In Which I Am Subpoenaed

What do Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and I have in common? We've all received subpoenas for our reporting! But while theirs dealt with affairs of state, mine concerned a dog -- a golden retriever, to be exact.

Without getting too specific (links will purposefully be omitted so as not to draw the judge's ire), I wrote a couple stories in March about a woman from Hawaii who sued her son and daughter-in-law to share the breeding rights of their stud golden retriever. When they went to execute the agreement -- essentially, her flying into town for one week for visitation rights to extract the retriever's semen -- the Hawaii woman never returned to the suburban Boston town where her children live and, instead, absconded with the dog to JFK Airport in a rental car, flight to Hawaii already booked. Local police were contacted; airport police were contacted. They convinced this woman that maybe returning to Hawaii with the dog wasn't the best idea. She drove back to Massachusetts and was arrested in her lawyer's office the next day on a count of larceny. Unbelievable.

Obviously, her flight violated the settlement. Not so obviously, the son and daughter-in-law's lawyer decided my testimony might be needed to prove this. The call I received from her office notifying me was peculiar. Paralegal to me: "Attorney X wants to let you know the case is going to trial next Friday." Thinking to myself as she talks: "This is great! I'd lost track of this side of the case. No lawyer has ever notified me ahead of time when a case will be resolved. She's so nice." Paralegal to me: "You should be receiving that trial subpoena in the mail later this week."

Huh? What? Subpoena? In my three years as a reporter, one lesson that resonates forcefully is, "Tell your boss the moment you hear this word. These are a drag. Do you still have your notebooks? Were the conversations on or off the record? We'll probably fight this." All of the above happened and proved true.

As humorous as it was -- I was subpoenaed over a dog, his sperm and implanting it in bitches -- it was a drag. I spent parts of the next week leading to the trial thinking about how I would talk on the stand, going over my notes fives times to make sure I remembered everything. No matter how much judicial formality and seriousness can be subverted by such magnificent folly, it's still mildly unnerving. (I hope my attempts to coat it all in a smile didn't irritate my bosses too much.) I spent a Friday morning sitting around, waiting to get a telephone call telling me to drive to the courthouse. (This was the arrangement I had with the lawyer.) It never came. At noon, my lawyer rang to say everything was over. The way he said it was like someone had just gone through surgery and "Don't worry, everything is over and it's fine."

As great a conversation piece as this has been, and as amusing it was to say "my lawyer" for the first time in my life, getting subpoenaed is not fun.