There Goes the Judge

From his 25th-floor office, Judge Saul A. Epton, a soft-spoken and slightly owlish man of 62, surveyed the wintry expanse of Lake Michigan and reflected on his new post in the circuit court of Cook County: "This is paradise. It's boring but it's paradise."

Why should a judge find boredom to be paradise? The answer is a sad story of hope and despair.

Son of a German immigrant, Epton put himself through law school, specialized in insurance in his private practice, and finally, in 1959, became a judge. "Just about the time I went on the bench, my wife died. I wanted to forget my personal problems, so I asked for the most difficult assignment there was. The chief judge said, Take boys' court for 90 days, if you can stand it.' " Himself the father of one daughter, Epton administered a stern but understanding sort of justice to the 17-to 21-year-old youths who came before him. "There are two kinds of boys I see," he said of his 60 cases per day. "Hoodlums or pranksters, and I have to separate one from the other." Hoodlums found little leniency in Epton's court, but pranksters often received only informal punishment, such as "house arrest" (in which offenders were ordered to remain home between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.). Epton regularly gave youngsters the option of working off their fines and donating the proceeds to charity.

Epton made a point of meeting with young gang chieftains, explaining the law's point of view and answering their questions. He invited leaders to sit with him on the bench, and he would ask for their advice before sentencing a suspect. Sometimes he even took the "colleagues" to lunch for far-ranging discussion of the law. More than 5,000 boys shared the bench with Epton, learning, as the judge put it, that "there is no more mystery in boys' court than there is in the games they play. When they are offside in football, they have to be penalized. When they are offside in the game of life, there are penalties too."

After ten years in boys' court, Epton asked for transfer to criminal court because "I had so much success communicating that I thought perhaps I could do the same thing there." When he made his move, he was guest of honor at a banquet given by the leaders of some two dozen juvenile gangs. "Judge, we thought you were a miserable guy," said one of the hosts, "but then we agreed that you were the same miserable guy to everybody--a miserable guy but fair." In addition to such tributes, the judge received a new gavel.

Epton's first disillusionment was his discovery that the gavel had been stolen from another judge. Worse, he soon learned that two-thirds of those who came before him in criminal court were repeaters. "The heart breaks," he said "at seeing the same mothers time after time, wringing their hands because I'd already sent three or four members of their families to jail." Most discouraging of all were the appearances of some of the boys he had helped in boys' court --pranksters who had turned out to be hoodlums. "They had graduated from petty thievery to burglary, robbery, murder and rape. They betrayed my confidence in them."

Scarred. For three years, Epton endured the burdens of judging what he called the "vicious, ugly, barbaric side of society." Then he could endure no more. At his own request, he was transferred last month to circuit court, where he now hears nothing more "barbaric" than automobile accident claims.

Epton is still scarred, however, by his three-year ordeal. Once he was a staunch opponent of capital punishment, a proponent of rehabilitation. "Today," he says, "I vigorously support capital punishment. There are certain people who don't deserve the care, courtesies and efforts to rehabilitate them, who don't deserve to be maintained the rest of their lives." Something is wrong, he now believes, with the entire U.S. judicial system. "We give the longest sentences," he says, "and yet we have the most crime. I don't know the answers. I'm just very frustrated."

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