Kelly Sullivan, the verdict reader

Kelly Sullivan is used to being the most anonymous person in any courtroom trial—until she absolutely isn’t. Before her recent promotion, the veteran courtroom clerk worked criminal jury trials at the Sacramento Superior Court for a solid decade, including the infamous “Sweetheart Murders” cold case that ended with a death-row conviction for Richard Hirschfield a few years ago. Along with providing the judge with all kinds of administrative support (those prison sentences don’t just magically happen) and making sure the proverbial courtroom trains run on time, Sullivan is the one who says the most important words any defendant is likely to hear: guilty or not guilty. Good thing Sullivan has a pleasant voice. Here, Sullivan discusses her first big trial, keeping cool during courtroom outbursts and how sifting through evidence prior to trial is like the most traumatic Christmas ever.

Do you remember the first case your worked on?

I do.

What was it about?

Well, it was a tough one. When I was first hired with the court, I was working in what we call our home court, which are the volume courtroom clerks. Anybody who gets arraigned, they’re usually arraigned at one of our courtrooms in the jail. And you can have a hundred cases on a day. So that’s where every single case in this county starts, in one of the home courts, and they stay there until they’re ready to go to trial. And so, when I first worked at the court, I worked in those home courts. So I don’t really have any recollection of any of those, because it’s really just, you know, a cattle call. It’s just all day long, right? So you’re calling case after case after case after case.

So very fast-paced

Right. But the first case I did as a trial courtroom clerk … was two young defendants who I think were just barely 18, but committed the crime as juveniles. … And it was a murder trial, two co-defendants, and I walked in to work with that judge midway through the trial, and I thought, “These boys are so young.”

They were being tried as adults?

Yes, they were being tried as adults. It was murder, and the jury came back with, both defendants, first-degree murder convictions, and so the judge didn’t really have any discretion. It’s life without the possibility of parole for those two. And I thought, ‘Man, they’re 18 and they’re never, ever going to get out of prison.’”

You had to read the verdict, correct?

I did have to read the verdict, and I can tell you that in the 10 years I was a courtroom clerk, the verdicts are always the hardest part for the courtroom clerk because … you’re sort of the silent person. … But when the verdict comes in …all eyes are on you, and it’s the pivotal moment in a trial.

Do you remember what the reaction was like?

I do remember what the reaction was like, because the defendants were two young men and the courtroom was packed with their family members. And, of course, as soon as I said “guilty of first-degree murder,” it was just an outburst. Sobbing from the parents and siblings, and it was just very emotional.

How do you prepare yourself for that moment?

What I would do is say, “OK, I’m not going to look at anybody. I’m not going to look at the jury, I’m not going to look at the defendant. I’m just going to stand up and read these documents like I would read the charging document at the beginning of the trial.” I know how important it is and everybody’s looking, but I needed to do that for myself, to be able to get through it.

Do you find yourself invested in the trials?

I think that you are to a certain extent because how could you not be? … We hear terrible things that happen to people. You have to hear children recount terrible things that happened to them, so it’s a very emotional process. You try to disassociate yourself as much as you can, but you’re still human.

Have you ever read a verdict that you didn’t agree with?

I think that maybe one time in all of the trials that I’ve done that I thought to myself—and it’s not that I disagreed with the jury—I thought to myself, “Would I have done the same thing if I was on the jury?”

Did you ever misread a verdict?

I’ve only heard about two times where a clerk accidentally read the wrong verdict, and it’s because the judge handed back all the verdict forms, and they didn’t realize they were reading an unsigned verdict form until they got to the end.

I didn’t know that court clerks handled the evidence in such an intimate way.

Oh yeah, and some of those pictures I still have in my head, and probably will have in my head forever.

Any other surprises to your job?

Well, the evidence I think is a big thing. … We literally have to suit up, like hazmat suit up, because we’re dealing with bloodborne pathogens, we’re dealing with bodily fluids. The police out in the street just literally throw it in a paper bag. They put it in a paper bag, they mark it and then, when the case is ready to go to trial, an investigator walks them over to the court. And so it’s the courtroom clerk that has to confirm that everything they say they’re giving to you, they have. … You’re literally finding out as you’re pulling evidence out what it is. You haven’t really heard anything about the case yet. … You go out to the courtroom, put some brown, like, butcher paper out on a table and then you start going through those bags, one by one. You have to suit up, especially if you know it’s a sex assault case or murder, and then you’re just unpacking. And it’s not until you pull out the dress that the victim was wearing that you even know what you’re getting. That’s always the most difficult thing.

That sounds nerve-wracking.

A national one I did as a courtroom clerk was the Richard Hirschfield case. That was nerve-wracking in a different way. It was also a death penalty case, and with a death penalty case, you have to square everything. Everything’s much harder. … The courtroom was packed because it was a cold case. The two young folks who were murdered, their families were there. … We couldn’t even fit everybody in … so we had to set up a whole other courtroom for overflow. … In that case, when the initial verdicts came in for guilt or innocence, a 48 Hours producer came up to me and said, “We want to mic you for the verdict.” And I thought, “I don’t even want to read these verdicts, and now you want to mic me?” (Laughs.)

It makes it harder to trick yourself into thinking, “Oh, I’m just the conduit here.”

Right. So what I did for that was practice reading both the guilty and the not guilty verdicts. I sat in front of my court reporter and my bailiff, and I said, “OK, let me practice, because I don’t want to screw this up.” And then of course they found him guilty. … And when they came back with the death or life without the possibility of parole, reading that verdict is way harder than reading a guilt or innocence verdict. You really cannot ever completely separate yourself. It’s only one of two times that I had to read a death sentence, and that is way hard to do.