This article appeared in the Register-Herald on June 18, 2000.
What's a high school youngster with an innate hatred for math and science - and a corresponding love to vocalize and argue - to do at such a tender age, anyway?
In John Allen Hutchison's case, he becomes a lawyer.
Early on, the eventual Raleigh County Circuit Court judge gave the legal vocation serious thought.
Skeptics need only to peer inside his Woodrow Wilson High School yearbook. Right there under his boyish photograph, the caption reads: "Wants to be a lawyer." (Footnote to legal observers: The same prophetic words appear beside the name of John Wooton, who also became a lawyer.)
"Simply because I liked to talk, and hated math and science," Hutchison explained. "And I knew that I didn't have to have science and math to be a lawyer."
The budding attorney honed his speech skills, not on a debate squad or drama team, but on a couple of teachers.
"They were great ladies, but were bleeding hearts," he recalled. "I would always take for the hell of it the position opposite of theirs, just to argue with them. So that was why I wanted to be a lawyer. It was something I felt like I would be pretty good at."
Hutchison moved to the campus of Davis & Elkins College to earn a degree in history with a minor in political science.
As fate had it, he encountered an imposing, ex-district judge from Missouri named Dorothy Roberts, who was in charge of the political science department.
"She had an immense influence on my life," he said of the 6-foot professor. "She was hard as nails. The students were scared to death of her, and I loved her. She just raised Cain with me all the time."
Hutchison's legal career was put on hold, however, as the youthful graduate with a yen for anything athletic headed south to Athens, taking a job as an assistant baseball and basketball coach at Concord College. Soon, he learned the job wasn't confined to the hardwood and diamond.
To justify his salary (par for the small-college circuit), Hutchison was called upon to run a dormitory, scout for new prospects, run an intramural program and perform other tasks.
In his first sampling of the Law School Admissions Test, admittedly the unprepared Hutchison didn't fare well, and he was tempted to launch a career as a coach. But the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a small-college coach - he sees no difference in it there than on the big-name campuses, just in the dollars at stake - steered him back to his first love.
"I realized I didn't want to do that," he said. "I wanted to go back to law school."
By this time he was married, and wife Victoria, a special education specialist with the Raleigh County school system, helped him brush up on the academics. For three years the couple studied (including work on despised math), and his second go-round with the LSAT was rewarded with acceptance at West Virginia University and two other schools.
The couple's daughter, 19-year-old Gabriella, has completed a year at Concord, and adopted 14-year-old son Thaddeus will become a ninth-grader in the fall at Beckley-Stratton Junior High.
Hutchison saw his first soccer match at D&E and was hooked. Besides working with his children, the judge coached a girls' team three years and is a registered high school official.
"I enjoy soccer," he said. "It's one of my great, great loves."
In addition to soccer, Hutchison plays golf and enjoys anything athletic, except ice hockey ("I don't understand it"), and in recent years has concentrated on deer hunting. No longer in possession of a trained dog, he has abandoned his old pastime of bird hunting.
Owing to boyhood skills in carpentry, Hutchison also enjoys tinkering around with home improvement, an avocation he refers to as "sawdust therapy." And he appears to be a collector of baseball-styled hats - evidenced by the mostly donated 71 different ones that line the outer room of his courthouse office.
"It's the greatest job I ever had," he said of his place on the bench. "Truly."
Hutchison prefaces his explanation with an emphasis that the black robe is not a power trip.
"You've got the ability to affect a lot of things, and a lot of things positively," he said. "That's what I like about it the most.
"There are times when the job can be drudgery and seem overwhelming in terms of all the decisions you have to make. Then, if you sit back, not only are you a judge, but once you get to be a judge, miraculously you become a wise person."
Hutchison uses the bench as a bully pulpit of sorts, working, for instance, with police to bring about positive changes in the way their tasks are carried out.
"You make a decision, and sometimes you send a nice message that says, 'Hey, if you really want to do it right, do it this way,'" he said. "You can really improve your performance."
There is another reason he loves the job.
"Quite frankly, you have to believe in yourself, and I'm not cocky," he said. "I don't believe I'm cocky.
