A Woman's Turn

Twelve years ago when she became the first woman magistrate in New York City, Jean Norris was 42 and a "fine figure of a woman." Life, for her, promised exceed ingly well. She had Health and great vitality. Her salary was, by comparison with most career-women, high--$7,000.

She could look forward to the attentions which would be given to all the first-women-this-or-that. And she was no fool.

Until this year, life generously fulfilled its promise. If not famed. Jean Norris had become near-famed. She was smartly gowned. She had some friends on Park Avenue and many elsewhere. She had managed to travel much abroad. In Cairo, Calcutta, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, great were the heraldings and great the ban-quetings of "America's first woman judge."

Actually this title needed qualification. A magistrate is as different from a Supreme Court judge as an ordinary bank officer from a financier. And in Ohio that learned, grey-haired jurist. Florence Allen, had be come a justice of the Supreme Court. But what matter? Jean Norris had no grey hairs and was certainly somebody. She loved her work--being called "Your Honor," and tartly telling this male he was overruled, or wisely bidding that bad girl to be good.

Then last year the shadow arose. New York judges high and low, who the people were sure were crooked, began to be proved crooked. The power of Tammany in which Jean Norris had always trusted seemed insufficient to confound the inquisitors. Jean Norris' turn approached.

Last week she was summoned before Referee Samuel Seabury, ordered up into the witness stand, like any common crook, put under oath, examined and cross-examined, twisted and tangled on her magisterial conduct. Dressed in green, holding herself stiffly erect, the onetime Brooklyn girl answered questions briefly, almost insolently, in pseudo-Oxonian accent. Her inquisitors attempted to show that she was a falsifier of her court's official record, a tyrant on the bench who petulantly bossed defendants around at the peril of their constitutional rights, a dispenser of justice toward women offenders far less merciful than male magistrates.

What brought loudest public condemnation down upon Jean Norris' haughty head was proof that she had altered the steno graphic record of a case which was about to be appealed on the ground of an unfair trial. Mary Disena Labello was up on a prostitution charge. It was getting late in the afternoon. Mary Labello's attorney complained he had been in court since 10 a. m. The official record read as follows:

The Court--So have I. You know what to do; plead her [the defendant] guilty and tell her to throw herself on the mercy of the Court.

Judge Norris changed the record to read: "So have I. What is it, counsel, do you wish to plead her guilty and throw herself on the mercy of the Court?"

On the stand Magistrate Norris first denied that she had made any changes, then admitted that this alteration was "somewhat arbitrary" but that, after all, it was only "an error of judgment."

Out of the record in the same case she had stricken her statement to defense counsel that he was "going to be limited" in presenting evidence. Later she cut him short with a refusal to hear more of his witnesses--and then deleted it from the record. She practically forced the defendant to take the stand, ordered her to "get up" and "stop arguing." But from the revised record Magistrate Norris had also edited these judicial imperatives. The defendant was convicted, sent to the work house for 100 days.

Stubbornly Magistrate Norris last week refused to agree with Referee Seabury that her changes were "striking and substantial" in a fair-trial appeal and tended to put her "on record in a fairer and more impartial position." Her only defense: "An error of judgment ... an error of judgment. ... I made the changes according to my recollection of what I said."

Two other factors weighed against the "woman's judge of women": 1) she had dealt in the stock of a bail bond company which did business in her court; 2) she always refused to question the veracity of vice squad policemen in a prostitution case.

Kenna Case. In its corollary investigation into bribe-taking policemen who operate in magistrates' courts, the Seabury inquiry turned up this item last week:

Six years ago Police Lieutenant John W. Kenna was placed in charge of about 1,000 policemen in the midtown section of Manhattan, called "The Tenderloin," which abounds in speakeasies and vice resorts. His salary for the period amounted to $20,000. He and his mother, however, have banked during the six years a total of $237,000.

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