JUDGE COOPER

By luck of the blind-draw system that assigns criminal cases to circuit court judges, Judge Jessica Cooper has presided over more than her share of high- profile, media-glare cases.

She oversaw two of Jack (Dr. Death) Kevorkian's trials on homicide charges involving patients he helped commit suicide. The second, as a result of Kevorkian's notorious appearance on "60 Minutes", where he was shown twisting the dials on his poison-gas machines, which effected the death of Thomas Youk, 53—a sufferer of Lou Gehrig's disease—ended in a guilty verdict and a long prison sentence. Unfortunately for Kevorkian, by that time he had split with Fieger and insisted on representing himself, proving the adage about attorneys who do that having fools for clients.

At his sentencing, Cooper said: "You dared the authorities to stop you.

Consider yourself stopped." And then sent him off for 10 to 25.

Thanks to those and other prominent and controversial cases, the room in the Oakland County Courthouse that is reserved for camera crews, technicians and overflows of reporters and media attending trials had long carried a permanent, tongue-in-cheek sign saying: "Cooper's Media Room."

Cooper became a judge by accident, and her path to one of the most prominent judgeships in one of the most affluent counties in North America is at times mystifying even to her.

"I'm a product of the Sixties," she says. "And I'm a city person. How I got to the suburbs is anybody's guess."

Cooper is a tiny woman, soft-spoken both off and on the bench. Attorneys long ago learned not to mistake either her size or her demeanor for weakness of any kind. Upon entering the small suite of offices that housed her, her clerk, secretary and court reporter, visitors were greeted by a sign on the wall: "No Whining." She is a scholar of the law—she is also a professor at the Detroit College of Law on the campus of Michigan State University, specializing in the nuances of evidentiary law—sure of herself, confident in her rulings, the

unquestioned monarch of her domain. She is almost hidden up high behind the bench in her courtroom, but she can be ferocious when need be, and intimidating upon command.

Rob Jensen, the jury foreman for the Fletcher trial, would describe her afterwards as: "very neutral to everybody. Very fair. She seemed like the coolest person, but everybody in the jury was terrorized by her. She commanded authority. Here was a person who looked at you and you knew she was an authority figure."

Needless to say, when Cooper told the jury at each of their recesses and adjournments not to discuss the case amongst themselves or with anyone, they obeyed.

She was born in Los Angeles but moved to Michigan as a baby and grew up in Detroit, graduating from the city's premier high school, Cass Tech, in 1964. Detroit was a far different place in those days, still the center of the automotive universe, a forested city whose canopy of towering American elm trees had yet to be ravaged by Dutch elm disease. The buses ran on time and, while it was a city with many problems, most of them involving the gaping racial divides, no one yet called it Murder City.

Cooper went to undergraduate school and law school at Detroit's Wayne State University. While in school, she clerked for three years at a law firm specializing in labor law, and after graduating from law school in 1973, worked in appellate law for two years before starting her own firm in 1975, sharing space with another attorney as she struggled to build a practice.

"In those days, there weren't a lot of women practicing law," she says. And not a lot of work.

As a child of the Sixties, Cooper began specializing in civil rights cases. "Those were the days when they'd tell you, 'I'm sorry. We don't hire women.' Nobody understood it was a violation of Title VII." And she did a lot of probate work, one of those few niches into which women attorneys had been funneled and were allowed to prosper. As the civil rights cases would wend their laborious way through the federal court system, probate law paid the bills.

In 1978, on a lark, never suspecting she could win, in fact expecting to get

trounced, she ran for judge of the 46th District Court in southern Oakland County. The incumbent was a character—some would say that is far too polite a description—who had been around Southfield politics forever. A Neanderthal, he had been mayor before becoming a district judge.

He wore red robes on the bench, of all things, and used to keep his own chart of what time of the month women committed crimes. Not time of month as in early, middle or late, but time of the month relative to their menstrual cycle. He was sure he would eventually be able to correlate crime with menstruation, especially the crime of shoplifting.

"I thought his practices were an invasion of privacy and I was very much feminist oriented," she recalled in an interview in her office following Mick Fletcher's trial.

Inside her offices was a poster that read: "Justice, justice thou shall pursue." And justice she pursued in what she and everyone else thought would be a

Quixotic run at the incumbent judge's office.

