The courtroom was full before the judge ever walked in.
The wooden benches of the Clarendon County Courthouse were filled shoulder to shoulder – sheriffs and solicitors, defense lawyers and clerks, county officials, old friends, and a majority of the justices of the South Carolina Supreme Court. Only they weren’t there for a trial.
They were there for a goodbye.
The Honorable R. Ferrell Cothran, Jr., who has spent nearly five decades in and around that room – as a young defense attorney, as Clarendon County’s longtime county attorney, as an assistant solicitor, and, for the last 19 years, as a circuit court judge – was honored Thursday in a retirement ceremony that felt less like an ending than a witness.
OPENING TRIBUTES
“My inner self, I always say that if I can’t win the lottery,” retired Circuit Court Judge Thomas W. Cooper, Jr. told the crowd, “he can.”
The line drew laughter, but Cooper meant it. Before him, the ceremony had opened with an invocation from the Rev. C. Jared Hammett, who drew from the story of Elijah and Elisha as he prayed, “To follow a great judge is a daunting task, and today we’re not here to look at the one who will follow, but to honor the one who has come before.”
Clarendon County Bar Association President William H. Johnson also welcomed those gathered and acknowledged the many dignitaries present, including Speaker of the House G. Murrell Smith, Rep. Fawn Pedalino, and several members of the judiciary. “We are gathering to reflect on the career of Ferrell,” Johnson said. “He’s been a servant, a friend, and a trusted counselor for many years.”
Speaker after speaker described Cothran as gifted in court, relentless in work, and maybe even more so outside of it – a patient mentor of young lawyers, a steady hand in chaotic moments, a man who could fix just about anything and feed just about anyone.
A LIFE IN LAW
But when it was his turn at the podium, Cothran didn’t want to talk about himself.
“I hate talking about myself,” he said. “So I’m going to talk about this room and what it has meant to me.”
For the next several minutes, the judge didn’t give a résumé. He gave a testimony – about fear, about duty, about mercy, and about what happens in a courtroom when it’s working the way it should.
“This is really an important room,” he said. “This is an amazing room.”
Cothran was born in Manning in 1952 to Ralph F. Cothran and Ruth Davidson Dubose Cothran. He graduated from Manning High School in 1970, earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina in 1974 and his law degree from USC in 1977. After passing the bar, he joined his father in practice, becoming part of Cothran, Chandler & Cothran – later Cothran & Cothran.
He served as Clarendon County Attorney from 1979 to 2006. In 1983, then-Solicitor Wade S. Kolb, Jr. appointed him assistant solicitor for Clarendon County, where he prosecuted criminal cases for more than two decades. On Feb. 15, 2006, the General Assembly elected him to the circuit court bench in the Third Judicial Circuit. He began serving as a circuit judge that October.
He hunted. He fished. He cooked. He rebuilt what needed rebuilding. He taught church on Wednesdays. He raised three sons, Scott, Michael and Marion, with his wife, Debbie Brakefield Cothran, and, as he made sure to tell the room, now has “eight beautiful grandchildren.”
FINDING HIS CALLING
But it was inside Clarendon County’s main courtroom that Cothran had lived almost his entire professional life.
“Beulah and I grew up – we lived in this room, 48 years,” he said, nodding to longtime Clerk of Court Beulah Roberts and her successor, Shanita Brangman, along with the court staff he called not employees but friends.
He can still tell you the exact moment he first felt the weight of it.
“The scariest I've ever been in my life is in this room,” Cothran said.
It was Nov. 14, 1977. He had just been sworn in the week before. He walked in wearing a brand-new three-piece suit his grandmother had bought him, carrying a pen, a legal pad and a briefcase.
“The courtroom was full of jurors and lawyers and everything else,” Cothran said. “Prosecutors sittin’ at this table. And Judge Laney said, ‘Cothran. You been sworn in yet?’ And I thought he wanted to congratulate me.”
“I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘Good. This man sittin’ at your table is your client. He’s charged with burglary first. Go pick him a jury.’”
“I was scared,” Cothran said. “I looked at him, I asked him what his name was, and the judge went off the bench to take a break. I got out of my chair, and I walked to the clerk’s desk, and Mr. P. Brown was the clerk. I said, ‘Mr. Brown, I need a jury list and a dime.’ He gave me a jury list he had in his pocket and loaned me a dime.”
Cothran walked out to the pay phone in the hallway.
“I called my daddy. I said, ‘Listen…’ He said, ‘Son, I'm gonna close the office. You can do the best you can.’”
“I was scared to death I was gonna embarrass my whole family and friends,” he said. “And I was scared to death for that poor man.”
That first trial lasted three days. He said he “had no clue” what he was doing. But it set the course.
“I prosecuted hundreds of cases in this room,” he said. “I faced great lawyers, and I learned so much from them.”
TWO BOOKS, ONE PURPOSE
In 2006, when he moved from the prosecutor's table to the bench, Cothran said he brought two books with him: a Bible and the Constitution.
