Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  “Yes it is.”

  “Thank you, Officer Cassidy. I was curious.”

  The beleaguered defense counsel has nowhere to go. What do you do with the testimony of a blinded police officer whose pregnant wife waits on a nearby bench? What do you ask on cross examination? Where do you make your points? Where, in such a scene, do you find a place for your client to breathe?

  “No questions, your honor.”

  “The witness is excused. Thank you, Agent Cassidy.”

  Out in the corridor, McLarney watches the double doors open at the recess. The jurors are already upstairs in the jury room, Bothe is already back in chambers. Patti walks out with Gene on her arm, followed by Schenker.

  “Hey, Gene, how’d it go?” asks McLarney.

  “Okay,” says Cassidy. “I think I was good. What’d you think, Patti?”

  “You were great, Gene.”

  “What did Butchie do? Did he look at me?”

  “Yeah, Gene,” says a friend from the Western. “He was staring right at you.”

  “Staring? Was he eyefucking me?”

  “No,” says the officer. “He just looked real strange, you know.” Cassidy nods.

  “You hurt him, Gene,” says a Western man. “You got him good.”

  McLarney claps Cassidy on the back, then walks down the hall with Patti and Gene’s mother and brother, both down from New Jersey for the trial. As the family heads upstairs to the law library to wait out the defense case, McLarney puts a hand on Cassidy’s arm and asks a string of questions about the testimony.

  “I wish I could have been in there, Gene,” McLarney tells him on the stairs.

  “Yeah,” says Cassidy. “I think I did okay, though. What did you think, Patti?”

  Patti Cassidy reassures her husband again, but McLarney is too nervous to be satisfied by one opinion. Minutes later, he’s again pacing the courthouse corridor, buttonholing every lawyer, spectator and sheriff ’s deputy who walks out of Bothe’s court.

  “How’d Gene do? What was the jury’s reaction?”

  McLarney frowns at every assurance. The cost of following the most important jury trial of your life from a corridor is that you’re never willing to believe what you hear. Cassidy endured months of speech therapy, McLarney reminds the others. Did he hear the questions? How was his speech?

  “He did great, Terry,” says Schenker.

  “What’d Butchie do?” asks McLarney.

  “He just kept staring at him,” says a Western man. “He kept staring at the side of Gene’s face.”

  The side of Gene’s face. The wound track. Butchie Frazier staring at his handiwork, wondering what the hell went wrong. That son of a bitch, thinks McLarney, frowning at the image.

  The defense takes the rest of the afternoon, calling a couple of witnesses who insist that Butchie Frazier is the wrong man, that he wasn’t out there at Mosher and Appleton on that fall night. But Frazier himself does not take the stand; his criminal history makes such an act problematic.

  “What happened to Officer Cassidy is a tragedy,” declares the defense attorney in his closing argument. “But it is a tragedy we can do nothing about. It would be adding to that tragedy to convict Clifton Frazier based on the evidence the state presented.”

  For their own closing, Schenker and Gersh counter in tandem, with Schenker taking the high road and Gersh going low. The high road asks for an impartial examination of the evidence; the low road calls to a communal instinct that may or may not exist.

  “Don’t convict Clifton Frazier because the victim in this case is a police officer,” Schenker tells the jurors. “Do so because the evidence demands it… Because Clifton Frazier did not want to go to jail, he shot Officer Cassidy.”

  Yet ten minutes later, Gersh stands before the same jury, reminding them that “when a police officer is shot, a little bit of each of us is killed.”

  The “thin blue line” speech, thinks McLarney, listening to the closing arguments from the back bench. Every time a cop is shot, the prosecutors wheel out the protect-and-serve imagery. Does the jury believe it? Does anyone believe it anymore? McLarney looks at the twelve faces. They’re listening, at least-all except number nine. She’s looking right through Gersh, McLarney thinks. She’s going to be trouble.

  “We can send a message to the Butchie Fraziers of the world that they cannot go out on the street and shoot police officers…”

  And then it’s over. Walking single file, the jurors move past the prosecutors, past the defense attorney, past Butchie Frazier, to climb the stairwell to the deliberation room.

  Standing with Gersh and Schenker near the courtroom doors, McLarney suddenly encounters Frazier as the defendant, in handcuffs and leg irons, is under escort to the basement lockup. Frazier actually sneers as the two face each other at the edge of the hallway.

  “Yeah. Right,” McLarney mutters, fighting hard for control. “Who the…”

  Gersh pulls McLarney away. “I think we’ve got it,” the prosecutor tells him. “It’ll take a few hours, but I think we’ve got it. How’d you like our closing?”

  McLarney ignores him, staring instead at the procession of Butchie Frazier and his two guards out the courtroom doors and down the second-floor stairs.

  “C’mon,” says Gersh, with a light touch on McLarney’s shoulder. “Let’s go find Gene.”

