Main Sections

A View From The Bench: Conversation With Judge Hilton Dier

Tuesday September 5, 2006

By Larry Johnson

   A sense of humor is an indispensable attribute in any profession, and being a courtroom judge is no exception. Judge Dier would often tell his jury that what they were about to embark on what was serious business, but even in that solemn venue, an occasional joke and a little laughter could be expected and even welcomed.

Hilton Dier, like most of us, had no idea what he wanted to do when he grew up. His eventual career was a serendipitous confluence of a number of unpredictable factors. He was born February 16, 1927, in Toronto, Canada. His mother was visiting her sister in Toronto when Hilton decided to enter the world somewhat early. As a result, he can claim dual citizenship if he so desires.

At the time of his birth, Hilton's parents were residing in Albany, New York, where his father, also Hilton Dier, was a medical superintendent at the Albany Hospital. In 1934, when Hilton was seven years old, his father quit his job at the hospital and moved his family to Lake George, where he opened a general practice and became a country doctor.

Hilton grew up in Lake George and soon after graduating high school in 1944, enlisted in the U.S. Army as an infantryman. His father had preceded him by a couple of years and was exercising his medical skills as an army doctor.

Hilton was fortunate in never having to employ his training. He was eventually assigned to the Army of Occupation in Germany and was made a clerk at General Headquarters in Frankfurt. General Headquarters, Hilton remembers, was quite a magnificent seven-story, crescent- shaped building that had survived the intensive bombing of the city.  The Allies had leveled all of the buildings around it, but the Farber building, the former corporate headquarters of the Farber Chemical Company, had been intentionally preserved for its future use as Allied Headquarters.

“I was assigned to the Message Center. It was my job to receive, forward, and log all mail coming in and going out. Eventually, however, I became a driver for my immediate superior, a very likeable WAC, a major Hedwig Cadell. It was my job to sign out a vehicle and to drive the Major wherever she wanted to go.”

Also, while in the army, Hilton had applied for specialized training and had been sent to North Carolina State where “…I lasted about six months. The army had wanted to make an electrical engineer out of me, but that didn't last. My lack of math skills let me down and I was rotated back into regular service.” However, Hilton was mustered out in 1946 and immediately entered Cornell College on a scholarship that he had earned in high school. “I majored in just about everything,” he told me. “I started out as a pre-med major, but that didn't work out. Then I switched to drama and speech. This launched a temporary career in summer stock at Lake George. I eventually transferred from Cornell to SUNY at Plattsburgh. It was called Champlain College when I went there. I graduated in 1951 from Champlain with a degree in Liberal Arts and a concentration in philosophy and history. After graduation I went to New Mexico for a month to visit a friend, and when I came back I got a job as an announcer in a radio station in Glens Falls. I lasted at that job for five or six months, and then went to work for General Electric in an advertising training program. I was basically an advertising copy writer. I was assigned to a radio station owned by G.E. where I wrote copy. I loved that job,” Hilton told me, “I had been the magazine editor in college and I liked writing a great deal. I thought that I had found my niche. However, later on, I was assigned to a major appliance division, where I found myself writing banal ad copy for engineers who were deeply involved with garbage disposal systems. Writing copy for those guys got old very soon, and I said to hell with it and quit and applied to Harvard Law School,”

In 1956 Hilton graduated from Harvard and discovered that he had no immediate desire to practice law. “I had been working summers in restaurants and so I went to work full-time in a friend's family's restaurant.” Eventually he caught the “law bug” and came to Vermont where he clerked for Federal Judge Ernest Gibson from 1957 to 1958. “I liked clerking,” Hilton told me. “It was an interesting job because I got to meet the top lawyers in the state practicing in the Federal Court. Watching those lawyers at work for a solid year was a wonderful education.”

After his clerking tenure, Hilton stayed in Brattleboro, Vermont, and practiced private law for the next eight years, until he was offered a job in Montpelier in the Attorney General's Office. “After one year of trying cases, Attorney General Jim Oakes made me Deputy Attorney General.” Eventually Governor Phillip Hoff appointed him to a judgeship in Middlebury, where Hilton spent the next 21 years, until his retirement in 1989.

“Being a judge is like anything else,” Hilton told me. “Eventually it becomes routine and second nature responses are quite the norm.”  Judge Hilton Dier has tried the full spectrum of cases during his long tenure on the bench:  malpractice, criminal (including murder), civil, juvenile and family (including child custody cases).

“All trials are interesting in their own way,” Hilton explained, “but family cases are the real gut-wrenchers. Parental squabbling over custody of children is always difficult. Often the internecine fighting between husband and wife involves using the children as leverage. It can get very nasty. All a judge can do is get all the facts he or she can and hopefully do what is best for the children. Often the experts called into court for each side have such opposing points of view that it becomes impossible to take their testimony seriously. It then becomes the court's job to separate the wheat from the chaff and to try and do what is best for the most vulnerable.

“The hardest and also the easiest cases to judge are murder cases,” Hilton told me. “Most murder cases are generally well prepared by both sides. The stakes are high. Murder cases are undoubtedly the most interesting cases to try because of the nature of the crime and the high stakes involved. Most murders are crimes of passion and most murderers make excellent prisoners because of that fact.”

Hilton described one murder case that represented the norm. And as terrible as the crime was, there was an element of irresistible macabre humor. It seems that the murderer was an incorrigible drunk who had a persistently nagging wife. One day, while the husband was lying on the sofa with a bottle of vodka and a loaded .45 caliber revolver, his wife was sitting across the room and was fully engaged in nagging him. The man finally took his revolver and, unceremoniously, shot her. He then called the police and told them what he had done, and that he understood that since he had shot his wife that it was his responsibility to report the act to the proper authorities. When the police arrived, they took him into the kitchen and read him his rights. He wasn't interested and readily confessed to the murder. As was reported by the officer's in charge, he would occasionally look around the doorway at his recently deceased wife and yell at her: “You won't be nagging me anymore.” At his trial, the man blamed the whole miserable affair on Women's Lib.

Hilton is still an officer of the court and volunteers his services whenever  the need arrives. If there is an after hours need for a warrant or a judge is sick or on vacation, Hilton Dier readily puts on the robe, picks up the gavel and assumes the awesome responsibility that goes with being a judge in a court of law.

Printer Friendly

Top

Advertisements

Search our Archives