REACTION TO THE JUDGE

Chrzanowski's testimony led the evening news, was the lead every eight or ten minutes on the talk/news radio stations and drew derisive headlines in most of the next day's dailies.

The media ate up the "pretty lady" quote. It got laughs the next day at the Warren courthouse. Judge Chrzanowski might have taken the appellation as personal, that it was his own little nickname for her. The media certainly took it that way.

Many of the women who worked at the court knew differently. "Pretty lady," as it turned out, was Fletcher's standard greeting for just about any female under the age of 40, from judges to clerks to secretaries to janitors.

He was a flirt, one of the few men who could routinely, in this day and age, get away with greeting women he only knew casually as "pretty lady."

The Detroit Free Press put readers to sleep with its headline, below the fold on its Local News section—"Judge Gives Testimony in Fletcher Murder Trial" while the News was far juicier: "'Pretty Lady' Judge Tells of Affair, Lies" along with a photo of her on the stand and a liftout quote: "I loved him. I felt we would have a real future together."

Brian Dickerson, the Free Press' gifted columnist, who had nailed the situation so brilliantly in a column at Fletcher's arraignment 10 months earlier, was on his game, though.

"Hope is the thing with feathers," he began, quoting Emily Dickinson.

And even when it seemed Michael Fletcher had plucked that sucker clean, Susan Chrzanowski went on believing. As late as Tuesday, when prosecutors called her to testify at Fletcher's first-degree murder trial, the young Warren District Court judge seemed not quite ready to let the affair go.

Speaking tearfully at times, but never bitterly, she described a 17-month liaison marked by frequent reversals, but sustained again and again by Chrzanowski's hope that her lover would leave his wife and make a life with her.

Prosecutors have painted Fletcher as an equal-opportunity liar who regularly deceived both the women in his life. But in Chrzanowski's retelling, the slaying suspect seemed less a master manipulator than a garden-variety scaredy-cat who benefited from his lover's almost breath-taking

capacity for self-deception.…

"'We talked about what makes people happy,'" Dickerson wrote, quoting the judge's testimony.

"We talked about what it would be like to have a life together." But that August—the same day her divorce became final—Fletcher told Chrzanowski he was going back to his wife. Another woman might have taken that as a clue Fletcher was not the long-term investment opportunity she had imagined.…

The night before his wife's death, Chrzanowski said, Fletcher paged her to a late-evening tryst. He told her he'd been to church that day and that he'd gone out with his wife and parents. He didn't mention that they'd been celebrating Leann Fletcher's pregnancy. She only learned about the baby her lover and wife were expecting, Chrzanowski said, when Hazel Park police investigators sought her out the day after Leann's death.…

In the least convincing part of her testimony, Chrzanowski insisted she would have left her lover for good if she'd known he was still sleeping with his wife. But if that was what Fletcher feared most, he needn't have worried. If Chrzanowski's testimony established anything, it's that she wouldn't have stayed away long.

Dickerson's opposite at the News, Laura Berman, didn't write about Chrzanowski's testimony. She'd been at court the day before and had asked an old friend, who had once co-written a lengthy magazine cover story with her back when she worked at the rival Free Press, if he had any good angles to suggest.

The reporter told her that everyone would be covering Chrzanowski in Cooper's court. What she ought to do, if she was interested in irony and writing about it, was go sit in on the Warren or Center Line court and catch Chrzanowski on the bench. She's a preacher, the reporter had told her. She loves to admonish people on their sins. Trust me, it will be worth your morning. It will be a hoot. Berman took him up on his advice.

More than two weeks later, on June 29, while the jury was still out on its extremely lengthy deliberations on a verdict, the News' Metro section ran a withering column by Berman, headlined: "Shame Takes Back Seat in the Halls of Justice for Illicit Lovers."

"Shame isn't what it used to be," Berman began.

Every weekday, Warren Judge Susan Chrzanowski dons the black robes of her office. She administers justice in Center Line and Warren. It is her role to be a moral and legal authority, an example to the man who fell asleep in his car and left a crack pipe on the seat, to the student who sped through a stop sign, to the guy with stringy hair who says he had a shot of Jack Daniel's and "a couple of beers." And then drove home.

This is her job. To exemplify a high standard. To occupy a place of honor and authority. But how is a judge who has been publicly assigned a scarlet letter supposed to do this? Before the shooting death of Leann Fletcher, Macomb County prosecutors were happy to draw Chrzanowski on cases: She was fair and tough. Now, how tough can she be? How sternly can she lecture from the bench?

How much credibility can the star witness in her lover's murder case muster before the assorted scofflaws, screw-ups and speedsters who troop before her? "Good luck with your driving," she said cheerily Wednesday, to a speeder. "You need to slow down, ma'am," she said to another, in one of her harsher moments.…

The problem with Judge Chrzanowski isn't her passion for the wrong man, or her lapses in personal judgment that have been so publicly exposed. The problem is with a system that keeps giving her breaks, while the poor schmo who took a day off work to fight a 10 m.p.h.-over speeding ticket because he can't afford to pay the fine doesn't get a break.

Lying to police? Giving taxpayer-supported jobs to your lover? On Wednesday, I sat in her Center Line courtroom and watched her, a pleasant, pretty, 33-year-old woman who was kind, efficient, and friendly to everyone who came before her. Any woman might feel sympathetic toward another who happened to fall in love with the wrong man.

But she's a presiding judge. She might as well be wearing a big letter H for the hypocrisy of the justice system that lets her stay.