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A. I know I'm not smarter than everybody else. And face it, nobody in their right mind would seek the kind of lacerating publicity this Norplant decision has generated. This happened to me. Like being shot at happened to me.
Q. Why did this man try to kill you?
A. Because he felt that my Norplant decision was wrong. He passionately opposes birth control.
Q. Was he rational?
A. Either he was insane or he is a great hero. I mean, who acts on his beliefs? Everyone talks tough, but if he truly believed that I was killing babies, he was a brave enough man to stand up and try to kill me and suffer the consequences. I have seen the videotape of his confession, where he talked about planning the murder. He wanted the death penalty. He prepared for this. He had shot at a target hundreds of times.
Q. So you're at the bench, and you see this guy sitting there in the courtroom.
A. I hadn't really taken note of him. I was hearing a simple case, dividing up property in a divorce. He stood up and pointed a .357 at my head and pulled the trigger. And he missed.
Q. How close was he?
A. Nineteen feet. I ducked underneath the bench and waited for him to come around the corner and shoot at me again. A lot was going through my head very, very fast. I thought I was dying. I was feeling for the blood, and I couldn't find the blood. Then I saw the bullet hole in the wall above me and realized that he'd missed. I couldn't decide what to do, whether to beg or fight.
Q. Didn't you hear the scuffling when the bailiff rushed in and grabbed the guy?
A. No. So much was going on so fast. Then I stood up and saw him. He was flabbergasted that I was alive. He came for me. He wasn't cuffed.
Q. And you took a swing at him?
A. I took a lot of swings at him! It was chaos. This man had tried to kill me. I came around the bench, and he was coming for me, and I was punching him, and he was hitting me, and people were trying to pull us apart. Some people say I showed bad judgment. They think that a judge shouldn't get mad when somebody tries to kill him.
Q. You recently put an abused wife in jail. Why did you punish the victim?
A. She refused to testify against her husband, who had beaten her. I did not want to put her in jail. My judge friends told me, "Howard, you've got to get her out of jail."
Q. So why did you do it?
A. She violated a direct order of the court. I had to make a judgment call. She made her stand, I made my stand. It was a one-day case, and while it was going on, I had her held in my private holding cell at the courthouse. I had the bailiff stay with her and bring her a nice sandwich. The jury convicted her husband. And then I let her out.
Q. Didn't you have any alternatives?
A. I could have fined her. But she was poor.
Q. You didn't fine her because it would have been a hardship. Instead you put her in jail. Wasn't that pretty harsh?