Instant Justice’: After A Violent 49ers Game, The Eagles Opened A Stadium Jail
Nov. 10, 1997, couldn’t have gone worse for the Philadelphia Eagles.
In front of a national television audience on “Monday Night Football,” quarterback Steve Young and the 49ers were taking them to the cleaners. As the Eagles made mistake after mistake, the 67,000 fans in attendance at Veterans Stadium grew angry.
Near the end of the game, Philadelphia doomed to a 24-12 loss, an Eagles fan pulled a smuggled flare gun out of his jacket. He aimed it across the field and shot, arcing a flare directly into a crowd of fans. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
Others were not so lucky. Dozens of fistfights broke out around the stadium — so many that the Eagles were forced to issue an official press release after the game. “There were a large number of fights and acts of intimidation, many directed at fans in 49ers jerseys,” the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote.
In spite of the fact that we feel we have made significant strides in recent years with regard to fan conduct at Veterans Stadium, what we witnessed this past Monday was undoubtedly a step backward,” team owner Jeffrey Lurie told the media.
The team promised something would be done about violent fans at Veterans Stadium. Within a week, that solution would materialize in the form of a stadium courtroom run by a man whose career would later devolve into accusations of sexual misconduct and sociopathy.
“Eagles Court” seems like a joke about Philadelphians, but for nearly a decade, it was operational. Jail cells were constructed, along with a special, fully legitimate, legal courtroom. Instead of ejecting fans or sending them to a drunk tank — common in pro stadiums around the nation — offenders at Veterans Stadium would be hauled to court in the bowels of the stadium.
They’d wait in a holding cell and then, sometimes minutes later, appear before a judge for sentencing. Or, as a Philadelphia Daily News headline put it in November 1997: “With judge to provide instant justice, it’s fourth down for stadium thugs.” (This was before the wisdom of going for it on fourth down was as widely accepted.)
The face of Eagles Court was Judge Seamus Patrick McCaffery, a then-47-year-old Irish immigrant who had enlisted in the Marine Corps, worked for 20 years as a Philly cop and then got his law degree at night school. He rode a motorcycle with the license plate “JUDGE.”
His no-nonsense reputation was so well known that TV producers reportedly approached him about starring in a Judge Judy-esque reality show about Philly’s night courts, but the waiver needed to allow cameras in the courtroom was rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Eagles Court was a passion project for McCaffery, who loved anything that raised his profile. It was staffed by volunteer judges each game day, and McCaffery was eager for the role and the publicity that went with it. He went on “Good Morning America” and ESPN, and he was the subject of a Page 1 feature in the New York Times.
“There will be serious and fast results,” he boasted. “Fines will be high and if you can’t pay, then you’ll go to jail.”
The Eagles also hired more security to patrol the stadium. In the first home game after the Niners disaster, 135 police officers and a separate squad of private security guards were dispatched into the crowd; many were dressed in Steelers gear to serve as catnip to fight-prone Eagles fans.
The Daily News reported that concessionaires were also told to be “more vigilant enforcing the team’s existing policy of not selling beer to minors or drunks,” which seems to imply a legion of drunk children may have been roaming the stands.
The protocol went like this: Unruly fans were yanked from their seats and taken immediately to Eagles Court. There, police would run their IDs for a criminal record and get them arraigned, often while the suspects were still blackout drunk.
Any witnesses were also dragged along to give testimony. Then, they all went before a judge, often McCaffery himself, who would hear the evidence. Most got fines of $250-$350 for misdemeanors like openly carrying alcohol, underage drinking or drunk and disorderly. Season tickets were also revoked.
During the inaugural day of Eagles Court, only a few people were hauled in front of McCaffery. One had been arrested the moment he stepped into Veterans Stadium with an open bottle of booze. He was polite and, the Associated Press reported, slurred, “I thank you for your time” to McCaffery before stumbling out of the courtroom.
Things were quieter than you might expect in the sparse, concrete basement of Veterans Stadium. A typical sampling of problems included fans smuggling alcohol into the stadium, people getting in fights with beer sellers and, oddly, people trying to sell towels in the restrooms.
Most games, just a handful of fans went before Judge McCaffery. He blamed cops for being too soft, and in 1999, he took to the press to shame them, saying the police’s preference for ejecting, rather than arresting, fans was the real problem.
“If there’s nothing going on, there’s no sense in having a court,” McCaffery griped to the Daily News. “Why they are not making arrests, I don’t know.”
Katie Dowd:
Follow
