Judge Boyle tough -- but not always

Most folks I know think former House Speaker Jim Black won’t be any better off with a different federal judge than he was with U.S. District Judge James Dever. Judge Terry Boyle, who will handle Black’s sentencing, is known as a tough, no-nonsense judge. But then there’s the Jerry Gaskill case. More about that in a moment.
Black’s lawyer Ken Bell recently asked Dever to remove himself from the case because he once handled a lawsuit against then-Speaker Black and other state leaders over redistricting. Dever rejected the argument he was in any way biased against Black, but stepped aside anyway so that Black can go ahead and be sentenced without more delay.
The conventional wisdom is that Dever’s replacement in this case, Boyle, will be just as tough on Black as Dever would have been. (Dever had made it clear that he might sentence Black to a longer prison term than federal sentencing law normally provides for the crime of accepting illegal payments. It was part of a bribe scheme the government says Black engaged in to stay in power.)
I’ve sat in Judge Boyle’s courtroom a number of times and found him to be fair, firm and direct. I think the only bias he has is in upholding the law as he sees fit. His well-known independence has confounded observers who thought he would rule one way and were surprised when he ruled another in some civil cases and at least one criminal case.
I’d guess Judge Boyle will do about the same thing Judge Dever would have done in Black’s case. I think there’s a long prison term in his future.
But it’s also worth noting that in one recent high-profile case, Boyle did not throw the book at the defendants. When Judge Boyle sentenced former N.C. Ferry Division chief Jerry Gaskill and former dredging superintendent Billy Moore in an illegal dredging case in Currituck County, Gaskill and Moore got off light.
Gaskill had been convicted of making a false statement during the investigation and Moore pleaded guilty to ordering the dredging. It involved creating an illegal channel on the other side of Currituck Sound to create a passenger terminal to ferry students across the sound on a daily basis. There was all sorts of speculation about political involvement. After all, the 2002 General Assembly had ordered a feasibility study for a ferry operation to cut school travel time by boating 12 miles across the sound to Corolla.
But none of that came out in court. When Gaskill and Moore came before Judge Boyle in March, he sentenced them not to the two years of active prison time most folks expected them to get. Instead, he put them on probation for three years, gave them six months of house arrest, ordered them to serve 50 hours of community service and fined them $5,000 each.
This case won’t have any bearing on the fate of Jim Black, of course, and shouldn’t. But it’s an interesting departure from what most folks thought Judge Boyle would do in what, for a while, was a high-profile criminal case in northeastern North Carolina.

Ocracoke near the top of my list, too

The other day I was singing the praises of Taylors Creek and the Carrot Island-Back Sound-Shackleford Banks area of North Carolina’s Down East coastal area. Writing about it reminded me that North Carolina has so many exceptional coastal places and some folks may not know about them.
Some folks, in fact, may not realize what we normally mean by the Outer Banks. They’re the thin barrier islands that run from near the Virginia Border down to Cape Hatteras and then swing drastically back to Cape Lookout, often regarded as the southern terminus of the Outer Banks (though some would say its southerly limit is closer to Ocracoke), even though the barrier islands continue on down past Cape Fear to the South Carolina coast. Thanks to the Intracoastal Waterway, those barrier islands run on down to Florida.
Ocracoke Island is a marvelous place, most of it part of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. For that reason, most of the island remains undeveloped – which means many miles of lovely beaches uncluttered with surf shops, hot dog stands, motels, fast food joints and the other markingof beach life along most of our coast. There’s plenty of that in the town of Ocracoke perched on Silver Harbor at the southwestern end of the island. That place has a Caribbean atmosphere almost. We’ve chartered sailboats in the British Virgin Islands and sailed our old 37-foot cutter across Pamlico Sound and into Silver Lake harbor, and we got the same kick out of as we did making landfall and dropping anchor at Anegada, Cooper Island and Jost Van Dyke.
Ocracoke’s beaches have been ranked among the top 10 in American for years – second in 2005, third in 2006 and I wouldn’t be surprised it it doesn’t rank first when this year’s rankings come out in the next few days. It’s beach-going without the frills but with everything that’s essential to a beach: sand, saltwater and lovely scenery.
A word to the wise: If you drive there and take the ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke, mind the speed limit on highway 12. As you near the town of Ocracoke, the posted speed limit drops sharply from 55 to 45 to, I think, 25. and often there’s a Hyde County sheriff’s sitting there with a citation book. Ask me how I know.
What's your top N.C. beach? How about South Carolina?

