Handcuffed in the middle of a hallway, a rookie federal judge in a Santa Claus suit looked around at the jurors. There were dozens of them, and they’d heard arguments from both a prosecutor and a defense attorney that offered starkly different takes on the modern-day Saint Nick.
“All of you who are voting to free Santa say ‘yes,’” the presiding judge ordered. The crowd cheered, but another order followed: “All of you who are voting to keep Santa in jail say ‘yes.’”
The first round was much more thunderous than the second.
“On an almost unanimous vote, we’re going to free Santa,” said U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, summoning the U.S. Marshals Service.
With that, U.S. District Judge John Holcomb, a 2020 Donald Trumpappointee, was freed from the handcuffs and hugged by his wife, ending another yearly tradition at Carter’s holiday pancake breakfast that began when the 78-year-old was a judge in the state of California’s Orange County Superior Court in the 1980s.