The telephone rang in Judge Joseph Kaplan's chambers at 10:30 Friday morning. It rang with Jacqueline McLean under a suicide watch in a room at St. Joseph Hospital, and it rang with Billy Murphy and Cristina Gutierrez emptying their lungs at Judge Elsbeth Bothe, and it rang with Bothe trying to hold back the inevitable.

On Judge Kaplan's telephone was City Councilwoman Vera Hall, who said she wanted to meet with him. About Jackie McLean, she said. About how upset "the community" is, she said. About how the city comptroller, accused of stealing and manipulating big money, was suffering badly now and was only "about one-20th" the person she used to be.

An hour later, according to Kaplan, Hall was there in his office, and so were several other council members -- Iris Reeves, Carl Stokes, Sheila Dixon, Melvin Stukes -- and they were asking Kaplan to postpone the case against McLean and effectively take it out of Judge Bothe's hands.

"A double standard," they told Kaplan. "McLean is being treated differently, and in a rougher way, because she's a black woman."

"She's not," Kaplan replied. "She's being treated no differently than Jeffrey Levitt or Jerome Cardin, or Allan Pearlstein or Wally Orlinsky. All white men, and none given a slap on the wrist."

But the atmosphere in the courtroom, Kaplan was told. Too combative. Too many bared teeth.

And, on this, Kaplan nodded his head and agreed. Things had gotten out of hand, he said. The battles between defense attorneys Murphy and Gutierrez and Judge Bothe were "inappropriate and make the whole system look like a circus."

But, even as he spoke the words, events had already begun to take the decision out of Kaplan's hands and put it strictly in the psychiatric community's. At 7:30 that morning, McLean's psychiatrist, Dennis Kutzer, met with her to check her condition before court and asked if she had thoughts of suicide.

"That's an option," McLean said, according to a memo written by Kutzer. "Let me be judged by God. At least he won't be biased, and maybe he'll forgive me."

Kutzer felt he had no choice but to set into motion the process to involuntarily commit her, effectively prohibiting her from standing trial now.

"Why do you keep wanting to save me?" McLean said. "I'm not worth saving."

"Does this mean we're going to lose you?"

"Yes," she said.

She said it at the end of a hellish week, a week in which her attorneys vented themselves at Judge Bothe, and Bothe tried to hold her ground, and in the end everybody was brought low, especially Jacqueline McLean.

On Wednesday, she collapsed in court and had to be led out of the room. On Thursday, only the ministrations of Gutierrez seemed to keep her calm. On Friday, she was placed on suicide watch, while her attorneys did what they'd attempted to do all week, which was to remove Judge Bothe from the case.

Some of this is personal, and some not. "They see sparks when they see each other," Judge Kaplan said, meaning the defense attorneys and Bothe. "There's no trust there."

But there was something else: Jacqueline McLean's case looked like a plea bargain from the day she was indicted. It's been an open secret among all parties, and among all courthouse observers who know the nature of such cases. The point of contention has been this: Would she have to do time in prison?

And this is why, for three days, Murphy and Gutierrez did verbal battle with Judge Bothe, openly expressing contempt for her, hollering at her, attempting to prod her into an outburst and thus disqualify herself from objectively overseeing the case.

A tentative deal had been struck months ago: If McLean would plead guilty, the state prosecutor, Stephen Montanarelli, would agree to a 90-day sentence, of which McLean would have to serve 30 days. But then, apparently surprising everyone, McLean attempted suicide.

Or seemed to. Montanarelli wasn't buying it. He felt McLean had made a bid for public sympathy and, feeling public pressure for stiff sentencing, said the deal was off. Now, he said, she could plead guilty and have to serve a year in jail.

In time, Montanarelli cooled, and the 90-day offer was back on the table. But, when all parties finally met Wednesday morning in Judge Bothe's chambers, the judge reportedly said she wanted McLean to get two years in prison. Murphy and Gutierrez, infuriated, took that as a signal that they had no choice: They had to remove Bothe from the case.

And, to do it, they needed to provoke her, insult her, make her lose her composure. And it was a war they eventually won, but in the process lost a few battles: Jacqueline McLean was now under a suicide watch, exhausted by three days of courtroom histrionics, and Judge Bothe was saying a terrible mistake had been made. Sitting in her chambers Friday afternoon, after the case had been postponed and removed from her court, she said, "I never said a two-year sentence. I said I wanted a two-year window. In other words, I wanted an option that I could sentence up to two years. And, in fact, after about five minutes, I changed that to a one-year window.

"But let's be realistic," Bothe said now. "I'm not going to send her to prison when a doctor says she needs to be hospitalized. They could have made a deal for a short jail term long ago, and it'd all be over by now. They said no."

And now we have Jacqueline McLean wishing to end her life instead of putting this business behind her. And politicians who attempt to muscle themselves into the judicial process. And Judge Bothe sitting in her chambers when everyone else has gone away, and drumming her fingers on her desk, and declaring she feels betrayed.

"I don't think any other judge has been sold out like I have," she said.

Maybe it was just the anger of the moment. Maybe Judge Kaplan had no choice, with McLean's emotions so unraveled, but to postpone the case. Maybe McLean's attorneys hadn't understood Bothe only wanted a two-year "window" on JTC sentencing, or maybe they just didn't trust her when they heard it.

But it was a week that left the criminal justice system looking crummy, and it left Jacqueline McLean under a suicide watch.