Taylor Creek's exquisite coastal scenery

Taylor Creek knocks me out every time I see it. It’s one of North Carolina’s special places, lined with historic homes and an assortment of sailing and motor vessels tied up on one side and one of the world’s loveliest views of the coastal environment on the other.
Pick the right spot and you can watch the feral ponies feeding at twilight, study the shorebirds and egrets and herons on Carrot Island and, with just a little elevation, spot the fishing boats and cargo ships coming in and out of Beaufort Inlet between Bogue Banks and Shackleford Banks.
And if you’ve ever tried to maneuver a 37-foot, 10-ton cutter in the current when it was at full flood with the wind blowing from another direction, you know it can be an exciting place. (That’s when I learned to use pilings as a pivot point getting in and out of the town docks.) The creek has strong twice-daily high and low ties, and woe be to the captain who lets his vessel get caught broadside against the current with not enough power on.
A couple weeks ago I spent a few days in a rocking chair on the front porch of a house overlooking Taylor’s Creek. We saw 20 of the wild horses nosing around in the shallows one morning.
We were there to fish but the weather was foul for a while, and I enjoyed just sitting and watching the scenery that Rachel Carson saw when she first came to Beaufort in 1938 to do research at what was then called the U.S. Fisheries Station.
She spent several years there studying the coastal ecology, and later published “Under the Sea-Wind” (1941) and “The Edge of the Sea” (1955) based in part on her studies. It was much later in her career -- 1962 -- that she published perhaps her most well-known book, “Silent Spring,” prompting concerns about pesticides. She died in 1964 from cancer.
May 27 was her 100th birthday and it has prompted a spate of articles celebrating her work as “the mother of the environmental movement,” her research that later led the Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT and prompting sharp criticism from those who now argue that the DDT ban has led to many deaths from malaria, even though other pesticides have proven effective against mosquitoes.
“Thanks to Rachel Carson, endangered bird species in the untied States have recovered, including the Bald Eagle, Brown Pelican, peregrine Falcon, and osprey,” according to Michael Fry, director of American Bird Conservancy’s pesticides and birds campaign.
Detractors, including columnist John Tierney in Tuesday’s New York Times, argue that Carson “used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass.”
The area where she did her research nearly 70 years ago is now preserved as the Rachel Carson North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve. There’s a terrific website with, appropriately, a birdseye view of the reserve, including downtown Beaufort and Taylor Creek, Beaufort Inlet, Shackleford Banks and North River and Back Sound. It’ll take you back.

Legislative speed of light

In my more than 30 years of covering the N.C. General Assembly, Senate and House versions of the state budget passed on an earlier date than this year only four times – in 2003, when then-House Co-speakers Jim Black and Richard Morgan presided and, of course, Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight was leading the Senate, as well as 1995, 1993 and 1979. These are the legislative equivalent of the speed of light.
The House passed its version a couple of weeks ago and the Senate approved its version today (May 31). In 2003, the two had cleared their chambers and gone to a conference committee to work out differences on April 30. In 1995 the bills passed by May 16 and in 1993, by May 18. In 1979, the bills cleared on May 30.
That’s a big date in the legislature, because it means the leaders of the two chambers now know what their real differences are and can concentrate on hashing them out. It still can be weeks, if not months, before a final budget is adopted. In 2001, it took until Sept. 21.
Gerry Cohen, head of the legislature’s bill drafting office, has a blog
where you can find the dates previous General Assemblies passed their budgets. Follow this link for all the nitty-gritty details.
His blog is a reminder how much things have changed in the legislature. The data is for long sessions (in odd-numbered years) only, going back to 1961. In 1974, legislators began coming back to Raleigh in even-numbered years to adjust the biennial state budget, after a recession caused all sorts of havoc during the Holshouser Administration.
The 1961 session, by the way, was the last legislators sat in the state Capitol. In 1963, they began meeting in the new Legislative Building on Jones Street, a full block north of the Capitol.

