Your Verdict

In 1967, only four days after the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, Jacqueline St. Joan married across the color line in Virginia-and lost her family as a result. What followed was a life shaped by the upheavals of the era: divorce, single motherhood, and deep involvement in the second wave of feminism, including relationships with both women and men.

In the 1980s, St. Joan became a judge in Denver, presiding over cases that exposed the fragility and resilience of ordinary lives. Her rulings brought her both respect and criticism. She writes of cases that linger long after the gavel falls, of moments when the law offers no clean answer, and of the personal toll which controversial decisions take. She writes of times when attorneys or the press turned their attention to the judge herself--reviving her memories of her musician father and her complex, racist mother, of her own anti-war protests during Vietnam, of clients who'd dropped domestic abuse complaints out of fear.... As she re-collects relevant pieces of her memories, she takes readers into the corridors and assigned rooms of the Denver City & County Building so that they can consider how a judge tries to balance legal requirements and human empathy. Moving between courtroom and home, Your Verdict explores how gender, sexuality, race, conscience, history and responsibility shape the choices we make and the costs we bear.

Several cases get particularly resonant attention: the "defacing" of a statue of Columbus by a group of American Indian Movement protestors; police and public response to the trial of a prostitute with AIDS; treatment of a lawyer whose ex-husband (a policeman) had shot her in court; a defense attorney's demand that she recuse herself because she would inevitably be biased against a famous football player accused of domestic abuse. The trials of Operation Rescue members, arrested for "disturbing the peace" and "harassment" at an abortion clinic, constitute a particularly nuanced chapter as she examines individual motives and actions in light of various laws' requirements and of her own experiences with political protests, a deeply Catholic childhood, and much more.

This memoir resists easy closure. What emerges is a hard-won integrity: the author's refusal to choose either her belief in the law or her belief in love. Your Verdict: A Judge's Reckoning with Law and Loss is a memoir about courage, reinvention, and what happens when a life lived outside the rules enters the courtroom.