“Listen here. This is Robert Nussbaum,” he said angrily, “and my family will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if you give that murderous heathen another chance.” Robert Nussbaum? Robert Nussbaum? “My brother was killed by that animal and—” Right! Robert Nussbaum was Peter Nussbaum’s younger brother, who’d been in high school at the time of Peter’s murder. Dressed to kill, toting an army of assistants, Robert Nussbaum had appeared at oral arguments weeks earlier.

“Um, excuse me. Excuse me. Mr. Nussbaum. I am not allowed to speak to you. I am hanging up now.” I took a deep breath. Under no circumstances were law clerks ever to speak with anyone personally affiliated with a case. Our numbers were unlisted—how did Robert get ahold of mine? How did he know Friedman’s vote in the case—the panel’s opinions had not even been released within the court, let alone to the public. The judges’ decisions were confidential at this point.

As I pondered how to gently break the news of Robert Nussbaum’s call to the judge, an e-mail popped up. It was from Judge Adams’s secretary, and it was titled: “Penn Pals Reminder.” Oh no! I’d signed Matthew and myself up weeks ago for a do-gooder program that Adams had created a few years back. Law clerks and secretaries volunteered to read with inner city kids for an hour every Monday afternoon in chambers. Adams was smoking crack if she thought that one hour was going to save those kids, but I still wanted in. Any variation was welcome. So much so that I’d ventured into the torture chamber to get the judge’s permission to participate. She refused to lift her head from a brief and replied: “Do whatever you feel you have to do.”

Janet had warned me that the tutoring program put the judge in a foul mood and advised against it. Penn Pals was a Friedman category killer: She hated kids. She hated her law clerks doing anything that didn’t involve slaving away for her. She hated Judge Adams. It was reported that last year, the cataclysmic combo drove her to tell a second-grader to “just shut up” when he read from Mother Goose too loudly. When the kid cried, the judge slammed the door in his tiny face. It wasn’t long after that that Janet and Roy were told flat out that they were not allowed to do the program. I was an idiot. What was I thinking? I knew what I was thinking—I wanted somebody, anybody, to talk to, even if it were a six-year-old.