Judges Are Seeking Cover on The Bench

"Where are you?" he remembered a state police detective saying in a phone call. It was late at night, the hours when Petrie is called several times a week for an emergency protective order.

Petrie explained he was practicing with his band.

"No, I mean where are you? Right now?" the detective interrupted and told Petrie about the eulogy, the instructions and the threat, and that the police didn't know where Ronnie Cornett was.

Cornett, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder, has yet to go on trial. Because of that, Petrie doesn't want to talk specifically about the case. Instead he defers to authorities, who say they learned about the threat from a tip from a friend of Cornett's, and to a court file. In it is Petrie's divorce ruling, in which Cornett's wife got the Cadillac, the boat, the jewelry, the artwork and the house, and Cornett got the farm, the truck, the knives, the gun safe and the guns.

It also includes the results of a search warrant executed on a "gray hard Samsonite briefcase with the initials R.C. with a combination lock with three numbers to open (326)," inside of which police say they found $10,000 and 13 Imodium A-D caplets.

And the results of another search warrant, this one on a 2003 Chevy Tahoe, in which they found the accordion file, the hollowed-out packet of papers, a Colt .45, two seven-round magazines filled with bullets, and a 15th bullet in the Colt .45's chamber.

What's not in the court file is any sense of the eight hours between the detective's phone call and Cornett's arrest. "I remember feeling sick to my stomach, feeling like I was going to throw up," said Petrie's wife, Lesli. Petrie said he was up all night, in his den, lights down and drapes drawn, waiting for the next call from police.

At 5:30 a.m. it came: Stay away from work, they told him, and keep the children home from school.

Then came another call just before 7 a.m. saying that Cornett had been taken into custody, and soon after that, after talking things over with his wife and waking his children, Petrie decided to go to the courthouse. He walked in the unguarded entrance. He made his way to the unguarded third floor. He went into his unguarded courtroom, gaveled another session of Hate Court into order and methodically began working his way through the day's docket -- just as he is doing this day, six months later.

In the intervening months, there have been some changes. One involves an alarm system at Petrie's home; another involves an unmarked parking space at the courthouse; another involves deputies with handheld metal detectors who now wand anyone going into the courtroom. Petrie said he is also considering the answer he got from the state police when he asked them what he could do for protection, and they answered, "Buy a gun."

What hasn't changed: the cases themselves, which remain as sad and angry as ever.

"I just don't want me and her to get into it anymore," one of the sisters is now saying quietly, head bowed, no longer glaring, and that's how that case ends, not with a restraining order but with two sisters walking out into the hallway.

Onto the next case: a woman who said her husband twisted her arm, threw her to the ground and threw a remote control at her head.

Voices rise. Bailiffs, tense, watch. Petrie puts his head in his hands, even more of him disappearing from sight. Two days from now he will be taking a class to get his concealed weapons permit, but for now he's a judge not with a gun, but a question.

"And then what happened?" he asked.