Assignment America: Catherine gets real

NEW YORK, Dec. 2 (UPI) -- I parked myself in Catherine Crier's messy lived-in office on Third Avenue one recent morning and we proceeded to spend half the day solving the problems of the republic.

In between rants she was preparing her half-hour Court TV show "Crier Live," attending an office birthday party, shuttling back and forth to CNN so she could do commentary stand-ups on the Beltway snipers and the Winona Ryder case, applying her own makeup (yes, that perfect movie-star coif travels with her on the morning train from her home in Westchester County) and juggling a schedule that includes not only her normal daily interviews but a publicity tour for her new best-seller, "The Case Against Lawyers" (Broadway Books, 244 pages, $23.95).

She seemed a little taken aback only twice -- when I told her my theory that she is the Anti-Ann-Coulter ("Can of worms," her face said. "Don't go there.") and when I suggested that many of the positions in her book would probably be considered too liberal by mainstream America and yet somehow she gets away with it.

"I consider myself a pragmatic idealist," she said.

"I don't know what that means," I told her.

"I don't either," she said, laughing. "That's what I like about it."

It was the only "politician" moment in the day.

Catherine Crier is one of those women you would never call "Cathy" -- she has the regal presence and the supermodel posture of a media queen -- but you don't really think of her as a diva either. When she starts motoring on her favorite topics -- grandstanding politicians and lawyers who are chipping away at democracy with nitpicky rules -- she has the air of a no-nonsense Texas schoolmarm. You could easily imagine her running for office on some kind of New South populist reform ticket with the slogan "Let's Get Real, People."

She seems very comfortable in front of the camera, but her charm derives from the fact that she's not very slick. She still has the trace of a Texas accent and tends to end sentences with "and all these sorts of things," in the manner of an exasperated soccer mom who just doesn't have time to enumerate ALL that is wrong right now. It works because she's free of all the visual clichés most anchors rely on and perhaps the reason is that she still feels a little like a media neophyte.

"I have so many dues to pay," she says as we fight cross-town traffic on the way to CNN. "I need to get out and report and establish more of my credentials."

Since I've known anchors who would do ANYTHING rather than actually get down to the nitty-gritty of talking to news sources, it was refreshing to hear. Crier came into journalism by a side door, after a fast-track legal career that had her presiding over the 162nd District Court in Dallas when she was still in her 20s. She was on schedule for her childhood dream -- running for national office and eventually becoming secretary of State -- which was an aspiration she developed as a rambunctious tomboy in a family that had so many horses they had to move from the Dallas suburbs and buy a ranch 100 miles to the north. In her book she describes her role model as Atticus Finch (or perhaps Gregory Peck) in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

"As corny as it sounds," she says, "that was me, even as a kid. I thought there was no more noble profession than the law."

She majored in politics and international affairs at Southern Methodist University and went on to SMU Law School, cutting classes to watch criminal trials at the Dallas County Courthouse. That's where famously tough prosecutors worked under the tutelage of District Attorney Henry Wade, who hadn't personally tried a case since Jack Ruby but still controlled every aspect of his fiefdom.

"I fell in love with litigation," she says, "and so as soon as I graduated, I started hanging out at Henry Wade's doorstep. But when I met Henry, he just cackled, because he said, 'You know, I'd like to hire you, but I can't hire a woman unless (chief prosecutor) Doug Mulder passes on it.' And Doug at that time was not known to welcome women into the DA's office. And Henry just looked at me and started to laugh. So I figured the right person had sort of passed on it."

Not only did he pass on it -- she started trying cases as an assistant district attorney even before her bar results were in.

But her stint as a prosecutor also exposed her to some of the inequities she would later write about in "The Case Against Lawyers."

"You start running into cases where you think, we're shoveling people through too fast, or, you know, someone is poor and doesn't have a good lawyer, they're liable to get a tougher deal than someone who comes in with family and counselors and all this sort of thing," she said. "But one of the things that really got to me is, right after I left the DA's office, a case was tried -- Joyce Ann Brown, tried for the murder of Mr. Danziger, the furrier. Danziger's wife identified this woman, and so she was found guilty. Put on Death Row for nine years. And then they found her virtual twin in Mexico, who confessed to the crime. No relation whatsoever. And that sort of thing really shifted my opinion about the death penalty."

But her sense of outrage was to be tested even more when she left Henry Wade to join a prestigious firm as a litigator.

"Now I went over to the REALLY dangerous side of the hall -- civil litigation, fighting over money. And you saw how corrupting campaign contributions are to the judiciary."

Money was so corrupting, she found, that she was personally offended by the actions of the legendary Dee Brown Walker, a judge who had presided over a district court since time immemorial and exemplified the old boys network in all its fading glory.