"But a lot of the decisions that I have to make, I think I'm the right guy to make them. I was raised right. I believe I have good core values, and I try to apply those. You'll always see that. Raleigh County is very, very fortunate. Truly, I believe we've got three judges that have that type of personal system."
Hutchison isn't one to shy from making tough decisions, a mission he seems to relish.
"I can do it and at least walk away from it, whether the parties know it or not, knowing that they got a fair shake," he said. "I think I'm fair. You can affect a lot of things as a judge."
Admittedly, sending a person to prison isn't easy, and Hutchison doesn't mask his anger at one who reappears before him after getting a dose of leniency in the form of probation.
"The hardest thing about putting someone in prison is looking at the effect it has on his support group - his family, his parents," he said. "Lawyers know how to use that, of course. They bring it all in. It's a sympathy factor.
"But at some point you have to say, 'What you did deserves prison, and it's not my fault that you did this to your support group.'"
Even so, he adds, "It's tough, and nobody goes to jail from my courtroom on a whim. It's not that I walked in, got a headache and am in a bad mood, and that's why they're going to jail. That's not how it works. If I send them to jail, I've really thought about it."
Hutchison, like many occupying the bench, at times has become a target of verbal abuse.
In a recent murder trial, the defendant unleashed a stream of invective, saving his loudest curse for the judge while a bailiff led him away. Hutchison didn't take that, or any other abuse, personally.
There have been times when mere words didn't sate the anger of the defendant.
"I've had people get up out of the chair and try to get me," he said. "I've got good bailiffs. They never get very close."
In what he feels was his most unnerving moment, one man fished a knife from a box and issued a threat.
But there are times when legal humor prevails.
For instance, not long ago, a man before him had failed a drug test, and his attorney made a feeble excuse that his client simply had been victimized by second-hand marijuana smoke in a room filled with dopers.
Hutchison wondered aloud if the man wanted to stick with the "I didn't inhale" tack.
"It didn't work for Bill," the judge reflected. "I don't think it's going to work for your client."
At that point, the man stood up and confessed to smoking the drug - and inhaling.
Unlike some judges, Hutchison never worked as a prosecutor, and, in fact, handled only three cases as a defense attorney upon leaving WVU - two for druggies and another involving a charge of arson.
All three wound up as mistrials.
His first job in the legal world entailed largely research while a student, requiring him to call in his results nightly via Dictaphone.
In 1980, he landed a job with the Beckley firm of Higgins and Gorman, working in tax and business - fields he never envisioned. Five years later, the firm took him in as a partner under the banner Gorman, Sheatsley and Hutchison. But in 1992, a career change sent him to Nationwide Insurance Co. as an administrative trial lawyer.
Three years thereafter, then-Gov. Gaston Caperton appointed him to succeed retiring Judge Thomas Canterbury. In 1996, he was elected to complete the unexpired term, and this year he is unopposed for a full, eight-year term.
Hutchison struck a pensive look when asked how he sizes up the role of a judge.
"That's deep," he mused. "His main purpose is to make sure the system works. It doesn't always. But you're in a position where you can effect a lot of good changes. A judge just cannot sit back and say the folks in Charleston make the decisions, and I'll just follow the rulebook.
"A judge has got to recognize the shortcomings and try to change them. We do that a lot. We're in the process now in this state where we're trying to develop the family law master system and see where it's going and how it's going to change.
"A judge has to speak out on things like that and point out the shortcomings, as well as the benefits. A lot of people have one idea, a lot have another idea. Judges have an obligation to the public to say, 'Hey, you need to be in the middle, you need to be one way or another.'
"That is his main function - to make sure the system works, and the system is complicated. It's getting more complicated every day."
Even so, Hutchison views the American judicial system as possessing the potential to be the world's best.
"In terms of administration and operation, it can fall apart sometimes and make mistakes," he acknowledged.
"But the potential for the best system is there. You've got to protect the public. But you've also got to protect the individual. And that is really a hard line to walk. There are abuses both ways. But when it works, it's beautiful. It truly is."