by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
The biggest hit during Friday’s Constitutional Law Day program wasn’t even part of the original program.
It was the Bill of Rights Song, set to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” as presented by several dozen fifth-graders at Garden City Elementary School.
Hank Coxe, an attorney with the Bedell Law Firm, was clearly impressed.
He first asked the students if they could guess the number of lawyers practicing in and around Jacksonville. Responses ranged from 35 to 1 million. The answer, Coxe said, is nearly 3,000.
“I will tell you,” he said to the students, “I have been doing this type of work in this town for almost 30 years. I’ll bet there aren’t 15 lawyers out of 3,000 who could have done what you did and name all of the first 10 amendments.
“So you guys are way ahead of everybody else.”
Attorneys and judges from the Chester Bedell Inn of Court spread out around the city Friday, talking to students about law and the Constitution. Coxe, attorney Michael Freed, U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan and Corrigan’s law clerk, Susanne Weisman, went to Garden City, the only elementary school to get a visit.
Additional teams went to Fletcher, Mandarin and Ribault high schools.
Corrigan, the chapter president, asked Freed to lead the effort, the Inn of Court’s first outreach program.
“We have a combination of lawyers and judges going out,” said Freed. “There will be a variety of presentations by the lawyers and judges, but the theme will be the same: the Constitution, why it’s important and why it survives while similar documents in other nations haven’t.”
Corrigan helped lead the students through the mock first appearance of one of their teachers, who was “accused” of armed bank robbery. He had roles written out for the student judge, as well as for the prosecutor, defense attorney and other court officers.
He also took questions from his young audience, who seemed to be particularly concerned about police officers beating statements out of suspects.
“Did you see that on TV?” Corrigan asked.
Nodding heads filled several rows.
“Do you believe everything you see on TV?”
Shaking heads replaced the nodders.
“Good.”
He explained to the pupils that suspects rarely are beaten, especially since police are aware that no statements are admissible if they come from an abused suspect.
“Can you tell me what you think lawyers do?” Coxe asked the group. “And you can’t say, ‘advertise.’”
The power of advertising did come up later in his presentation when he asked the students if they had ever heard of any famous lawyers. The answers came faster than at any other part of the program:
“Eddie Farah . . . Barnes, Barnes & Cohen . . . Harrell & Johnson.”
Coxe, a criminal defense attorney, discussed the select number of amendments in the Bill of Rights that spell out the rights of people accused of a crime. He told his audience that those amendments “protect me, and they protect you, from the government. They don’t give any rights to the government.”
He asked how many had heard of Joseph Stalin . . . “no, not a lawyer.”
In 1917, Coxe said, Stalin directed the murders of more than a million Russian citizens — even though Russia had a constitution “almost just like ours.”
“How could he have done that?” Coxe asked. “The Russian people and the Russian government did not believe in that constitution. They did not believe it meant what it said.“In this country, our government and our people believe it means what it says.”