The Reluctant Judge

After a complicated civil trial, lawyers expect to spend anxious months waiting for the judge's decision. But attorneys at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund think matters have gone to weird lengths in the case of Storage Handler William English and other black employees of the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. Their employment-discrimination suit--raising issues of promotion and seniority--was filed in 1969. The trial did not begin until January 1973. Then Georgia Federal Judge Alexander A. Lawrence set about pondering his decision. Now, two years and five months later, he is still pondering.

He cannot have forgotten about it. After waiting eight months, L.D.F. lawyers sent Lawrence a letter asking that the case be decided. With no answer to that or to their second letter three months later or to a formal motion requesting a decision two months after that, the attorneys asked for help from Chief Judge John R. Brown of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Brown communicated with Lawrence and reported that "he will get this case out just as soon as he can, and understands fully the need for a decision at the earliest possible time." That was a year ago.

Down the Line. By last January the frustrated L.D.F. finally decided to ask the appeals court for a formal order directing the judge to decide the case. They argued that Lawrence, 68, a Savannah lawyer appointed to the bench by Lyndon Johnson in 1968, had a past history of dragging his feet in deciding employment-discrimination cases. But the appeals court said no. Now the L.D.F. attorneys have gone to the Supreme Court. The "pattern of delay," they claim, means "a substantial nullification" of employment civil rights in southern Georgia, where Lawrence presides. The high court will not even decide whether to decide to take the unusual step of budging Judge Lawrence until October.

If Lawrence has not ruled by then, his opinion will have been pending for nearly three years. Since the trial, Seaboard has changed many of its practices under challenge. Still, for William English, and his coworkers, a final answer remains years down the line. If Lawrence some day finds they were victims of illegal discrimination and if that finding survives appeals, then it will be necessary to go back to trial on the issue of damages. And presiding over that trial--if everyone lives that long--will once again be the reluctant Judge Lawrence.

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