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Nothing Funny About Drinking And Driving

By AMY GOODUSKY

Usually, this column is devoted to the lighter side of the legal profession. Maybe, as a music reviewer once noted about my vocal performance, the column is “occasionally somewhat pleasant” to read. What I wish to say here may not really be pleasant, to write or to read, and certainly is not intended to be funny.

I write in connection with Superior Court Judge E. Curtissa Cofield’s suspension. I’ve never met her. I have no opinion with regard to whether she is a good or a bad judge. But I do know that history repeats itself. This bit of history is personal. It involves a lawyer, alcohol, a motor vehicle, a scandal, a judge and death: two deaths, in fact.

My anonymity has been precious to me, but it’s worthwhile to blow it now. I am Joseph Fazzano’s daughter. On April 27, 1983, my father ran down a little girl, Jeannette Ortiz, on the corner of Park and Zion streets in Hartford as he drove home after an evening of hard drinking at the South Seas restaurant. Jeannette Ortiz died a short while afterward. My father left the scene. He never told me whether he knew he hit her. He may have been in an alcoholic blackout, and did not know until the next morning that he had done any damage. What is clear is that when he turned himself in, the next day, his blood could not be tested for alcohol; there was no way even to prove that he had been driving when the car struck the child.

Jeanette Ortiz was Puerto Rican. My father was the attorney for the Hartford Police Union. The press went wild. Rumors of cover-ups fulminated. I had a bodyguard while on the road with my band. There was an act of racially charged violence at my grandmother’s home. Protests were staged.

My father had a lawyer: the very best there was, Jim Wade. My father also had written, eloquent testimonials, and on the other side, people crying for his law license, for incarceration, for humiliation, retribution. Nothing could restore Jeannette Ortiz, but he should have to pay. When State v. Fazzano came to trial, it was assigned to Judge Richard Noren. The judge suspended my father’s law license for three years, during which time he was ordered to perform community service in Juvenile Court.

My father served his sentence. Many children got the services of a highly qualified criminal defense attorney to which they would otherwise never have had access. My father’s practice continued to do business, under the guidance of his partners. He suffered inevitable financial losses. Those who had raged against the lightness of the sentence eventually moved on to another cause. But my father never stopped drinking. He had a beer in his hand the day after the accident, and except for a nine-month hiatus at the end of 1989 he continued to drink till the end of his life.

He returned to the practice of law, although never at his former level of notoriety. Nevertheless, he helped a great many people, often without taking a fee.

I’ve told you there was a second death. That was Judge Noren’s suicide. He hanged himself after being pulled over, driving under the influence. He must, I believe, have seen himself in my father’s place when he stared down from the bench. I suspect he gave my father another chance, the one he could not give himself.

Judge Cofield’s recent tangle with booze and a car resulted in no serious physical harm. I pray that it will have nothing like the manifold, echoing ramifications of my father’s accident. Judge Cofield needs help, not censure. That help is far more readily available now, to anyone willing to accept it, than it was in the mid 1980s, before 12-step fellowships were common enough to be satirized on late night television. Fear of political backlash should not motivate anyone’s decision. Judge Noren proved that those consequences, too, can be fatal.•

Amy F. Goodusky, a former paralegal, rock ‘n’ roll singer and horseback riding instructor, is of counsel to O’Brien, Tanski & Young in Hartford.