THE JUDICIAL INNOVATOR

JUDGE RICHEY UNAFRAID TO GO OUT ON LIMB

On New Year's Eve in 1978, as the printers union of the Washington Star wrangled with publishers over a new contract, an emergency hearing on the negotiations convened before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey. But a snag arose: All court stenographers were gone for the holiday.

With only hours to go before the stalled negotiations threatened to close the Star, Richey grabbed the nearest solution: the tape recorder of a nearby news reporter. Breaking the standing rule against allowing the devices in the courthouse, Richey ordered the hearing to proceed, electronically recorded. The result: a new contract.

"It was a time the Star was almost going to close," said a lawyer involved in the case, Andrew M. Kramer. "The judge took a very active role, and really was instrumental in getting parties to talk."

The stern, white-haired judge now presiding over the trial of accused drug dealer Rayful Edmond III strikes most observers as a central casting director's idea of a strait-laced Republican. But behind that sober facade lurks a risk-taker -- a media-savvy one.

"He is not afraid to be on the cutting edge," said one of Richey's fellow federal judges, summing up the general courthouse opinion about the 65-year-old Nixon appointee.

In the Star labor negotiations of a decade ago, or last Friday's controversial ruling barring the public from the Edmond trial, Richey has more than once shown a willingness to go out on a judicial limb.

It was he, for instance, who ruled in 1981 that demonstrators in Lafayette Square have a constitutional right to sleep there as a protest against homelessness, a decision that marked an important innovation in First Amendment law.

More recently, Richey ruled that private citizens have a right to sue the president of the United States for access to computer tapes used in the Executive Office of the President. That decision marked the first time the Administrative Procedures Act had been interpreted to give people that right against the chief executive.

There is little in Richey's background to suggest an iconoclast in the making. Born in Logan County, Ohio, in 1923, Richey had a strict Methodist upbringing that included little Sunday horseplay, but lots of dinner-table talk about politics and issues of the day. He moved to Washington in 1950 and practiced law in this area for 21 years.

In 1967, he was appointed general counsel to the Maryland Public Service Commission by an old friend, Gov. Spiro Agnew. Later, as vice president, Agnew proved to be Richey's route to a federal judgeship. Nixon appointed him to the bench here in 1971.

As a Republican appointee, Richey proved to be unexpectedly liberal. In 1980, he awarded what was then the largest damage award ever given to victims of sex discrimination: $16 million to 324 female employees of the Government Printing Office.

He was also hard-working, a quality that holds true today. In the Edmond case, the judge has issued more than 200 pretrial orders and for months now has been working 12 to 15 hours a day, six days a week. It is a schedule that taxes law clerks many years his junior.

"I renegotiated my deal with him to get two weeks of vacation instead of one after the first year," said one former clerk, Washington lawyer Jeffrey F. Liss. "He can tire you out."

Richey is not one to labor unknown and unappreciated. He courts the media with an acute image consciousness.

On the same day the computer tapes ruling was issued, for instance, courtesy copies arrived promptly on the desks of courthouse reporters. Last May, the judge made sure that reporters were provided copies of a routine commencement speech he gave at a local law school.

Reporters who arrived for the first day of the Edmond trial each got a typed transcript of his greeting to the jury -- a 14-page document in which a brief review of the charges against each defendant were preceded by a classic Richey preamble.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," it read, "the Court first wishes to express the hope that each of you had a comfortable and pleasant weekend."

The man in charge of presiding over the trial of the District's most famous alleged drug dealer runs his courtroom like the captain of a wartime destroyer, brooking no dissent from unruly defense lawyers and routinely cutting off their arguments in mid-sentence if he thinks the conversation is getting nowhere. He is prone to dramatic pronouncements and iron-fisted rules.

"The next time you or any other lawyer is late, or delays any facet of this proceeding," he informed one of the Edmond defense attorneys at a hearing last May, "you will be fined." The lawyer was five minutes late.

Off the bench, that stentorian voice subsides and another demeanor takes its place -- the man known to former law clerks and colleagues as "Uncle Chuck."

"I think most of his law clerks will tell you he's wonderful to work for," said Liss. "He'll get very close, and advise you."

He dishes out advice in court, too -- but it comes in a tougher package. Some lawyers who regularly appear before him believe he is a persnickety creator of bureaucratic busywork.

One who clearly holds that opinion is Edmond's lawyer, William Murphy, who early in the trial protested that one of Richey's rules was a waste of time -- the requirement that all motions be submitted in writing. Richey should allow lawyers "to make our arguments on our feet," Murphy said, "like we've been trained to do."

"Have you finished?" Richey inquired dryly, when Murphy paused. Then he denied the ruling, and the trial proceeded.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.