"Keep up the good work," Dugan told him. Dugan and court staff looked at their calendars and gave Fleming a court date three week later to, again, check in.
"He's a great guy," Fleming later said of Dugan. "He's fair and straight forward. He knows what's going on. But he also won't take no bullshit from you."
That Friday, many of the veterans appearing before Dugan seemed to feel the same way. A few, however, were there to refuse the veterans court and be re-assigned to court dates in the regular court. One 60ish Vietnam veteran who did this was outraged over a charge that he had lied on a gun registration form about an Abuse Prevention Order from Brockton, Massachusetts. He wanted to plead not guilty and fight the case. If he lost, of course, he had a chance of being sent to "State Road," the array of prisons in the northeast area of the city.
The Philadelphia justice system is notoriously overburdened and lot of human details get lost along the way in the procedure that begins with arrest. Next comes the assignment of a public defender, a process that often doesn't allow much time for the attorney to learn about a case -- let alone undertake any kind of investigation -- before facing a judge. Plea-bargaining tends to become the name of the game, with the public defender and the district attorney both interested in streamlining their case loads.
I've taught creative writing in the city's maximum security prison for ten years, and many of my students are incarcerated there without a trial -- even though there is a law that says trials should occur within 180 days of arrest. Technicalities allow it to be overlooked, and it is not uncommon to have someone in the city jail for two, three or four years without having a trial. Many inmates are simply overwhelmed.
The Drug War, of course, is a major cause of this dysfunctional, overloaded, often insensitive and prejudicial system. Sending so many people to jail seems to make less and less sense. Jail for possession of drugs should, by now, be seen as a waste of tax-payer money, but men and women are still sent to jail for this. Jailing people for small-time drug sales in the inner city has become absurd.
Judge Dugan told me he expressed how fed up he was with the Drug War in open court in February, when he was moved to declare, "The Drug War is officially lost." What made him say this, he said, was seeing poor, African American grandmothers in his court for selling drugs. The way he put it, when you begin to see the famous last line of parental responsibility in a poor, dysfunctional community selling drugs to make ends meet and survive you have to realize something is terribly wrong. A new approach was called for.
Dugan was appointed a municipal judge by Governor Ed Rendell in 2010. Before that, he spent a lot of time in military service, beginning as an enlisted man, then being commissioned an officer in the legal JAG Corps. He is proud of his service in both the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. At a dinner for the 82nd Airborne Association, where he introduced Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery, he jokingly said he had served in the war zones as both "a pogue and a grunt." A pogue stands for Personnel Other than Grunts or POG. Dugan was awarded a Bronze Star and the Combat Action Badge in Iraq.
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