“I put my hand on this book,” he said, holding one up, “and swore to uphold this book.”
“I have studied this book, all the blue books that go with it, and all the cases the Supreme Court has decided. Because this is really an important room. … I got a lot of knowledge from this book,” he said of the Constitution. “I gained wisdom from this book,” he said of Scripture.
“Because this book is about our relationship with God, but this book is about our relationship with each other, and that's what's really important.”
He said both guided him on days when judging felt easy and on days when it didn’t.
“Being up there sometime was really tough, because you gotta make decisions that nobody else wants to make,” Cothran said. “And sometimes they're pretty easy, and sometimes they take all you got, and sometimes they take more than you have.”
“And when that happened,” he said, “I got this book and I went to this room,” meaning the chambers and the quiet counsel of his law clerks and fellow judges.
“You can't believe the brotherhood we have,” he said. “Such tough decisions. The friendship with these people are for a lifetime. It is amazing. Because for the most part, it's kind of lonely otherwise.”
FRIENDSHIP AND LEGACY
That theme – friendship – ran through the entire ceremony.
Justice George C. James, Jr., of the South Carolina Supreme Court, who was elected to the circuit bench the same year as Cothran, said what made Cothran special wasn’t only what he knew, but how he carried people around him.
“Often overlooked in the workplace, but vital to success in any organization, is friendship, genuine friendship between colleagues,” James said.
Quoting scripture, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens his friend,” James told the crowd, “Ferrell is that iron.”
“Judges are typically alone,” James said. “They become isolated … from colleagues and even from the lawyers who appear frequently in front of them. But when judges build friendships with their colleagues, things change, and Ferrell was always the first in our group … to reach out.”
“I’ve learned a lot from you, Farrell, over the last 19 years,” James said. “Most of that didn’t come from a training manual or a CLE or a law book. Most came from listening to you, bouncing ideas off you and realizing that you are a brilliant man.”
“Ferrell gets what it means to be a great judge,” James said. “He listens, he understands, he reasons and he soundly rules. … The last thing I will say … Ferrell Cothran is a fine man, and I’m lucky to call him my friend.”
Cooper, who once occupied the same Third Circuit seat, went further. He called Cothran fearless, generous and incapable of doing anything halfway.
He told stories about Cothran as an outdoorsman and teacher: running boats, cooking for crowds, building deer stands from scratch, turning Wednesday night prayer meetings at First Presbyterian Church into something young working families would actually come to because, as Cooper put it, “he started it with what he can do best. He provided them a meal.”
“Judge Cothran is most famously generous,” Cooper said. “Generous with his time, with his efforts, with his expertise and with his vast array of tools. He will stop what he is doing to help you with your project or your emergency. He will lend you anything that you may need from his vast workshop … and if he doesn't have it, he'll go buy it and then lend it to you. And if you don't know how to operate it, he'll do the task for you.”
Cooper said when Cothran’s portrait is hung in the courtroom alongside other jurists, future generations will see his face, but not necessarily understand the whole of him.
“That portrait, nor any portrait, cannot accurately capture Judge Cothran’s true nature,” Cooper said. “His true measure will linger in the priceless memories he has created for all the young people that he has mentored.”
‘THIS ROOM’
Then it was Cothran’s turn to define that “true measure.”
He didn’t point to a verdict. He pointed to a place.
“In this room,” he said, “is where we solve problems. We end disputes. We end disputes between the government and the people. We end disputes between citizens. This is some unique room. Our democracy is put to a test every day in courtrooms just like this across the country. This is where the people need to go, and the decisions we make in here change lives.”
“I have cried in this room and I have laughed in this room,” Cothran said. “I have felt the presence of God and His grace and His love and His forgiveness and His peace, and I stared Satan in the eye with his selfishness and his hate and his separation. It all happens in this room.”
“This is where justice is handed out, where mercy is given, where we separate the wayward from the wicked,” he said. “This is really an amazing room, and there's no other room like it in any county or any state, except this room.”
He paused, then added something you don’t always hear from a judge in a black robe:
“That's what life's all about,” he said. “That's what makes you happy, that's what brings you peace. It's not the things you have, it's the relationships you build, and I built some great relationships in this room, and it truly does make a difference in everybody's life.”
He looked out over the courtroom again – the lawyers he’d sparred with, the clerks who kept his calendar, the sheriff and deputies he’d worked beside, his family, his grandchildren.
“I thank every one of you for being here, because I have a relationship with each one of you,” he said. “You've taken away from your busy schedule, and you've driven very far to honor me, and I am truly humble. I don't deserve all this. I make mistakes. But my relationship with you … I love each and every one of you.”
A FINAL BLESSING
After the benediction from the Rev. Dr. William T. Johnson of Historic Taw Caw Missionary Baptist Church, the court recessed not for sentencing, but for supper.
There was a reception in the Land, Parker, Welch courtyard, catered by Traditions – except for the chicken bog and barbecue. Cothran insisted on cooking that himself.
