The Banishing Judge

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The mythologies of many Native American tribes feature a character known to anthropologists as the trickster. He is both good and bad; a creator but also a mischief maker. Above all, he is duplicitous: joyously, energetically deceptive. Among the Tlingit people of western Alaska, the trickster figure is known as the Raven. At the moment, however, someone bearing a striking resemblance to him is roaming the Ketchikan area under another name.

Last Thursday marked the first day of what is without question the most widely publicized legal proceeding in Tlingit history. In the 750-person lumber and fishing town of Klawock, Alaska, 12 self-proclaimed tribal judges pondered the fate of two young criminals. The "tribal court" had the trappings of authenticity: the hall had been ritually purified with a "devil's club" branch, and some of the judges wore red and black ceremonial blankets and gestured with eagle and raven feathers. But there were abundant reasons for skepticism, both of the tribunal and the sentence it was likely to mete out. Not least of which was its presiding magistrate: one of the more creative cross-cultural jurists in recent legal history, Rudy James.

The saga began in August 1993, when Adrian Guthrie and Simon Roberts, both 17, and raised in Klawock, ordered a pizza in Everett, Washington. When Domino's Pizza deliveryman Timothy Whittlesey showed up, Guthrie distracted him and Roberts hit him repeatedly with a baseball bat, leaving him, his assailant now admits, "kinda in convulsions." A bystander saw the teens removing Whittlesey's beeper, $40 and the pizza. The two Tlingits pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery. Superior Court Judge James Allendoerfer was expected to assign prison terms of up to 5 1/2 years.

Enter Rudy James. The 58-year-old Klawock native had long ago moved to Washington and married the ex-wife of one of Allendoerfer's colleagues on the bench. At the behest of Roberts' grandfather, he presented himself as a Tlingit tribal judge and suggested an exotic deal. If Allendoerfer bound the boys over to their tribe, they would undergo a traditional Tlingit punishment: banishment on remote, uninhabited islands, while contemplating their sins and hewing logs with which to build Whittlesey a house.

The offer had its attractions. It was eminently multicultural; it addressed a well-founded Native American grievance regarding the law's treatment of Indian minors; and it dovetailed nicely with the public misgivings about the criminal justice system's inability to rehabilitate. By contrast, James offered up the Alaskan islands as a type of Rousseau's Eden where, he enthused, the boys' "attitudes can be affected by nature and nature's god. By beholding ((nature)) you become changed."

Allendoerfer bought it. Postponing official sentencing for 18 months, he accepted a $25,000 property bond from the boys' families and put them in James' custody. Then he went on vacation.

That was prudent, given the information that had already begun leaking out. Although James has no criminal convictions, he has a history of bad debts, and civil court judgments against him have reportedly reached $60,000. Klawock's only federally recognized Tlingit organization, the Klawock Cooperative Association, sent a letter disassociating itself from the case. Sociologists were up in arms. Says Sasha Hughes, author of two books on Native Alaskan heritage and a longtime James observer: "Banishment is not part of Tlingit culture. Rudy is a con man. He just makes it up as he goes along." Adds Aaron Isaacs of the Cooperative Association: "People want to know. Who's he representing?"

A good question. In Klawock last Thursday, the panel of judges was peculiarly constituted. Five of the 12 were named James; a sixth was Roberts' grandfather; a seventh was invited on at the last minute by Guthrie's mother. Relatives also made up a large fraction of the hearing's meager Tlingit audience. After the purification ceremonies and a speech by 92-year-old George Jim exhorting the Tlingits to "march together; that way we will not fall apart!" the defendants entered, dressed in reversed tunics, to indicate their shame, and traditional red head coverings.

While Whittlesey, whom James had promised restitution for the partial deafness he has suffered, looked on from the audience, both boys apologized for their crime. But then, responding to leading questions by their elders, they ticked off a list of extenuating circumstances: they had been drunk; Roberts always carried a bat with him for fear of gangs; he had "heard a report that one of the Domino's Pizza deliverymen had a gun" and might be dangerous. The day's session ended with a statement by one of the elders that "it's a known fact that under the influence of alcohol you can break all the Ten Commandments of God." The two defendants, who sometimes had trouble keeping a straight face during the proceedings, replaced their ceremonial headdress with baseball caps, jumped into a jeep and drove home for the evening, grinning.

On the following day, to nobody's surprise, they were banished for from 12 to 18 months apiece. It will be interesting to see how onerous that penalty actually turns out to be.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Klawock