THE VERDICT -- Robert Gardner

When one has been a judge as long as I was -- more than 60 years --

the faces and names of those who appear before you blend into anonymity.

All except for Oswaldo Lopez.

Oswaldo was a thief, a happy-go-lucky, not particularly bright thief.

One chilly December night, he was walking past the Salvation Army

headquarters, and there, in the window, was a coat. So Oswaldo did what

seemed to him a very logical thing. He picked up a rock, broke the plate

glass window, put the coat on and continued walking down the street --

and into the arms of the entire Santa Ana Police Department.

If he wasn’t very smart about crime, he was positively ingenious when

it came to his defense. He appeared in my court and claimed that he could

not speak nor hear. So that his rights would not be violated, we hired a

sign language interpreter plus a Spanish language translator. The pace of

the trial was agonizing. The district attorney would ask a question. The

translator would put it into Spanish. The interpreter would sign. Oswaldo

would sign, the translator would translate . . . the county was going to

go bankrupt at this rate. And then we found out he wasn’t what he

claimed. He could speak, and he could hear.

What an embarrassment. And so I arrived at a truly Solomonic (and

face-saving) solution. The district attorney, the public defendant and I

each put in $10. We trooped down to the bus station where we bought a

one-way ticket to El Paso. My bailiff, Lee Bruso, advised the bus driver

not to let Oswaldo off the bus until it reached El Paso, and we waved

Oswaldo on his way.

I guess it worked. I never saw Oswaldo again. Whether the city of El

Paso had to foot the bill for an interpreter and translator, we’ll never

know.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column runs Tuesdays.