I have the joy and honor of serving as the personal bailiff to one of the greatest judges I’ve ever had the chance to meet. Often, our court is so busy, it is just him and me in the courtroom for staff. I am the court bailiff, clerk, reporter, and probation officer. I also create about 90% of the forms we use.
One day, we have one of our regular customers in. I became very familiar with the young man well before I ever met him. Not only have I frequently entered new warrants for his arrest in the state system, but I also have the frequent occasion to be the dispatcher answering radio calls from pursuits he’s lead, and frequently evaded, our officers on.
On this particular day, he knows he is going to be drug tested (by me), which includes me physically having to watch him pee into a cup, on the side of which is a thermometer strip. He pulls out what appears to be a normal male appendage and starts to free urine into the cup. Once he has filled the cup to the indicated line:
Me: “You can finish up, and then wash your hands and meet me in the courtroom.”
Something isn’t right. The temperature of the fluid is not body temperature, at least not a normal one. According to the thermal strip, the liquid is close to 106 degrees F. As an EMT, I know that this would usually be a fatal body temperature, or at the absolute easiest, the person would be so feverish that they would not be able to hold their legs beneath them to stand. What is even weirder are the results. Now, we’re talking about a kid, about seventeen or eighteen, and I know his drug of choice is weed. Well, he doesn’t test positive for weed.
After I get back into the courtroom, I seal the test kit in a bag — normally, I throw them away — write down some information in his case file, and hand it to the judge. When I do, the judge scratches his left inside wrist and then his right inside wrist, our code for “get ready to arrest.” The judge calls the kid up, and I have him stand almost behind the court reporter’s bench, so I can cut him off if he tries bolting on foot.
Judge: “Are you feeling well?”
Kid: “I feel fine.”
Judge: “Well, according to your test kit, you’re running a very high fever, and you tested positive for MDMA and methamphetamines.”
MDMA is also called ecstasy.
I s*** you not, the kid rolls his eyes, reaches into his pants, yanks pretty hard a couple of times, and brings out a male-appendage-shaped apparatus that has a small bladder attached with a locking mechanism keeping the fluid from leaking out.
He knew that such kits usually come back under temp, so he had it suspended in a half cup of coffee until he finally took it out and strapped it to his leg before entering the courtroom. The delicious irony is that he wasn’t careful who he got the urine sample from. All he asked was whether or not the donor had been smoking weed lately, not even thinking to ask about any other drugs.
I take him into custody, glove up and take hold of the device he left sitting on the reporter’s bench, and take him to jail. I will tell the jail staff that charges are pending, but he is to be held on PC of probation violation.
On the way to the jail, I turn to him. He isn’t a bad looking kid, and he didn’t have a bad upbringing, so I say something he isn’t expecting.
Me: “You know, I’ve known about you and your exploits for like five years or so now, but I have one major question.”
Kid: “What’s that?”
Me: “Have you ever given any serious thought to doing something positive with your life?”
Kid: “What could someone like me do?”
I look him in the eye.
Me: “Dude, you’ve been doing it for over five years. On the horrible dirt roads we have in this county, you still drive ’em like you’re Dale Earnhardt. Seriously, kid, you should think about making an honest career as a racecar driver.”
He kind of laughed me off, but I was 100% deadly serious. The kid could drive. For him to drive so well he could evade multiple-car pursuits at high speed, on winding, poorly-maintained dirt roads, surely he’d be no match for an oval circuit. I even offered to put in a word for a local racing team, whose owner I knew.
Sadly, the kid never took me up on my offer and just sank further and further into the quagmire of the justice system, ultimately spending time in a state pen for his actions. I still maintain that he would have made one h*** of a racecar driver.
For clarification, he did not get put in jail for drug charges. He got put in jail for a probation violation on one of his high-speed pursuits. We can’t charge a person for testing positive for marijuana, except if it’s one of the terms of their probation with the court.
