A Young Lawyer's Imagined Brush With Death
| Publication year | 2023 |
| Pages | 0042 |
GBJ | Feature
BY HON. ALBERT R. SACKS
As a senior judge (officially retired) with DeKalb County, I happily find myself with extra time to do with as I please. One of my many retirement goals is to organize the disorganized notes and general meanderings left in the "who knows where" places on my computer hard drives. Another of my retirement goals is to challenge my memory and record life events; the ones I deem worthy of memorializing. I thought of one memory worth sharing as much for its improbability as for its entertainment value.
Upon receiving my law school diploma in 1980, I found employment in Atlanta with Jim Jenkins, an all-around great guy and an extraordinary lawyer. He was a partner in a criminal defense firm with offices in Atlanta, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The firm had an interesting specialty—the defense of those charged with the sale or possession of large quantities of marijuana. A typical case handled out of our Georgia office might involve a client charged with transporting hundreds of pounds of pot via airplane for delivery to some nondescript landing strip in central or south Georgia, or, if not by air, then by coastal delivery via shrimp boat or other maritime vessel. The criminal defense work was exciting and challenging, with dim prospects of victory if the case was tried before a small-town rural jury.
I had been at the firm for a few months when Jim was scheduled to appear in Florida for an important pre-trial hearing. Our client was a retired Air Force colonel and fighter jet pilot who flew adrenaline-pumping combat missions in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. He was indicted for transporting multiple kilos of marijuana by plane. He was a very likeable fellow. It seemed that the closest he could come to reliving the excitement of evasive, stealth-like piloting in civilian life was by choosing domestic smuggling as his pathway to a lucrative livelihood. High risk, high reward.
Jim had arranged for his client to fly the two of them from Georgia to Florida in the client's private plane, a small single-engine aircraft. I drove Jim and our client to Peachtree DeKalb Airport, an airfield principally serving private air traffic. We arrived at our client's airplane, which was parked on the tarmac, and I asked myself how the heck both of them along with their luggage and Jim's multiple...
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