The Headlines
I Live My Life In Stories - Series
Most people encountered the story one headline at a time.
Louisiana’s attorney general had been indicted. There were accusations, responses, courtroom developments and political reactions. Each new headline appeared to be another discrete piece of news, something to read for thirty seconds before moving on to whatever happened next.
That is not how I experienced it.
By the time the first major headline appeared, I had already noticed several smaller things developing in the weeks before it. None of them meant very much alone. They were names, decisions, relationships and bits of information that most people would have had no reason to connect. Somewhere in my mind, however, they had already begun arranging themselves.
I could see the story forming.
I do not mean that I knew every fact or possessed information unavailable to anyone else. I was not involved in the matter, and I remained entirely outside of it. I simply recognized the shape of what was happening before the individual events had become a recognizable sequence.
When the indictment came, the public largely saw an extraordinary headline: Louisiana’s attorney general had been criminally charged. I saw the opening of the next act. I believed the case would reach the Louisiana Supreme Court quickly. I believed the legal process used to obtain the indictment would become more important than the accusations themselves. I believed judges and lawyers who were then standing at the edges of the story would eventually be pulled into its center.
I said so, and for a while, saying so earned me considerable criticism.
Then the Louisiana Supreme Court issued its ruling. The language was unusually direct. The Court identified disturbing procedural defects and apparent improprieties, questioned the motives or competence behind what had occurred, and expressly acknowledged that proceedings involving judicial or attorney discipline might become necessary.
To most people, that ruling was another headline.
To me, it was the curtain rising on the scene I had already watched in my head.
The next movement seemed just as visible. If the conduct surrounding the indictment were examined, the judges and attorneys involved could become the subjects of scrutiny themselves. That scrutiny would lead toward the Judiciary Commission and the Office of Disciplinary Counsel. The people who had appeared to be directing the action could find themselves standing beneath the lights.
Even the Commission existed in my mind as more than the name of an institution. My father was serving on it. One of its newer members was John Sinquefield, a lawyer known throughout Louisiana for prosecuting serial killer Derrick Todd Lee. The Supreme Court itself was not an abstract body to me either. These were people whose names, families and professional histories sometimes intersected with my own life in ordinary, unexpected ways. A justice’s wife had once maintained an office in my building. A justice had administered the first wedding ceremony I ever performed.
None of those connections made me part of the story. They did not provide secret information, and they were not evidence of anything improper. They simply made the cast three-dimensional to me. While the public saw offices, titles and institutions, I saw human beings occupying positions inside a much larger structure. I could see where their paths crossed and how movement in one part of that structure would eventually produce movement somewhere else.
It felt like sitting in a Broadway theater while everyone around me was studying photographs from individual scenes. They saw an indictment. Then a ruling. Then recusals. Then dismissals. Perhaps, eventually, investigations.
I saw a play.
That is often how my mind works. Facts rarely remain separate for long. They begin attaching themselves to one another. People become characters—not imaginary ones, but human beings with histories, loyalties, pressures and choices. Institutions become settings. Earlier events become foreshadowing. A sentence buried near the end of a judicial opinion becomes the line that tells me where the story is going next.
Sometimes I am wrong. Any honest storyteller must leave room for an unexpected ending. But sometimes I watch events arrive almost exactly as I first imagined them, and I am reminded that what appears ordinary to someone else may already be alive and moving inside my mind.
Perhaps that is why I write. By the time the rest of the world sees the headline, I have often been watching the story for weeks.
Update 9/24/26. You should be able to see the events unfolding publicly now, the events I’ve been waiting on for months.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney-at-Law
Hampton Law Firm
Comments