Today's Courthouse: There Are No Casual Visitors By: Rudolph Kass A Lamentation UNTIL THE 1970s, courthouses in America were civic and social centers. Centrally located, they often served multiple purposes as town and county offices, post office, government agencies – and courts. Trials occasionally provided the best free entertainment around. Courthouses were meant to be – and were – open, public places. This the design of courthouses reflected. Courthouses occupied prominent places, and access was unrestricted – even in the Wild West, where patrons apparently understood they were to check their six-guns at the door. A prominent example of courthouse openness is the old Suffolk County courthouse in Boston’s Pemberton Square. Entrances in the front and rear enabled the public to walk easily from Beacon Hill to downtown through the grand atrium of the courthouse, which is festooned with statues of virtues such as Justice, Temperance, Prudence and Truth. History does not record whether the sculptures, looking down from their niches, ever improved the moral life of a pedestrian, but the passage was pleasant, healthfully aerobic if going up the stairs to the hill, and held some promise of encounter with a friend or acquaintance. More recently, the planners of the United States Courthouse on the South Boston waterfront (now called the Moakley Courthouse) envisioned a renewal of the tradition of a courthouse that would double as a place of public assembly. There would be a waterside park, and interior spaces with splendid harbor views would be available for public events. In Massachusetts, the first constriction on the openness of courthouses followed the explosion of a bomb as a political statement during the days of radical rage in the late 1960s. Not too long thereafter, when a jury in the United States District Court returned a verdict of guilty, the distraught defendant opened his briefcase, pulled out a gun and shot – himself, rather than Judge Skinner, who was presiding. These events led to the establishment of security checkpoints with magnetic scanners at courthouse entrances. So much for easy passage. No matter how foul the weather, a walk around the old Suffolk County Courthouse became preferable to the delay and irritation, albeit minor, of a frisk to get into the building. There would no longer be casual visitors to a courthouse. The shock of those incidents might have worn off and the incidents themselves demoted to social pathology of a time gone by had not the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City occurred. Suddenly, security became a major program item in courthouse design. It is now a standard for any new courthouse design to include an entire separate circulation system of stairs, corridors and elevators, through which judicial personnel may scuttle without being seen by, let alone coming into contact with, the public. The Moakley Courthouse, whose design was completed after the Oklahoma City bomb went off, bears a forbidding front facade and an entrance that, rather than saying, "Welcome," suggests, "Despair all ye who enter here." Once inside, the building is glorious. The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York was the coup de grace to the openness of public buildings. Jersey barriers bar the public from the waterfront park in back of the Moakley Courthouse. Similar concrete barriers establish perimeters around courthouses around the state to keep car bombs at distances that reduce their destructive potential. Other security measures such as the X-ray and other inspections of lawyers and members of the public have been beefed up. Entry to the courthouse is a somber business, and a member of the public who has no business there is unlikely to wander in to look around or to socialize. The courthouse crowd will have to assemble elsewhere, perhaps at the nearest coffee shop. Rudolph Kass is an associate justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court (retired but recalled to the bench) and a member of the Massachusetts Law Review Editorial Board. A slightly different version of this article was published in the Fall 2002 issue of the Massachusetts Law Review, published by the Massachusetts Bar Association. This article is printed with permission of the author and of the MBA..
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