  Cassidy is already settled in for the wait, seated with his wife, his mother and his older brother in the back of the nearby jury assembly room. Western uniforms, fresh from their eight-to-four shift, hover around the family, issuing congratulations on the victory sure to come. Out in the hallway, Gersh and Schenker accept congratulations from spectators. As the evening sky fades outside the courtroom windows, two of the Western men organize a pizza run.

  “Gene, what do you want on yours?”

  “I don’t care, as long as it’s anchovy.”

  “What’s the name of the place again?”

  “Marco’s. On Exeter Street.”

  “We better order now,” says one officer, smiling. “We’ll not be hanging around here long.”

  For an hour or so, they are the picture of confidence. For an hour, they are laughing and joking and telling stories from the streets of the Western, stories that always manage to end with someone in handcuffs. Waiting for a verdict they are sure will come quickly, they busy themselves by recounting the best parts of the closing arguments and the details of Gene’s testimony.

  But suddenly their optimism is shattered by the news that shouting can be heard near the door to Bothe’s courtroom, shouting that comes from the jury room upstairs. At times, the loudest voices carry out into the courthouse hallway, just outside the room where Gene Cassidy and his family sit amid empty pizza boxes and Styrofoam cups. The mood of the Western men darkens.

  Two hours go by, then three. The shouting in the jury room continues, and the wait becomes agonizing.

  “I don’t know what to say, Gene,” says Gersh, losing faith. “I gave it my best and I’m afraid it wasn’t enough.”

  Four hours brings only a note from the jury forewoman, indicating that the panel is hopelessly deadlocked. Bothe reads the note to the attorneys, then brings the jury downstairs and gives a standard instruction, urging the jurors to return and attempt to reach a verdict.

  More shouting.

  “This is a crime, Gene,” says Corey Belt. “I can’t believe it.”

  Raw doubt is sticking in their throats as the angry voice of one juror carries above the others and is heard at the bottom of the jury room stairs. They always lie, shouts the juror. You got to convince me.

  They always lie. Who does? The police? The witnesses? The defendants? Butchie didn’t even testify, so it can’t be him. So who in hell is she talking about? McLarney hears about the remark from a clerk and immediately thinks of juror number nine, the woman who seemed to be looking through Gersh during the closings. It’s her voice, he tells himself. Goddammit, she’s the one.

  McLarney swall
ows hard and retreats to the second-floor corridor, where he paces back and forth in a smoldering rage. There wasn’t enough, he tells himself. I’m losing this jury because I didn’t give them enough. An eyewitness. Corroboration. A jail-house confession. Somehow, it wasn’t enough. As late evening arrives, McLarney finds it harder and harder to go back into the room where Gene is waiting. As he walks back and forth in the marble hallway, several men from the Western come outside to assure him that it doesn’t matter either way.

  “Guilty, he goes to prison,” declares one uniform, aman who once served under McLarney in Sector 2. “Not guilty, he goes back out on the street.”

  “If he comes back to the Western, he’s dead,” says another, agreeing. “That piece of shit will wish he’d been found guilty.”

  Reckless words, but McLarney nods in agreement. In truth, there would be no need for a plan, no elaborate conspiracy. It would simply happen. Butchie Frazier was a stone criminal, and a criminal is nothing if not predictable. Back on the streets of the Western, he would surely do his dark little deeds, and just as surely, every last uniform would be there waiting. No trial, no lawyers, no jury. If Butchie Frazier is set free today, McLarney tells himself, he’ll be dead within a year.

  Back in the courtroom, Gersh and Schenker contemplate the alternatives. Fearing the worst, they could go to Frazier’s attorney and offer a plea before the jury returns. But what kind of plea? Frazier already balked at fifty. Thirty? Thirty means parole in as little as ten. Cassidy said from the outset he couldn’t live with ten. But can he live with an acquittal? In the end, the entire discussion is academic; sensing perhaps the same thing as the prosecutors, Butchie Frazier turns down any notion of a negotiated plea.

  But the six-hour mark brings another, different note from the forewoman, this one inquiring about the difference between first- and second-degree attempted murder. Guilty. They’re talking guilty in there.

  Hearing the latest, the cops in the jury assembly room are suddenly breathing again; a few sidle up to Cassidy and offer congratulations. He shrugs them off. Second-degree, he says, shaking his head. How can they be thinking about second-degree?

  “Never mind that, Gene,” says Gersh, a veteran prosecutor who has been through this wait a hundred times. “They’ve turned the corner. They’re coming around.”

  Cassidy smiles at the thought. As if to lighten his mood, he asks permission to tell his joke.

  “Which joke is this?” asks Belt.

  “You know,” says Cassidy. “My joke.”

  “Your joke? The one you told before?”

  “Yeah,” says Cassidy. “That one.”

  Belt shakes his head, smiling. “What do you want to do, Gene? Clear the room?”

  “What the hell,” says Biemiller, another Western man. “Tell the joke, Gene.”

  Cassidy launches into an unlikely tale of three pieces of string standing outside a barroom, all of whom are thirsty and in want of a beer. A sign on the door says no string will be served.

  “The first piece of string goes into the bar and orders a beer,” explains Cassidy, “and the bartender says, ‘Hey, are you a piece of string?’”