Senate would expand NC court funding

Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory’s campaign for more state support for the court system had a good day Tuesday when the Senate unveiled its proposed $20 billion budget for next year. The bill proposes a $43 million increase for courts with a significant increase in personnel. That boosts the courts budget by about 10.5 percent, from about $408 million to $451 million.
The bill calls for:
-- Eighty new victim witness/legal assistants, 60 assistant prosecutors and 15 investigators, at a cost of $10.5 million.
-- Three hundred new deputy clerk positions for Superior and Districtcourts, at a cost of $11.2 million.
-- Forty-two new magistrates, at a cost of $1.8 million.
-- Ten new District Court judges, at a cost of $1.4 million.
-- Seventeen new District Court judicial assistants, at a cost of $759,000.
-- Eight new family court staffers to expand family courts into two new judicial districts, at cost of $522,000.
-- Twelve new guardian ad litem positions, at a cost of $1.1 million, to replace expiring federal grant funds.
-- Thirteen and three-quarters new positions for drug treatment courts staff in nine districts, at a cost of $834,000.
-- Six new Superior Court judicial assistants, at a cost of $261,000.
These recommendations in the Senate bill ought to gladden the heart of the mayor, who made two visits to the legislature this spring, including one on April 11 when he met with Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, the leader of the state Senate, as well as others. During or right after that meeting, Basnight and Sen. Dan Clodfelter, D-Mecklenburg, reached an agreement in principle that any increase in court costs would go back into the courts system for new personnel.
Clodfelter had arranged such a solution two years earlier, he says, but the budget writers in 2005 used the increase in receipts for other purposes.
Tuesday, Basnight gave Clodfelter and Sen. Charlie Dannelly, D-Mecklenburg, credit for pushing the courts funding through the Senate.
Here’s the text of the blog entry I posted back in April, after McCrory’s second visit:
Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory was back in Raleigh Tuesday to meet with Senate leaders and the Mecklenburg delegation in his campaign to get more funding for the courts system. While the meeting didn’t result in a solution, Basnight and Sen. Dan Clodfelter of Charlotte worked out the basis for additional funding for the courts.
Clodfelter is in a good position to work on this issue. He’s vice-chairman of the Appropriations Committee on Justice and Public Safety, co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary I Committee dealing with civil law. Word is that Basnight and Clodfelter are looking at an increase in court costs to produce more revenue for courtroom resources.
Mayor McCrory has pressed the legislature to boost court funding for a number of urban areas that have heavy criminal calendars in the courts and need more law enforcement resources. The legislature last year boosted court funding significantly, with the support of Gov. Mike Easley.
Clodfelter backed that expansion and is supporting more, though he has been careful to point out that an examination of caseloads and resources in the state’s largest judicial districts does not support the notion that only a few places have special court needs. It’s a statewide problem, and Mecklenburg fares well in some areas and not in other areas of court resources.
The legislature’s Fiscal Research Division points out that in 2005, Mecklenburg was just 5 percent larger in population than Wake, but had 40 percent more magistrates than Wake. The third largest district was Guilford, which is two-thirds the size of Wake, but which had one-third more magistrates than Wake.
On the other hand, Mecklenburg and Guilford both had “significantly more criminal cases filed in Superior Court than Wake, 40 percent and 25 percent respectively,” the analysis noted. And while Wake had 10 percent more traffic infractions than Mecklenburg, the latter had more than 50 percent more juvenile petitions to handle.

Finding the deed to Dix Hill

The morning email brought the following note about a fascinating story last fall on the discovery in an old safe of the deed to Dix Hill, or at least a part of it. Jay Warsaw sent along a link to a story WRAL TV did last fall.

Here’s also the text of a story by Ryan Teague Beckwith of The News & Observer.

December 2, 2006

Safe's prize is a Dix surprise


Author: Ryan Teague Beckwith; Staff Writer


Edition: Final
Section: News
Page: B3





For kids in Kinston in the late 1960s, it was the neighborhood equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.

Take your bike to the Kilpatrick Country Store. Drink a soda and suck on a Mary Jane candy. Then go next door to the junkyard and spin the dial on the 6-foot-tall safe.

"Pretty much every kid in the neighborhood tried to turn that dial," Jeff Foyles recalls. "You'd say, 'I'm going to be the lucky kid today,' just joking around."

As an adult, Foyles finally got a chance to open the 140-year-old safe. Inside, he found a trove of historic documents related to the Dorothea Dix state hospital, slated to close by 2008.