"Dee Brown was rated frequently at the bottom of the bar poll," she said. "But his campaigns were always well funded because he would sign those temporary restraining orders at 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon when the other side wasn't there. I just found that I disagreed dramatically with the way he operated his court, having practiced in there. And that was why I decided to run for that judgeship. It was never a plan. Just: This isn't right. And so I had an uncontested primary, and then I defeated Dee Brown."

She says it matter-of-factly. But in fact the defeat of Walker was a sea-change political upheaval in the Dallas of the early 1980s. And the experience led to one of her most zealously held Ralph Nader views -- that elected judges are a bad idea, and that, if we have them at all, we should fund their campaigns from the public trough.

"If we can fund the judges' races, we can make them non-partisan, and then it's gonna be up to the citizens to pay attention, to do our job, figure out who's right. But it wouldn't be done on a partisan ballot. And you'd have to know who it was. And they'd be beholden to no one," she said.

Her elective-judges position is typical of her style. Most of her calls for reform are those of a high school civics teacher, not so much ideological as simply, "Let's figure out what works here." A whole chapter of her book is devoted to the minutiae of federal regulatory agencies -- one of those topics guaranteed to make your eyes glaze over -- and yet she feels passionately that this is an area where America has gone horribly wrong.

"We have all these rules and laws," she says, "that require an abandonment of judgment. You can get sued if you use your own judgment. You can't trust that anymore. You've gotta follow the rules. And innovation, creativity, all of those sorts of things are frowned upon. Anything that might actually move an agency forward doesn't work. And the agency every year wants to prove to Congress that it's done a good job so it can get more money, and it's hard to go in and just say 'There are more happy children in the world.' They have to say, 'We have opened and closed 52,000 welfare cases,' or whatever. Same with OSHA. Instead of saying 'The workplace is actually getting safer, we can look out there and see it's getting safer,' they'll say, 'We issued five million essentially traffic tickets -- violations.' And so they're measured on that kind of output, which often has no correlation with whether the agency is doing a good job."

Railing at the bureaucracy is nothing new, of course, but Crier does it with an urgency that's surprising to hear from within the normally jaded and cynical halls of the Fourth Estate. She actively supports Common Good, the Philip K. Howard legal-reform organization, and openly ballyhoos its Web site in her book. There's nothing revolutionary about what she's saying -- her views on tort reform, education reform, prison reform, drug-war reform and campaign finance reform are all from well-tilled fields -- but her celebrity makes the book important since she's able to popularize views that wouldn't get such a wide circulation in, say, The National Review or The New Republic.

Except for her attacks on plaintiffs attorneys -- she thinks they should be reined in and their fees reduced, especially in the tobacco and asbestos cases -- she doesn't really propose any radical reforms. What she calls for instead is the sort of fine-tuning of the system that you would expect from a woman who, after all, relies on ratings just like everyone else in the news world. The one area in which she comes down squarely on the side of widespread liberal overhaul is, oddly enough, crime.

"There's a great editorial cartoon," she says. "It's got the body on the gurney, and what looks like doctors with face masks, injecting somebody. And the caption is 'I thought YOU tried him! No, I thought YOU tried him!' And they're already injecting him. It's obscene. I think we oughta lock the bad guys up. I have no problem with life without parole. I am not for opening the doors to dangerous individuals. But we have so many non-violent drug users. Minor dealers. I'm talking about the welfare mom who might sell a bit of crack to feed her kids or her habit. The big traffickers can flip people and get out on minimal sentences. And then we've got a lot of very small-time thieves, if you will, and others who have gotten caught up in the system.

"The three strikes law is terrible. I went down and did a piece where this kid had burgled his mother's and neighbor's garage for money to buy pot. So that's two strikes. The mother used tough love and made him go down to the police and confess.

And he marched right down. In our day they would have said, 'OK, take him home, give him a spanking.' But two felonies. Then he was caught standing lookout for a kid who was selling drugs in the alleyway. That was three. He's doing life. Life! Two burglaries in his own mom's house. And standing on the street corner."

Crier has been in television for 14 years, ever since she met an employee of CBS at a Christmas party in 1988 and he suggested that she give talk shows a try. Two friends of hers helped her make a videotape, and a month later she was making a pilot for CNN. Six months after that, she was hosting the morning news with Bernard Shaw.

She seems more comfortable at Court TV than she ever was at CNN, though, perhaps because she has more to do. "Crier Live" is a true issues-oriented show at a time when such shows are being pushed out by carpet-bombing coverage of whatever the glamour story of the day is.

"Unfortunately," she says, "we're now all feeding off the entertainment value of particular news stories. The substance with hard news has gone down, down, down. And the willingness to stay on one story -- like the impeachment story, the Monica story, or Princess Di or JFK Jr.'s plane -- we'll stay on these for months, if not years! You're talking about the same story over and over, and you will do it until the ratings start to shift."

Except, of course, on "Crier Live," where she has a rule: one segment on the glamour story of the day, and then the rest is HERS. Because it's the right thing to do. Get real, people.

(John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at

joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)