A new judge takes the bench as familiar face steps down
Magistrate to retire after nearly 15 years in US District Court
Before leaving the federal courthouse in Allentown this month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry S. Perkin hung his portrait in the courtroom where he presided for nearly 15 years.
On Nov, 12, U.S. Magistrate Judge Pamela Carlos was sworn in to replace Perkin on the bench, resolving civil lawsuits and giving criminal defendants their first appearances in court. Carlos, an experienced lawyer with deep ties to Allentown, said she hopes it will be many years before her own portrait adorns the courtroom wall.
Perkin joined the comple
ment of magistrate judges for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2007. Unlike district judges, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, magistrate judges are selected by the district judges in the court where they will serve. Before his appointment, Perkin served as solicitor for Allentown and Lehigh County and as an assistant district attorney under former District Attorney William Platt, and practiced law privately.
He said his time on the bench was the best experience of his professional life.
With the exception of criminal trials and sentencings, “magistrate judges get to do virtually everything in the court,” he said.
Carlos joins the court with more than 30 years of experience as an attorney, having worked in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office at the start of her career before joining Bennett, Bricklin and Saltzburg, where she developed a specialty in insurance litigation and complex casualty cases with a focus on sexual abuse litigation.
A New York native, Carlos graduated from Franklin & Marshal College and Temple University law school. She first visited Allentown in 1985 after meeting her husband. Carlos said she remembers when Hess’s department store, with its patio restaurant, was still open and serving sumptuous deserts and putting on fashion displays.
“I’ve been around a long time and I really feel at home here,” she said. “I feel very privileged to come here and carry on in the new role.”
Carlos, of Lansdale, said her practice in state and federal courts across eastern Pennsylvania, including appearances before Perkin, prepared her well for her new role.
“I think my breadth of experience allows me to see the big picture,” she said.
Perkin said he was presented with a fascinating range of cases over the years, from business disputes to tragic civil rights claims. Although one role of magistrates is to oversee mediation between the parties in a civil lawsuit to reach a settlement, Perkin presided over some memorable jury trials.
In one excessive force case, a young man was being arrested by the state attorney general’s drug task force when he tried to flee and turned his car on the agents, who shot him to death. It was a case of a string of bad decisions leading to tragedy, Perkin said.
“That one has always stuck with me,” he said.
In another involving a government contractor in Afghanistan suing for damages, Perkin presided over a trial where the plaintiff and a number of witnesses testified via the video conferencing technology in the Allentown courthouse long before COVID made it commonplace.
“The things I learned about how things are transacted in Afghanistan were very eye-opening to me,” he said.
In others, Perkin said he saw the power of a jury to reach decisions based on its interpretation of the evidence. In a 2011 trial, a man serving a state prison sentence claimed he suffered frostbite and permanent injuries while he was being transported from Berks County to the Bucks County jail in a sheriff ’s department van on a frigid January day. Although he banged on the wall of the cab and shouted to the deputies inside, they did not turn on the heat in the back, and the prisoner testified his feet were black and blue from the cold, which caused nerve damage.
The jury found that the deputies had not acted recklessly and were not liable for the man’s injuries.
“That was one rare case where I didn’t necessarily agree with the jury,” he said.
Perkin’s portrait, a photograph printed to resemble an oil painting donated by the Lehigh County Bar Association, will hang beside that of U.S. Magistrate Judge Arnold Rapoport, who served from 1975 to 2007 and across the room from that of retired U.S. District Judge Edward Cahn, for whom the courthouse is named.
He said the Allentown courthouse, with just three of the district’s 28 judges, felt like a family and functioned like a smaller version of Philadelphia’s bustling federal courthouse, where most judges are based. Perkin said although a smaller number of attorneys practice in federal court than in state court, it gives them better access to the judges to work on fair resolutions to cases.
Carlos said she looks forward to meeting with lawyers and clients to start moving along cases stalled by the pandemic.
“We’re open for business and I look forward to meeting everybody and hopefully having a long and fruitful career,” she said.