The name may not be a household word, but James Cayce is the judge who  signed off on the search warrant on July 28, 2011, requiring Google, as owner of Youtube, to give up its information about the nefarious Mr. Fiddlesticks, hater of the Renton, Washington police.

The alleged crime was cyberstalking, generating a  significant  amount of  analysis about the merit of the law and its applicability to some cartoons posted on Youtube that were unflattering to the local cops.  The story was outed by KIRO-TV reporter Chris Halsne, who questioned whether such parodies could really be criminal.  Relying on nationally respected legal experts, Halsne concludes that it doesn’t pass the laugh test.

The focus has largely been on Renton’s intention to prosecute Fiddlesticks for his alleged cyberstalking.  My suspicion is that nobody ever intended to prosecute, and the cops and prosecutors banged heads trying to come up with any colorable crime to fill out the search warrant affidavit.  Cyberstalking was the best they could come up with. 

But what they really wanted was to know who was creating these cartoons that hurt the cops’ feelings and made them look foolish.  They just wanted a name. Once they knew their enemy, they would fix the problem.

On the morning of July 28th, Judge James Cayce likely had no idea that this was the day that would make him an internet phenomenon.  Not much that happens in Renton becomes an internet phenomenon.  Maybe he had a cup of coffee or two.  People in Washington State tend to like coffee.  Nothing unusual.  And then he went to work, as do judges all over the country, dreading the droning of lawyers whining about the misery of their clients’ lives, every one of which is the worst ever and demands redress like no litigant before him.

In the midst of this judicial drudgery, maybe some papers are shuffled before him by his clerk, telling him they need to be signed.  He glances down at the papers and sees the caption, affidavit for a search warrant.  He checks to make sure the affiant signed and the attesting signatures are in place.  There they are, just as they should be, approved by the prosecutor.  He knows that this means the prosecutor has gone over the papers to make sure the “i”s are dotted and “t”s are crossed, that the niceties are in place, just as they are with all the other search warrants he’s asked to sign.  And as he scribbles his name on the proper line, he wonders what he should have for lunch. 

The effort required to carefully scrutinize a search warrant, to parse the details with the level of scrutiny that one might anticipate before allowing a police officer to engage in an intrusion so severe and serious that it’s worthy of constitutional protection, is really quite hard.  To put in the amount of thought necessary, it could take hours, analyzing its merit from all angles, considering whether it’s truly needed and whether, if the police find what they’re seeking, a crime will be solved. 

This could eat up a large part of a judge’s day, were he to give it the focus demanded of something of constitutional magnitude.  Who has that much time?  The wheels of justice would grind to a halt, and the judge would never make it home in time for dinner.

Putting pen to paper to scribble the lines that constitute the authorization for the police to search is a task that takes no more than a few second.  If we just assume the normal course, the personal presumption of regularity, then the authorization for the search warrant will barely make a ripple in the hard day ahead of a judge.  He can get back to the work of doing justice, listening to the next lawyer whine about the misery his client endures.  All day long, one misery or another, each the end of the world that can only be stopped by his Solomonic decision.  And then there’s the question of what to eat for dinner.

And so James Cayce performed his judicial function, relying upon the banality of the paper searching for the identity of some cartoon-making internet guy, without breaking stride from the daily routine.  And now, he’s famous on the internet for approving one of the most ridiculous search warrants ever signed.

This entire scenario, of course, exists only in my fertile imagination.  I have no clue what James Cayce did on July 28th, nor the amount of time, thought or attention he gave this search warrant application by the local cops who wanted so badly to find out which of their residents was ridiculing them on the internet.  It’s sheer fantasy, borne of my desire to believe that Judge James Cayce isn’t a blithering idiot who didn’t have the slightest clue what he was signing or the outrageous legal issues at stake in his authorization, or some blind cop-loving jurist who would authorize a rectal search of his mother if the highway patrol asked nicely.

No, I prefer to speculate that these papers were just shuffled before him, as search warrants are handed up from clerk to judge in courtrooms across the country every day, with judges performing their legal function by putting their name on the correct line as they ponder why they ever thought wearing a robe was going to be a prestigious career choice.  Work, work, work.

But I do believe that Judge James Cayce never expected to find his name repeated all over the internet on the morning of July 28th.  Had he anticipated this, he probably would have given this warrant application a lot more thought.