Your Verdict:  A Judge’s Memoir of Law and Loss

The memoir opens with St. Joan on the bench in 1990s Denver, presiding over cases that place her at the center of bodily harm and public scrutiny. As a judge, she is expected to embody neutrality, to apply the law without visible feeling. Instead, her rulings—grounded in careful legal reasoning but animated by a belief that justice divorced from human consequence is incomplete—draw criticism and controversy. In a political climate increasingly suspicious of judges who acknowledge the moral weight of their decisions, she becomes a lightning rod, praised by some and condemned by others.

Running parallel to her public life is a private rupture that proves even more enduring. When St. Joan marries across racial lines, members of her own family reject the marriage—and, by extension, her. The rejection is not explosive but quiet and sustained: invitations stop, conversations thin, and love is withheld under the guise of principle. She comes to understand that judgment does not always announce itself loudly; often it arrives as silence.

As the memoir moves between courtroom and family table, the two narratives begin to echo each other. On the bench, St. Joan confronts defendants whose lives are shaped by forces far beyond the immediate facts of their cases—race, gender, poverty, fear, and history. With her parents, she confronts a similar refusal to see complexity, a similar insistence on moral certainty without reckoning. In both arenas, she learns that neutrality is often claimed by those least affected by its consequences.

The book traces St. Joan’s evolving understanding of justice—not as an abstract ideal, but as a daily practice that demands courage, humility, and cost. She reflects on cases that linger long after the gavel falls, on moments when the law offers no clean answer, and on the personal toll of making decisions that cannot please everyone. At the same time, she chronicles the slow, painful work of building a life outside the approval of her family of origin, sustained first by marriage, and later by chosen communities, and a growing clarity about what love requires.

Rather than offering vindication or tidy reconciliation, Your Verdict resists easy closure. Some family wounds remain unresolved. Some professional controversies are never fully settled. What does emerge is a hard-won integrity: St. Joan’s refusal to disown either her belief in the law or her belief in love, even when each makes the other more difficult.

The memoir closes by returning the central question to the reader. Having lived under judgment—familial, public, and historical—St. Joan does not ask to be absolved. She offers the record: the rulings, the marriage, the feminist activism,  costs paid and convictions held. What justice means, and whether love belongs within it, is left deliberately unsettled.

The verdict, she insists, is yours.