The Hanging Judge: An Interview With Judge Michael Ponsor (Part 1)

An interview with a very rare individual: a federal judge and New York Times bestselling novelist.

Looking for some stocking stuffers for the lawyer or law student in your life? I have two items to add to the holiday gift guides we’ve previously published: two superb legal thrillers, The Hanging Judge and The One-Eyed Judge, by Michael Ponsor.

That name rings a bell — do you mean Judge Michael Ponsor? Yes, that’s right. Within the legal profession, Judge Ponsor is best known as a Senior United States District Judge for the District of Massachusetts, appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. But Judge Ponsor — a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, as well as a former Rhodes Scholar — is a man of many talents. How many federal judges are also critically acclaimed, New York Times-bestselling authors?

A few months ago, right before I went out on paternity leave, I interviewed Judge Ponsor about his fascinating authorial and judicial careers. After briefly chatting about the similarities in our backgrounds — two alma maters in common, plus the whole “lawyer turned novelist” thing — we plunged into the substance of our conversation.

Here’s the (lightly edited and condensed) first part of our chat, centered on The Hanging Judge and Judge Ponsor’s writing career. The second part, focused on The One-Eyed Judge and Judge Ponsor’s legal career, will follow next week. Enjoy!

DL: Congratulations on your success as both a judge and an author. Your legal career, while long and distinguished, is fairly straightforward. Can you give us an overview of your career as a writer?

MP: I’ve been trying to write fiction since my 20s. I wrote a complete novel when I was at Oxford called When the Bough Breaks, about a boy growing up in the Midwest. It was picked up by New York literary agency, and they were confident the book would find a publisher. I was ambivalent about law school so I thought, “Great! I won’t have to go! I’ll be a famous novelist instead.” But there were no takers. Off I went to law school.

Then, in 1973, when I was still in law school, I had a short story published in Redbook. I got paid $1,500 for it, a sizable sum at the time. I was still ambivalent about being a lawyer, so this time I thought, “Great! I can be a famous short story writer instead.”

Sponsored

Again, it didn’t work out. Little did I know that the 1973 Redbook story would comprise my entire published literary oeuvre for the next forty years, until The Hanging Judge came out in 2013. My main problem was that I wanted to be a writer but didn’t have anything terribly profound to write about.

DL: And that’s where your legal and judicial career comes in….

MP: What boosted me into a higher level of focus as a writer was presiding over a death penalty case in 2000 called United States v. Gilbert, involving a nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital charged with killing four of her patients and attempting to kill three others.

The trial went on for more than five months. Massachusetts doesn’t have a state death penalty, and this was the first death penalty case in almost 50 years. It was a harrowing experience – morally, to ensure a fair process where the stakes were so high, and emotionally, knowing that an evidentiary ruling of mine might either let a killer go free or send a woman to her death after a botched trial.

In the end, the jury found Kristen Gilbert guilty but declined to impose the death penalty. She didn’t appeal – perhaps because, under Supreme Court precedent, had she “won” on appeal and gotten a new trial, she could have faced the death penalty again.

Sponsored

I wrote an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe about the experience of presiding over a death-penalty trial. I tried not to make judgments and focused on describing the objective challenges – here’s a steep hill, here’s a swamp, here lie dragons. My core point – not especially surprising, but powerfully hammered home for me by the trial – was that if we’re going to have a death penalty, then we must acknowledge the reality that, on occasion, an innocent person will be executed. The process is brutally human, and human beings make mistakes.

The Globe piece turned out well, and people told me how helpful it was to read. But I also felt that in such a short piece I wasn’t fully able to capture the atmosphere of an actual death-penalty trial. Ethical restrictions also prevented me from going into much detail about my real trial. So I thought I’d pick up fiction again and try to write a novel about the experience from the viewpoint of a fictional judge, whom I named David Norcross.

DL: At the time, though, you were still a very busy, very real federal judge…

MP: Yes, I was still working full-time as an active district judge. I would set aside my Saturdays and Sundays, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., to write. I’d basically nail my door shut to block out distractions. I have a poster on my bulletin board with a picture of a dog on it, saying that to write successfully you have to give yourself the same command you give your dog: SIT! STAY!

DL: And how long did that process take, from starting to write the novel to the final publication of The Hanging Judge?

MP: About seven years – to write, and re-write, and re-write the manuscript, to find an agent, to find a publisher, and to see the book published.

It was a humbling experience. If you’re a federal judge, you’re used to having people defer to you. You enter the courtroom, and everyone stands up. You tell a little joke, and everyone has a hearty chuckle. Publishing fiction is a good antidote to that: you get treated like dirt!

My agent from years ago was no longer in the business, so I had to find a new agent. I got shot down by one literary agency after another. On one call to an agency, I got a young woman who sounded like she was about 18, and she was talking to me, like, “So Mike [munching noise], we’re looking at your book [munching noise]….” And it dawned on me: she’s eating a sandwich while she’s talking to me! I wanted to say: “I’m a federal judge, for God’s sake! Can you at least put your damned tuna fish down!” But I kept quiet, not wanting to be pegged as a pill. In the end, they didn’t take the book anyway.

DL: So how did you eventually find an agent?

MP: It took about a year. My first manuscript was way too long – over 180,000 words. One agency told me that if I could get it down to around 100,000 words, they’d take another look. So I cut out tons of material, including a couple much beloved characters, got my draft down to 115,000 words or so, and sent it around again. Eventually it got picked up by Robin Straus, a wonderful agent. She’s been fantastic.

DL: And then what about finding a publisher?

MP: Robin really liked the manuscript and was optimistic at the start of the process. But it took a little while; we had a number of near misses, nice letters from publishers that praised the book but passed. 

