Judge's 2009 resolution has etiquette as priority
Posted on Friday, January 2, 2009
CONWAY - It's been years, but Circuit Judge David Reynolds of Conway well remembers a woman who showed up for jury duty in her aerobics outfit.
"I told her she needed to go home. That was a distraction to everyone in the courtroom," Reynolds recalled.
As a new year begins, Reynolds proposed a resolution for all the witnesses, jurors and defendants who show up in his courtroom: "that they behave in the courtroom like they do at church."
Of course, "that's probably the problem," Reynolds said. "The etiquette at church has changed a lot in our lifetime."
The words of etiquette experts like Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners) and Letitia Baldrige occasionally sound almost nostalgic to people old enough to remember the days before cell phones interrupted movies, before adults joined children in pulling out the Doublemint during a worship service and certainly before anyone donned flip-flops for a White House picture with the president.
"What we writers on etiquette say doesn't matter. ... [People] no longer follow rules of etiquette. ... They do what they jolly well please," said Baldrige, who was Jacqueline Kennedy's White House social secretary in the early 1960s.
"We're in a period of nastiness, and we just have to live through it, battle our way through it," Baldrige said by telephone from her Washington office.
Leah Ingram, the Pennsyl- vania author of the Everything Etiquette Book: A Modern-Day Guide to Good Manners, agreed: "I just think we've become a very casual society that thinks manners are for dinosaurs."
Ingram, for example, likened the practice of chewing gum while offering or taking communion during a worship service as "right up there with why people don't send thank-you notes anymore. ... I don't think there's a place for anybody to be chewing gum" in a church or synagogue.
"My kids know when we walk into a house of worship, out goes the gum."
There's "been a relaxing of the teaching of good manners with so many people in the current generation or even in the last generation," Ingram said Wednesday. "That's a real shame, because I think there is always a place for good manners."
And sometimes a practical need.
Ingram said she's been told that "in the work world, the people who do not send thank-you notes don't go as far. They may not get a second interview for a job if they don't send a thankyou note."
Further, employees "may not be looked at professionally" if they chew gum at a conference table or don't know how to use their forks and knives properly at business functions, she said.
Baldrige said she's even seen a bridesmaid chewing gum as she walked up the aisle.
"I just see it everywhere," she said. "There is no place where it seems to be verboten anymore. ... It's just so ugly."
Back in the courtroom, Reynolds said, he's had to tell a couple people who showed up in filthy clothes to go change them.
One of his colleagues, Circuit Judge Charles E. Clawson Jr. of Conway, said a judge is supposed to listen to the testimony and try not to get caught up in the presentation.
But, Clawson said, "We're all subject to first impressions. ... If the presentation detracts from the content, that's something you have to consider."
"I have handed people napkins or Kleenex to spit their gum out" while they were testifying. I've done that on more than one occasion," he said. "You can't understand what they're saying for the smacking."
Clawson believes "the institution of the court deserves a measure of respect."
"To see people chewing gum or showing up in a pair of shorts in the summertime or a T-shirt with some ... slogan or something like that on it, I just think the court deserves better," he said. "I have called people to the bench and told them" not to wear shorts to court.
Reynolds said he even had one person charged with a drug offense come to court with a picture of a marijuana leaf on his shirt.
"It's almost as if they don't know how to act," he said.
Defense attorney Frank Shaw of Conway advises his clients and witnesses to wear something that makes them feel comfortable, whether that's a suit or jeans and a sweater, but something "besides shorts and some unseemly shirt."
"Wear what you'd wear to church," a funeral or a wedding, he said.
"How you present yourself in court is a perception of your character, and how you act is representative of those things, and to some extent how you dress. [They] are indications of what kind of person you are," Shaw said.
About 30 years ago, Shaw recalled, a defense witness providing his client an alibi walked into the courtroom and was wearing a see-through white cotton outfit with no underwear and a goldcolored chain between her legs.
"When she walked in, we thought our goose was cooked," he said.
"It never ceases to amaze me what people will wear to court," he said. "They'll just have on the worst, dirtiest clothes they've got. They look like they think they're going to a mobile-home repair party."
Ingram said people should err on the side of dressing conservatively and not be afraid to ask what is the proper attire at work or at someone's house where they've been invited for dinner.
And when it comes to shoes, Ingram said, "I would have died a thousand deaths if my children went to the White House wearing flip-flops," as did some members of Northwestern University's lacrosse team in 2005.
"Flip-flops are for the pool, for summer days, for weekends with shorts. ... If you're going to wear a dress or a skirt as a woman, you should be wearing a better set of footwear," Ingram said. "Please, not a rubber flipflop."
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