The safe belonged to Albert Kilpatrick, owner of the country store and the junkyard. He liked to submit sealed bids to state auctions on old farm equipment and resell it around Kinston.

In 1967, the safe caught his eye. It's about the size of a double-wide refrigerator and is heavier than a car. Lettering on the front indicates it was owned by the hospital. Kilpatrick bid $112 for it.

Trouble was, no one knew the combination. At one point, Kilpatrick hired a safecracker who drilled a few holes in the 8-inch-thick steel doors, to no avail. So, the safe sat in the junkyard, year after year.

When Kilpatrick died in the mid-1980s, his family began selling off things. Foyles, who worked at the West Pharmaceutical Services plant, decided it would make a good safe for two shotguns and a rifle that belonged to his grandfather.

Foyles bought it -- he won't say exactly how much he paid -- and brought it a mile or so down N.C. 55 to his house with a Depression-era forklift that belongs to his brother, Nelson.

A few weeks later, Foyles found a safecracker who thought he could get it open. While Foyles and his brother drank bottles of Budweiser, the safecracker spun the dial, listened with a headset and consulted old manuals. About a half-hour later, he hit the front twice with a rubber mallet, and the door swung open.

"There was a bad smell inside that thing," Foyles recalls. "It was musty, like opening an old trunk, but three times as bad."

Inside: not much. Two old eyeglass cases and a bunch of cubbyholes set up like mail slots. Foyles shrugged. He hadn't thought there would be anything valuable in there.

But looking at it later, something about those cubbyholes didn't seem right. He got off his stool and wiggled them loose. Behind them were two small boxes filled with historical documents.

They included an official 1907 copy of the deed to Dix Hill and a related map, letters to and from hospital officials, uncashed checks from relatives of patients, even a prescription for a pint of whiskey for a patient.

Foyles filed them away and mostly forgot about them until a few months ago, when he heard a radio report about the planned closing of the hospital.

State archivist Dick Lankford says he does not know how the documents ended up in private hands. He says the deed and map copies are not valuable, but the letters and other documents could still be public records.

"We'd have to see the contents of the safe to know," he says.

That may not happen soon.

If they are still public records, Lankford says the state would begin the legal process to reclaim them. If they're not, the archives office would not be interested, he says.

Foyles says he'd like the documents to end up in a museum or the archives, but only for a fair price. He doesn't want to just hand them over for nothing.

After all, he spun the dial.

"It's just like someone buying a lottery ticket," he said.


Copyright 2006 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Botanical Garden for Dix Hill?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about Dorothea Dix, the crusader for mental health reform in the 19th century who came to North Carolina, documented deplorable conditions for the mentally afflicted and wound up persuading the General Assembly to finance what is now Dorthea Dix Hospital overlooking downtown Raleigh.

The state plans to close that hospital. Local developers, the Easley administration and parks advocates all have big ideas for how the last 306 acres of the original Dix Hill tract should be used. I wrote about park advocates seeing it as a destination park for not just the city but the entire state. Here’s a link to that column.

Willie Pilkington, an avid gardener and member of the Wake County Botanical Garden Society, pointed out that I had overlooked his organization’s proposal for a World Class Botanical Garden on the site. You can read more about that proposal in this link.

The hitch, as always, is about cost. The Easley administration sees the land as a financial asset. It wants to put some state office buildings there. The city of Raleigh would like to buy it, and there are a couple of estimates of $40 to $50 million or more for the cost of the land. Some folks hope the statewill simply deed it over, as the state did when it gave land to N.C. State University and to the State Farmers’ Market.

The legislature has debated what to do. Some believe it should be put up for bid and sold to the best bidder – which may mean a lot of commercial or residential development. Wednesday, the N.C. House decided it all needed more study. That’s what it decided in 2005 when it created the first Dix Hospital study commission. But putting the matter in a study bill now preserves the possibility that the legislature could revisit the issue later this year or in 2008 and decide to sell or otherwise transfer use of the land for one or more of the many competing proposals -- but it mentions any arrangement should provide funding for mental health. The legislature’s crossover deadline – the date for when a bill had to pass either the House or Senate to be eligible for further consideration in this biennial legislature – was Thursday. As Rep. Jennifer Weiss, D-Wake, was quoted in the N&O, “We’re just preserving our options.”