“Your Verdict”: A retired judge reflects on the law, life and family ...Middle East

Denver, Colorado, 1992 

In October of that year, during Denver’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I gave a talk at a Unitarian Church about what I called “the sin of domestic violence.”  I was surprised by what I was talking about.   

At churches:  There are spiritual dimensions of domestic violence, which can amount to an ongoing destruction of a soul.  Sexism is a sin.  Some men have a distorted sense of entitlement to the time, attention, energy, and bodies of women.  From that distortion comes a willingness to coerce what they cannot obtain voluntarily. 

At universities:  Femicide is a reality, yet we hardly even hear the word.  Why aren’t we naming what we know?  Why isn’t there more research?

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At law schools:   Feminist scholars are rethinking the idea of justice completely, from a perspective that includes women this time.   Feminist jurisprudence begins with hearing the inner voice and unlearning to not speak.

At hospitals: Feeling one has gotten justice can contribute to the healing process.

It seemed to me to be beneficial to engage in this kind of dialogue in the community; but as a judge, on some level, I felt treasonous because I was criticizing my own profession.  I checked the ethical rules.  Judges have to be careful what they say and do, but they do not have to be hermits. The Code of Judicial Conduct encourages judges to participate in community activities related to improving the justice system, so I always limited my remarks to the justice system, I prepared in advance, and I always kept a copy of what I said.

One day I was invited to deliver the keynote address at the Margo Ginger Green Lecture Series, named for a University of Colorado student who had been gunned down by her estranged husband at midday on a downtown Denver street, before he fired a 9 mm round into his own head.  In honor of their daughter, Margo Green’s parents were funding a special college lecture series on violence against women.  Margo’s mother would also be on the program.  I wondered:  How can she speak?  How can such a parent go on?  How can I possibly say no?

“Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss ”

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After I finished the first draft, I practiced reading it out loud. . . I worried it sounded too radical and might be misunderstood.  I worried about backlash, so I called my unofficial media consultant — my son, Chris, who worked at a bank in Boulder.  I read him the entire speech over the phone.  

“What do you think?” I asked.  

He didn’t hesitate.  “Take out a couple of patriarchys and a couple of male dominances, and it’ll be okay.”  I could tell he could tell I was nervous.  “And don’t worry, Mom,” he advised. “Go ahead and kick ass.  You know what you’re saying is true!”  

God, I love that kid!

Fawn Germer of the Rocky Mountain News had told me she would be covering my keynote speech because she had heard there might be trouble — the university had received a harassing phone call earlier in the day.  There were plans for extra security. As it turned out, there was no trouble.  The event was somber and meaningful, and a short news story about it appeared the next day.  

However, within a week that same news clipping was being brandished in the Protection Order courtroom between the fingers of an attorney who insisted that I was biased against men and should disqualify myself from hearing the case against his client, Clarence Kay, who was a star tight end for the Denver Broncos.  Even I had heard of him and I was not much of a football fan.  I had issued an ex parte temporary restraining order against him on the request of his girlfriend. Now the issue to be litigated was whether the restraining order should be made permanent. 

Soon the defense was in court requesting a delay. “Judge, I have a right to interview people who heard your speech at the university to find out exactly what you said.  I need time to do that.”  He waited at the podium.  He looked a little like Buddy Holly with the square black glasses, and his straight black hair that often seemed to be in turmoil.  He screwed up his lips when he was thinking and could be a real showman when he made a passionate, if not entirely relevant, argument.  

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The attorney representing Mr. Kay’s girlfriend, objected to the delay, “for the record,” she said.  She was an intelligent, spirited, and intense person who spoke at least three languages fluently. She stood alone on her side of the courtroom, her wild graying hair flying.  

By claiming that my speech proved I was biased against men, the defense wanted to get the case away from me or create a diversion by making me the issue in the case.  If he couldn’t delay the game, he could cause an intentional foul. . . “Motion to continue granted,” I ruled.  “A short one, Counsel.”

My decision to be a judge who would speak in the community honestly about how domestic violence cases are treated in our troubled legal system was already having consequences in the courtroom.  If my words were going to be turned against me again, I wanted to be judged by my actual words, and not someone else’s version of them, so I lobbed the grenade back over the fence and mailed my copy of the speech to both attorneys with the note:   “Since I am the only one with an actual record of what I said at the university last week, I am sending copies to both of you, so you can decide how you want to proceed.”  

If the defense goal was to delay the proceedings, was I going for his bait?  Or if my goal was to continue raising the issue of domestic violence in the community, was he going for mine?

Eventually, I denied the motion to recuse myself and the decision was appealed immediately, assigned to District Judge Robert Fullerton, which worried me a bit.  Fullerton was a highly respected and experienced judge.  Right out of law school I had applied to be his law clerk, but after my interview, he turned me down. 

“You’re qualified,” he had said.  “No doubt about that.  But when I look at your extracurricular activities, I have to wonder if we’d be comfortable with each other.” 

He had been referring to my women’s rights activities during law school — the newspaper, Big Mama Rag, Women & the Law Conference, teaching street law at the women’s prison.  Ironically, I now had the same concern that the defense in the restraining order case expressed — will the judge be fair to me, or is he biased?

I waited for Fullerton’s ruling while the story had its play in the Denver media.  The headline read: “Bronco accuses judge of bias against men.”  Articles. Letters. Talk shows.  Is Judge St. Joan biased against men?  Is the legal system unfair to battered women?  Is the system unfair to women judges and lawyers?  May judges speak out on public issues?  Should they?   Can a feminist judge be a fair judge?  The debate I had begun about domestic violence and the courts evolved into a wider public discourse.

