Judge threatens girls with Hell

[Rick Duncan]

I am puzzled about exactly why this case is "surreal."
Is it because the Judge mentioned hell? Or because the
girls' mother is up-in-arms over a harmless attempt on
the part of the judge to warn the girls about the
importance of telling the truth when under oath?

If only President Clinton had been warned about the
possibility of hell as the wages of lying when under
oath; our Nation might have been spared the shame of
an impeached President!

--Rick Duncan


--- stuartbuck <stuartbuck at MSN.COM> wrote:
> Keeping in line with the surreal stories we've seen
> lately, here are some
> excerpts from an interesting (and to me hilarious)
> article from the Chicago
> Sun-Times:
> http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/judg02.html
>
>
> Judge threatens girls with `hell'
>
> November 2, 2000
>
> BY CHRIS FUSCO SUBURBAN REPORTER
>
>
> "If you lie, you will go to hell," a Cook County
> judge warned two girls in
> his court before they testified about their dead
> poodle.
>
> Judge James T. Ryan once kept a woman in court until
> she soiled herself, and
> fined another woman for speeding to a hospital to
> give birth. The former
> mayor of Arlington Heights says he has since learned
> to control his temper.
>
> Now, he's in trouble with Diane Tuzzolino, a Mount
> Prospect mother who says
> he scared her children, Karyn, 12, and Kara, 8.
>
> "My older daughter went to testify," Tuzzolino said.
> "He told her, `You
> realize if you lie, you will go to hell. You realize
> what I'm saying, you
> will go to hell.' "
>
> The judge, she says, then made a similar statement
> to Kara.
>
> Ryan isn't disputing that he mentioned the afterlife
> in his Rolling Meadows
> courtroom. But he says he treated Tuzzolino's
> children with respect,
> speaking kindly to see if they were fit to testify
> in a heartbreaking case.
>
> "I might have said, `It was conceivable you could go
> to hell,' though I
> don't remember exactly. Sometimes people misperceive
> what I'm trying to do."
>
> The family was in court Friday to dispute a $312.70
> bill from a Schaumburg
> animal hospital, which cared for Tabitha, the
> family's 19-year-old black
> poodle-Pomeranian mix.
>
> * * *
>
> A signed receipt for the veterinarian's work, Ryan
> said, made Tuzzolino
> responsible for the bill, despite her argument that
> the dog already had died
> when she brought it to the animal hospital last
> April. The girls testified
> that the dog's head had drooped in the car on the
> way to the vet, Ryan said.
>
> "I didn't want the children to testify, but she was
> insistent," he said. "I
> questioned the children, asking them if they knew
> the difference between
> right and wrong ... and what would happen to them if
> they did not tell the
> truth."
>
> When she heard the judge, "I was basically
> speechless," said Tuzzolino, 38.
> "Never in my life have I heard a judge say that,
> even to an adult."
> * * *


=====
Rick Duncan (conlawprof at yahoo.com)

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