Judge Martha E. Hass
Folly Beach Municipal Court
Being as old as I’m getting to be, I sometimes wonder if I get the facts of the stories I write about jumbled up and confused. I’ll be sitting at my desk and a case I tried forty-five years ago will pop into my head and I’ll decide I want to write about it. Like a case I tried in the Folly Beach Municipal Court in 1980 when I represented a schoolteacher arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for performing oral sex on the beach on Folly Beach. She was mortified she would lose her teaching certificate but, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could do for her.
Folly Beach is affectionately known as the Edge of America and has always enjoyed let’s just say a colorful reputation. It sat along the main sea route leading to Charleston Harbor and the many shipwrecks along its shore first earned it the name Coffin Island before developers, wanting to turn it into a resort destination, changed its name to Folly Beach. “Folly” because its an old English word for lush greenery, but it could just as aptly meant the more modern connotation of a foolish act that leads to a bad outcome as in my schoolteacher’s case.
Trials on Folly Beach were held in the evenings after the part-time municipal judge, Martha E. Hass, finished her day job as a College of Charleston Business Law professor. She was a good bit older than me but had graduated USC law school the year after I became a lawyer. It was my first time appearing before her and she struck me as a hardnosed, no-nonsense kind of judge. The schoolteacher and I sat in the makeshift courtroom waiting our turn watching Judge Hass mete out tough justice to all manner of assorted characters accused of committing one bizarre disorderly act after another on the island. My poor schoolteacher became more and more nervous with each guilty verdict and sentence.
We were thankful when it turned out we were the last case on the docket that night. By the time we were called, the courtroom had almost emptied out much to my client’s relief. Folly Beach didn’t have a police department, it had a Department of Public Safety, and our case was being prosecuted by the Fire Chief Wallace Benson, who had apprehended my client in the act. It was obvious he thought what my client had been caught doing was funny, but you could also tell Judge Hass didn’t think it was funny in the slightest. I misread her anger completely thinking she was going to come down on my client like a ton of bricks but, halfway through the Chief’s presentation of the evidence against my client, Judge Hass interrupted him to ask where the gentleman was my client allegedly committed the disorderly conduct with. The Chief was surprised by her question and stammered he didn’t know. Judge Hass announced, “Case dismissed for failure to prove who the moving party was.” The finality of her decision was emphasized by the banging of her gavel on her bench.
It was as if the weight of the world had been lifted off my client’s shoulders and she started crying. I walked her out to her car and stood there watching as she pulled away. When I turned around, there was Judge Hass. She asked if I’d like to get a bite to eat with her at one of the many fine seafood restaurants on the strip. I did and we shared a wonderful meal, a couple of drinks, and a great conversation together that night. What a delightful person she turned out to be, smart as a whip and funny too. She told me stories about growing up in Charleston and her love of boating and fishing the beautiful rivers and estuaries that surround us.
I never appeared before Judge Hass again but never forgot her either. Here it is almost 50 years later and I still remember that trial like it was yesterday, or think I do anyway. To be sure, I looked her up online wanting to find a picture of her to go with my story. Of course, she’d aged as I have but I still recognized her. I also wanted to make sure I’d gotten the spelling of her name and the facts straight for my story so I pulled up her Post & Courier 2023 obituary and was relieved to confirm I still got it. Right there in her obituary in black and white it says, “She earned M.A.T, M.B.A., and Juris Doctor degrees from the University of South Carolina. She was a complex person with great Ability and talent. She grew up and worked in a man’s world and was not afraid to speak her mind. Early in her career she practiced Family Law and served as a Folly Beach Magistrate. She was especially proud of the fact that the police learned quickly not to bring cases against prostitutes unless they also brought in the johns…” I wonder if she was referring to my case.
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