County Magistrate Judge

So tell me about the, the accident.$$Well, we were, it was about maybe eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock at night and we had decided to go to Lake Tahoe. And, I think the highway to Lake Tahoe is highway 80 [Interstate 80], so you'd go from Oakland [California] to San Francis- to Sacramento [California], the Sacramento area and at some point you, you go on highway 50 [U.S. Route 50]. Well, Marty Bennett [ph.], the guy who was driving the car, who had been a chef who had cooked the food at the party, I don't think was that familiar with getting to Lake Tahoe. And at some point we did not, we never made it to highway 50. He stayed on 80 and during this, in this part of California, it's near the California, Nevada border where the accident was, it's in Truckee, California, and it's in the mountains. And at the time we were really on our way to Reno [Nevada], rather than Lake Tahoe because he missed the turn for 50. At some point on the way up there, we stopped for gas and I got out and went to the restroom and got something to drink and then got back in the car and we were in a Toyota station wagon and had the--I had worked all week and was tired and the, in the station wagon, we had pushed the backseat down, and so I really was asleep. When I got back in the car, I was asleep in the back, and my boyfriend was asleep in the back and then Jenny [ph.], his sister, was in the passenger seat and Marty was driving. And at some point, I, I was awakened by the fact that the car was moving around, but wasn't sure what was going on because I was still kind of waking up out of a sleep and I just heard somebody say, "Oh no, oh no," and then the car stopped. And, I don't have a real concept of the time that elapsed in, in leaving the road, but we did flip over several times. We hit a guardrail and the guardrail had a fan at the end of it that ordinarily would keep a car from going off the road, but this one was bent in a certain way and the way the car hit it, it caused the car to flip over the guardrail and it flipped over several times and went down an embankment. And in the course of flipping over one of the times, when the car was on, was upside down, the latch on the back of the station wagon opened up and I was ejected from the car, wasn't in the seatbelt because I was lying down and so, I was out on the ground. At some point I woke up and people were around me saying, "It'll be all right." And I just was conscious that I was lying down but, and that had been in an accident, was really not aware of what had happened, was feeling a pain in my neck but was kind of in and out of consciousness. And so there was a period of time where I heard people around me saying everything was going to be okay, and then at one point I woke up again and I was in a hospital and they were asking me what my name was, and then I lost consciousness again, and I woke up again, I was in a hospital. Later found out that I had been taken to a small hospital in Truckee, California and I was, at that point, with Ralph [ph.], my boyfriend had had injury to his foot, and Jenny, who was in the front seat, had had, had her seatbelt on and had some abrasions on her chest from the seatbelt. I think it hit her chin on the dashboard. And Marty had not been injured. He said that there was a light from a truck that came by that caught him and he was temporarily unable to see, and that's why he lost control of the vehicle, but the three of us were asleep in the car, and I tend to think that maybe he was tired and fell asleep, too. He was not charged with anything.$So the lawsuit with MARTA [Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority] was in 2001.$$Um-hm.$$Okay.$$And, and just before that time, of course, I was still, had in mind, and Judge Thompson [A.L. Thompson] had in mind, appointing me to the magistrate court [Magistrate Court of Fulton County]. There was, he was waiting for a vacancy to--there were three full-time judges at the time and he decided not to wait and to appoint me as a part-time judge and that happened at the beginning of 2000. And so, I was called to court to preside over plea hearings at the jail where people who were convicted of misdemeanors had been in jail a sufficient amount of time and they were ready to take pleas. So I would go to the jail and hear calendars just to, to take their guilty pleas. At this point, the, the benches, the courtrooms that were used by magistrate court judges, none of them were accessible. The one lift that we had installed in the courthouse was in a courtroom that was occupied by a, another judge, and I could not use her courtroom. So here I am, after all these many years, advocating to try to get the benches accessible, it was actually my time to be a judge and the bench needed to be accessible for me. And I could not do anything in the courthouse until the courtroom that magistrate court used was accessible and, fortunately, the court administrator agreed that they needed to expedite ordering the lift for, at least one of the courtrooms that I would be using. And so, you know, I complained because I was only doing calendars at the jail, that was only one calendar and the bulk of the work was being done at the courthouse. So, by, I think by June of 2000, they had installed a ramp system that takes forever for county government to work to actually figure out what kind of lift to install, but they did have a ramp going up to the bench so I started doing the regular work of magistrate court by 2000, by the summer of 2000. And so then I was still part-time but they would call me in to do calendars, two and three days a week, and it was enough to get my, my foot in the door. I was doing criminal, first appearance calendars for misde- well, for all the cases that involved Fulton County police [Fulton County Police Department] and police from other jurisdictions. Atlanta [Atlanta Police Department] had their own court for, for first appearance hearings and then Fulton County [Superior Court of Fulton County] would hear the hearings for Fulton County police and all the other police departments that are in Fulton County, that would be the, all the university police departments and all the other cities in Fulton County. So I was doing those hearings, I was doing small claim court hearings. There's a child support calendar, the abandonment calendar. I was doing that calendar and on different days, I did, I had different calendars and finally there was a new position created, one judge had been appointed in that position before me and when she left to go to the state court [State Court of Fulton County], I was, been appointed a full-time magistrate in 2002. And I just had my five year anniversary as a magistrate court judge on September 11th of this year.