Habeas Corpus

Jimmy K. was an older attorney in Troy when I first started practicing. I think that he was unmarried, and had probably been admitted to the bar in the late 1930s or sometime in the early 1940s. He was a sole practitioner, but I never knew the location of his office, and suspect that he practiced out of his home. I don’t think he had much of a practice, and I believe that he subsisted on court appointments such as being a referee in foreclosure, which required little more of him than showing up at the courthouse and signing papers prepared by other lawyers.

Jimmy was an alcoholic. He was what you would call a “stinking drunk”. He looked frail and bent over even on his best days. In the early 1960s, public intoxication was still a criminal offense, and when the Troy police found Jimmy lying drunk on the street, they would cart him off to jail on a charge of public intoxication, a misdemeanor.

Jimmy was never brought to trial on the charge. Instead, he would just be kept at the jail for however long it took for him to sober up and feel ready to reenter society. Jimmy would then ask his jailers for paper and pen and proceed to carefully handwrite a petition for a writ of habeas corpus addressed to the Rensselaer County Supreme Court. There was an understanding that when Jimmy wrote out his petition, he was sober and ready to be released. No hearing was necessary, and a telephone call from the Court clerk to the jail put Jimmy back on the street without fanfare.