"I was at some political party and they said, 'Look, nobody can possibly beat him. But, you know, just to let him know he can't get away with this kind of thing, we need a woman to run against him,'" she recalled. "It was not a thing I was going to win. It was for the principle of it."

The police didn't like the judge, either, and so, to her surprise, the conservative police union and the ultraliberal feminist lawyer found themselves working together. The union campaigned for her door to door, her theater group went door to door, her female clients, no matter what time of month, went door to door.

And she won the election by 770 votes. She was 33. Her legal firm had just begun showing signs of being a real practice, a way to pay bills and take a vacation now and then and maybe even put something in the bank—"money had just started coming in"—and suddenly that career was over and this new one had begun.

It was clear from the start that, although there were too few women judges and far too much old-boy-networking among the lawyers that came before her, Cooper was not an accidental judge. She was a natural talent on the bench, the

kind losers walk away from thinking they had a fair trial.

She won re-election in 1984 with 75 percent of the vote, then ran for the more prestigious circuit bench in 1986. She was the district judge in Southfield, at the southern—and less affluent—end of Oakland County. Southfield abuts Detroit and its once lily-white make-up was fast being diluted by an influx of blacks, who for the first time in southeastern Michigan's history were able to find realtors who'd sell them houses in the suburbs, and Chaldeans, a fast- growing subculture of immigrants and their kids who had bought many of the gas stations and party stores in the inner city and were proving to be the latest success stories in the American melting pot.

Conventional wisdom, then, was that you couldn't get elected to Oakland County's circuit court from one of the south-end cities or towns.

Cooper won a six-year term, this time with 60 percent of the vote. "You should never tell me I can't do something."

In 1992, she easily won re-election, then lost a truly quixotic vote for the state Supreme Court in 1994—candidates run officially as independents, but are nominated at state-wide party conventions and the court is notoriously politicized. She ran as a true independent, without party backing or financial support just to protest the system—"I hate it; it's so ugly"—and shocked everyone by getting half a million votes.

In 1998 she was once more re-elected to the Circuit Court and at the time of the Fletcher trial was running for second district of the State Appeals Court, where she would be able to stop trying felons and move on to her real love— legal scholarship. "There's a time in your life when you say, 'Enough.' I shouldn't be in the public eye," she said, admitting a weariness for TV reporters racing after her, deluges of e-mails, hate mail and, particularly in the Kevorkian cases, death threats and armed guards.

"I want to fade into the background. At 54, I want to get more into academics. The Appeals Court is getting more and more politicized and I want to get in there and say, 'Hey, let's do the analysis. Let's call things right down the middle. Politics has no business here.' That's been my flag for a while, so I guess I'll have to go up there."

And then there was the sheer psychic weight that dealing with murderers, rapists and other assorted felons on a daily basis for 20 years presses down on you. "I think I've seen more things than I've ever needed to see," she said. "And I've learned more things than I've ever needed to learn. I've seen people who had no souls behind their eyes."

But the limelight wouldn't be fading, and the reporters wouldn't be going away, yet, in the spring and summer of 2000, which had been phenomenally busy seasons even for the energetic Cooper. There would be at least one more set of eyes to look into.

Cooper taught a seminar on trial practice at Emory Law School in Atlanta in early May, then got married on May 27 to engineer Clarke Cunningham, taking a week's honeymoon in Vermont before coming home to begin the Fletcher trial

—Legghio had requested a delay which would have extended the honeymoon, but she would have none of it.

And during the long trial, she continued to commute the 75–90 minutes each way, back and forth to East Lansing each Tuesday night, to teach evidentiary law at DCL.

Sometime that summer, she found time, too, to house-hunt, make some bids, buy a dream house and move.

"I'm insane," she'd crack to those who questioned her schedule.

Though she was a product of liberal times and causes, Cooper was a tough sentencer when it came to felonies of violence, and while defense attorneys respected her for her fairness and her knowledge of the law, they didn't necessarily look forward to judgment day.

Jack Kevorkian got 10 to 25 after his second-degree murder conviction in 1999, despite pleas by the defense that a long sentence would amount to a death sentence for the ailing, elderly eccentric. Henry Hearns, the younger brother of world-champion boxer Thomas Hearns, got 27–52 years for his conviction of second-degree murder in the shooting death of his fiancée following an argument at a party.

Those were sentences for second-degree murder, and Mick Fletcher was up on murder one.