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| Judge Thomas W. Cooper |
Cooper, by all accounts, is one of those soft spoken and skilled jurists who has no trouble, by all accounts, earning the respect, even the admiration of the lawyers who appear before him. As one lawyer put it, that can be a double edged sword, at least if you're hoping to get a speedy disposition in a case before him. "Everybody wants to go before Judge Cooper," said one attorney who knows the judge well, "and so he ends up with quite a backlog."
Despite that backlog, it's a safe bet that none of the cases on Cooper's calendar have consumed as much of his court time as the Junior Pierce case. It has been on the judge's calendar for 12 years.
The way Cooper describes it he virtually came of age surrounded by the conflicting theories of what really happened to the 13-year-old daughter of a prominent state senator. He was raised in the Sumter area, and the case, which at that time riveted the attention of the locals, began while he was a first year law student.
But it wasn't until the early 1990s that the case crossed his desk.
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