It seemed to be taking a long time for Judge Fullerton to decide if I had crossed or properly toed the ethical line between the judicial duty not to cave to media intimidation and the judicial duty to disqualify myself if my impartiality might reasonably be questioned.  The one rule discourages judge-shopping and the other rule promotes public confidence in a judge’s impartiality. 

After three weeks, Judge Fullerton issued his decision upholding my ruling, writing: “The overall tenor of her lecture is a critique of the legal system regarding domestic violence cases.  She discusses the legal system’s limited effectiveness to protect victims of domestic violence.  To quote her remarks: ‘The legal system has for too long neglected to address adequately the injustices that are suffered by women’ . . . Judge St. Joan challenged judges to become better informed about the problems of domestic violence . . . She states:  ‘The individual man is not the enemy. . . The system which socializes men. . . must be struggled against by all men . . . in community with women.  To this I add the challenge to men to use their power and privilege to reshape public consciousness about the harmfulness of gender.’”  

Whether he intended to or not, by quoting extensively from my ruling, Judge Fullerton was responding to my challenge by using his own power and privilege to reshape public consciousness about the harm caused by gender discrimination.

Washington, D.C. 1966

After moving out of my parents’ house in September, I joined a small group of students in a protest march in front of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in downtown Washington, D.C.  We were picketing the Catholic Church because the U.S. bishops had just released a wishy-washy statement about the Vietnam War, supporting it as a “just war.”   At the time I was working as a secretary in the U.S. Bishops Bureau of Information where I had actually typed up the press release on the pro-war statement.  I didn’t tell my boss that I was going to do it, but I joined Georgetown University’s Student Peace Union picket line at the cathedral.  

This was my very first public demonstration and I was nervous about all the newspaper photographers and the one TV camera.  Not only might my parents see me on TV, but maybe my boss would, too.  We walked in silence, in a circle, carrying our placards: “No ‘Just’ War in Vietnam.”  The nearby office buildings created shadows as clouds blew over and the sky cleared, then filled again, shading the sidewalk slabs, our faces, our posters. 

Pete Bryson, a dark-skinned man in a zip-up rust-colored sweater, tried to make conversation with me.  He was slim, medium-build, fast-talking, flirting with me and teasing the news photographer at the same time.  I wondered if he might be Middle Eastern.  He crossed over to my side of the moving circle of demonstrators, moving fast like a young horse.  His hair was dark and wiry, cut short in those days before sideburns and beards.  His eyes were very dark, very round and deep.  Like Omar Sharif, I thought.  

He gave the TV camera a big smile, a posed, childish shot that a professional would never have wasted film on.

“Aren’t you afraid of that?” I asked him.  “What if your parents see you on TV?”  When he laughed, I noticed his soft lips.

“They would be doing exactly the same kind of thing,” he replied. “They’d be proud to see me on TV.”  

I’d never heard of parents like that.  . . .

Later a group of us drank beer at the Cellar Door in Georgetown at a hootenanny where Pete strummed and picked a twelve-string guitar.  He really listened to the music, sometimes laying his ear down on the side of the instrument.  He seemed to be playing to a lonely child.  All the lonely children, where do they all come from?  He sang like a cover artist for Phil Ochs or Peter, Paul and Mary.  I knew right away he had a good heart.

“And this is a Negro spiritual that Odetta made famous,” he announced to the audience, tuning and strumming his twelve-string, introducing, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a song that to this day never fails to make me weep.  That was when I realized Pete was Black — actually, Pete was bi-racial — his father was Black from Mississippi and his mother’s side was Jewish.  After hearing him sing, Pete and I became pretty much inseparable.  He always said he fell for my green eyes.  I know I fell for his politics, his guitar, his voice—and his parents. Within a year I would leave my own family and join his.

In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program.  He asked and I said yes and we had to get to California soon.  But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; in Virginia, where Pete lived, laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master’s property, and Jim Crow laws  prohibited interracial marriage.   

One week the law was violence; yet the next week the law was liberation. 

On June 12, 1967, a date now known as Loving Day, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia.  The Court had solved our problem of where to get married.  Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the Arlington County Courthouse clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready.

“We’ve not received the Supreme Court’s order back from the Attorney General yet,” the clerk told him

“Well, we’re coming,” Pete replied.   “We’ll be there Friday, so I guess we’ll have to bring a Washington Post reporter with us.”  

Pete was bluffing, of course, about the reporter, but when we appeared on June 16 at the courthouse, no one blinked an eye.  The forms asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked “race,” Pete wrote “B” for Black and I wrote “H” for human. 

The Justice of the Peace, who told us he was also a Baptist minister, seemed excited to perform the ceremony — not because we were the first legally married interracial couple in Virginia’s history (I’m not sure if he even noticed that) but because he had composed what was then something new, an ecumenical wedding service between a Christian and a Jew.  He was planning to use it when he performed the ceremony the following week, and said he’d like to practice his ceremony on us — since (misreading our marriage license application) he said, Pete was B for Baptist and I was H for Hebrew!  

Ours was a short wedding ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, and a judge prattling on about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook.  We suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and got out of there as fast as we could.  The next day, we loaded up Pete’s taxicab with its new $29.99 Earl Scheib aqua blue paint job.  Then Pete and I, like thousands of young people that summer, drove to San Francisco, where we lived in Haight Ashbury.  After all, it was the Summer of Love.

Jacqueline St. Joan is a retired lawyer and Denver County Judge (1987-1994), fiction writer, poet, and essayist whose memoir, “Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Reckoning With Law and Loss” is being published by Golden Antelope Press on Loving Day, June 12, 2026.  She is a member of the Hearthstone CoHousing Community and sings in The Spirituals Project Choir.

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