After about a year, it was picked up by Open Road, a new publishing house launched by Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins and others. Open Road published The Hanging Judge in December 2013. They have given the book terrific support.

DL: And it took off from there – including hitting the New York Times bestseller list, and selling more than 40,000 copies.

MP: Actually, more than 54,000 copies as of September 30, and it’s still selling. Everyone at Open Road has been very pleased how it has done, especially for a first novel. I’m over the moon, of course.

DL: How would you explain the book’s success? Aside from its literary merit, of course – there are many excellent books that fail to achieve bestseller status.

MP: The book has, I think, one unique strength. It takes the reader right up onto the bench, where I’ve been for more than thirty years, and lets the reader see and feel what I’ve seen and felt as a judge, making tough decisions in a very intense environment. Anyone intending to practice law, to clerk, to litigate, or to get onto the bench is bound to find this viewpoint compelling. I gave the books to a district-court colleague, who liked them and passed them onto to his wife, so she could finally get a clear idea of how he spends his days.

Apart from the book’s inherent merits, such as they are, The Hanging Judge had some great blurbs from writer friends of mine, including Tracy Kidder, Anita Shreve, Jonathan Harr, Joe Kanon, John Katzenbach, Elinor Lipman, and the late Joe McGuiness. This support helped a lot. I also received some strong reviews, including a great review in the Washington Post and a starred review in Kirkus.

Finally, I did many events – more than 60 readings in 10 months. I spoke at libraries, law schools, colleges, bar associations, and courts. I got lots of invitations. People were very interested in the book as a window into our justice system, viewed through the eyes of someone who’d been, so to speak, in the trenches.

DL: And I believe Justice John Paul Stevens was a fan?

MP: Justice Stevens sent me a letter that I think I’ll be buried with. With his permission, we used part of his comments as a blurb for the back of my new book, The One-Eyed Judge.

Judge Michael Ponsor (via Open Road Media)

DL: So you were doing all of these events alongside your rather demanding day job….

MP: Yes – it was very intense. I took senior status in 2011 and that helped, but not very much.

Springfield has only one active federal judgeship, for an area encompassing four counties, 100 cities and towns, and 850,000 people. Because the Senate didn’t confirm my successor until the summer of 2014, some three years later, I couldn’t really cut my docket upon going senior in 2011.

I was effectively still a full-time judge when the book came out in late 2013. I was handling complex civil cases, criminal cases with Speedy Trial Act issues, TROs, and… a lot of book readings.

DL: Sounds rather stressful. Did you enjoy it?

MP: Absolutely. I’m an extrovert. I like pulling into a library parking lot, walking in with my box of books, not knowing anyone, meeting new people, and talking about my books. The people I meet at readings are interesting, generous, and fun. The crowds would vary in size – sometimes large groups in packed rooms, and sometimes a handful of people.

I remember one event at the Barnes & Noble in Framingham. It was an evening in December or January, with terrible winter weather. The bookstore was nestled somewhere deep within a nest of malls. My GPS croaked on me, and I got seriously lost. I showed up at one minute before seven, for a seven o’clock reading, with my bladder as big as a beach ball. Three people showed up: a former law clerk of mine, an author trying to pitch me on her self-published book, and a homeless guy trying to get out the weather.

The homeless man had very interesting questions – not many teeth, but many good questions. I gave him a free copy of the book.

DL: How long did it take for The Hanging Judge to become a bestseller?

MP: It hit the New York Times bestseller list in May 2014. I still have that page from the Book Review tacked to my bulletin board.

DL: The Hanging Judge and The One-Eyed Judge are based in part on your experiences as a sitting judge. Do you have any concerns about the interaction between your work as a judge and an author? Are you worried that litigants might read your books and claim some bias on your part, or that lawyers might read them and think you’re writing about them?

MP: I was a little anxious about this at first, but it has not turned out to be a problem. The plot of The Hanging Judge is nothing like the plot of my actual death-penalty case. The book starts with a drive-by shooting in Holyoke, where the murdered target is a drug dealer but a stray bullet also kills a young hockey mom. They catch the person they think is the shooter, and the ambitious U.S. attorney charges it as a RICO case in order to invoke the death penalty. It’s nothing like my case of a nurse in a VA hospital.

The main concern I had before the book came out was that I didn’t want to look like a blockhead – for example, by having a reviewer quote a poorly written passage I should have worked on more. I didn’t want to put myself or my court in an embarrassing position.

To try to head this off, I sent the book out to five of my colleagues, including my chief judge, and asked them to read it. They all got back to me and said that they liked it. This was a good way of making sure I wasn’t wandering into any area that would make me look clownish or unethical.

DL: Some readers might see similarities between you and your protagonist, Judge Norcross….

MP: Readers have said they see parallels. One colleague told me, “Come on, Michael – Judge Norcross is really you!” I told her, “Not true. Judge Norcross comes from Wisconsin. I come from Minnesota. They’re totally different!”

Jokes aside, there are significant differences between Judge Norcross and Judge Ponsor. Judge Norcross has much less experience on the bench when he gets his death-penalty case, and he makes mistakes that I wouldn’t make. He’s greener than I am. In The One-Eyed Judge, he makes a decision not to recuse himself in a case where in real life I certainly would have recused.

********************

We’ll learn more about The One-Eyed Judge — as well as Judge Ponsor’s writing process, the differences between fiction and judicial writing, and advice for aspiring federal judges — next week. For now, thanks to Judge Ponsor for his time and insights!

UPDATE (12/21/2017): Here’s the second and final installment, The One-Eyed Judge: An Interview With Judge Michael Ponsor.

The Hanging Judge [Amazon (affiliate link)]
The One-Eyed Judge [Amazon (affiliate link)]


DBL square headshotDavid Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.