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October 2015 - Voodoo in the Court

by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

I don’t know a great deal about Voodoo. I know it rhymes well as Cole Porter wrote: “Do do that voodoo that you do so well.” I have seen Voodoo stores in New Orleans, which struck me as more tourist traps than religious emporiums, and scores of movies that invariably involved spells, masks, and poisoned darts.

I had one personal experience with Voodoo although I was oblivious at the time. A long time ago, I had a secretary who apparently didn’t appreciate me as much as I thought. She was with me a relatively short time and then she moved out of the area. After she left, one of the other secretaries in our office asked me if I had felt ill or injured a couple of days earlier. I replied something to the effect that I was fine and asked why the question had come up. She then went over to my recently vacated secretary’s desk and pulled out a small, apparently male, doll impaled with something that looked like a large hatpin. The doll, she explained, was me, and she told me that every time my former secretary felt I had not been sufficiently accommodating, shall we say, as soon as my back was turned she would pull out the “attorney doll” and run him through with the pin. A quick visual autopsy of the doll revealed this to have been a repetitious experience. Next to a window it was pierced with shafts of sunlight. Riddled you might say. Swiss cheese came to mind.

It was humbling, but not injurious. Although now I have this aversion to needles. ...

Voodoo, I have learned, does not play well in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Specifically, in the courtroom of Cumberland County District Court Judge Talmage Baggett. One Abu-Bakr Abdur Rahman is a Voodoo practitioner who appeared in Judge Baggett’s court to face misdemeanor charges of something called “communicating a threat”—and no, I don’t know whether dolls and pins were involved.

He ran afoul of the court’s dress code, or perhaps more accurately, the court’s necklace code. Five necklaces. That hung down to the waist. According to the fayobserver.com, a local blog, one necklace was a metal chain holding a decorated container purporting to be a medicine bottle. The rest were beads, shells, and a skull-shaped amulet. Mr. Rahman is quoted as saying that the necklaces were “guardians or protectors ... [which] keep all evilness away from [him].”

I am not sure how he got through the metal detector, but maybe they don’t have them in Fayetteville. Yet.

Judge Baggett asked him to tuck the beads under his shirt. Mr. Rahman then reportedly called his priest to get approval to tuck in his necklaces. According to Mr. Rahman, the priest told him that if he did so he would disown his religion, and so he pulled them back out.

The judge noticed the necklaces had returned, and told him to tuck them back in, leave, or come to the prisoner’s box.

Mr. Rahman demurred, telling the court it was interfering with his religion. At this point, I think it fair to say that things were on a downhill slide.

Right to the prisoner’s box. “I will let you practice your religion right over here in the box,” the judge said, according to a transcript.

Mr. Rahman was handcuffed and in the dock reportedly from 10:50 a.m. to 1:35 p.m., at which time he was released.

Mr. Rahman mistakenly used his voice rather than his Voodoo powers. Little robed Voodoo dolls and a supply of pins beats a 170.6 any time.

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is a member of the firm of Millar, Hodges & Bemis in Newport Beach. He can be reached at millar@mhblaw.net.

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