A Retired Prosecutor’s Quest for Recognition

She did not do that. Instead, she found resolution from another source, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which reviews cases from the Northern District of Iowa.

The judge, Jane Kelly, working with a librarian for the Eighth Circuit, Eric Brust, arranged in October for three corrected pages in Appendix A to be printed with adhesive backing. They would be distributed to libraries holding copies of the history book, to be pasted over the inaccurate list of assistant U.S. attorneys.

On a chilly Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Wright paid a visit to the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids, a glass-fronted, bow-shaped building, to see if the new pages were pasted in. Ms. Wright now lives with her husband, Charles, a retired supervisor for the Postal Service, in Virginia Beach, Va. She and her husband had earlier made trips to courthouses in Des Moines and St. Louis, where copies of the history of the Northern District of Iowa are also kept.  

In the fourth-floor library of the Cedar Rapids courthouse, Hilary Naab, the librarian, removed the book — a decidedly modest tome for all the angst it had caused — from a shelf of dictionaries and other references. At a table with a red cutout heart and felt flowers — Valentine’s Day had just passed — Ms. Wright opened the hard cover with its gold title. She skipped past chapters on judges, prominent cases tried in the district and courthouses, until she arrived at Appendix A. Its 41 pages listed court personnel over the decades.

The three new pages enumerating the assistant U.S. attorneys were neatly pasted in. For a moment, Ms. Wright wondered aloud if they might have been added expressly for her visit, after she had called for an appointment. But she noticed that the edges of the pages were slightly worn, suggesting they’d been there for more than a few days, compressed by the weight of history, in a place few visit now that most legal research is done online.

“I am pleased,” Ms. Wright said.