  The string answers in the affirmative and is escorted from the premises. Some of the cops offer loud, audible yawns. Ignoring them, Cassidy recounts the plight of the second piece of string, which happens to be markedly similar to the first.

  “So then the third piece of string rolls around on the ground and ties himself up and gets all messed up before going into the bar, right?”

  McLarney wanders in from the hallway, just in time for a punch line he can’t possibly understand.

  “And the bartender asks him, ‘Are you a piece of string?’ And the string says, ‘ ’Fraid not.’”

  Groans all around.

  “Christ, that’s a terrible joke, Gene,” says one of the Western men. “Even for a blind guy, that’s a terrible joke.”

  Cassidy laughs. Inside the jury assembly room the tension is gone, the pall of defeat lifted suddenly by the jury forewoman’s casual question. McLarney, too, is relieved, though the idea of a second-degree verdict still doesn’t sit well. As Cassidy launches into another joke, McLarney wanders back into the corridor and slumps onto a hallway bench, his head resting against the cold marble wall. Belt follows him out.

  “Butchie’s going to prison,” says McLarney, as much to hear himself say it as for any other reason.

  “We need first-degree, bunk,” says Belt, leaning over the bench. “Second-degree don’t cut it.”

  McLarney nods in agreement.

  Upon the arrival of the forewoman’s note, Gersh and Schenker immediately withdrew any and all plea offers. Judge Bothe tells the prosecutors in her chambers that she’s ready to take a second-degree finding right now if the jurors are unanimous.

  “No,” says Gersh with a trace of anger. “Let them do their job.”

  The deliberations stretch to more than eight hours, and it is closing on 10:00 P.M. when the courtroom reconvenes and Butchie Frazier is returned from the basement lockup. Cassidy sits in the front bench with his wife, directly behind the prosecutors. McLarney and Belt find seats in the second bench, closer to the door. The jurors come downstairs silently. They do not look at the defendant-a good sign. They do not look at Cassidy-a bad sign. McLarney watches them settle into the jury box, his hands gripping the crease of his pants at both knees.

  “Madam forelady,” asks the clerk. “Have you reached a unanimous verdict on the charge of attempted murder in the first degree?”

  “Yes we have.”

  “How say you to that charge?”

  “We find the defendant guilty.”

  Gene Cassidy nods slowly, gripping his wife’s hand, as each juror is polled and the Western uniforms give up a soft cheer from the gallery. Several jurors begin to cry. From the trial table, Gersh turns around to scan the crowd, then gives McLarney a thumbs-up sign; McLarney smiles, shakes Belt’s hand and then pumps a fist in the air and leans forward, exhausted by the moment. Butchie Frazier shakes his head, then begins a careful examination of his fingernails.

  As Bothe sets a sentencing date and then concludes the proceedings, McLarney is out of his seat and moving toward the hallway, hoping to grab a juror or two and find out what the hell happened up in that room. Near the top of the stairs, a black juror, a younger woman still trying to control her tears, looks at the badge and shrugs off his question.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

  McLarney moves on and catches one of the three white jurors; he recognizes her as the girl who was crying during Cassidy’s testimony.

  “Miss… miss.”

  The girl looks back.

  “Miss,” says McLarney, catching up. “I was one of the investigators in the case and I was wondering what happened with the jury.”

  The girl nods.

  “Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  Reluctantly, the girl agrees.

  “I was the lead investigator,” McLarney tells her, a little embarrassed at the intensity he can in no way conceal. “What was it that hung you all up for so long?”

  The girl shakes her head. “A lot of them didn’t care. I mean not at all. It was crazy.”

  “They didn’t care?”

  “Not at all.”

  “What didn’t they care about?”

  “The entire thing. They didn’t care about any of it.”

  McLarney is stunned. Bombarding the young girl with questions, he begins piecing together eight hours of rancorous debate in which race and indifference played dominant roles.

  The girl explains that two of the three white jurors argued from the beginning for a first-degree verdict, just as two of the younger black jurors had insisted on acquittal, contending that the police had put every witness up to testifying in an effort to convict someone-anyone-of shooting a white officer. That, they explained, was why all the police were sitting in court. Frazier’s girlfriend had cried because she
had been forced to lie. The other two witnesses were probably drunk, coming from the bar. The kid from the city jail testified because he had cut a deal for himself.

  The girl remembers that a younger black juror declared at one point that she didn’t like police, which prompted another juror to ask what that had to do with anything. I just don’t like them, the first juror replied, adding that anyone who lived in her neighborhood wouldn’t like them either.

  The other eight jurors offered little opinion except to say that they would vote for whatever was agreed upon, the young girl tells McLarney. It was Friday, they pointed out, and the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend. They wanted to go home.

  McLarney listens in amazement. “What brought you all around to first-degree?” he asks.

  “I wasn’t going to budge and that other woman, the one in the back row, she wasn’t going to change her mind either. She was for first-degree from the very beginning, too. After a while, everyone wanted to go home, I guess.”

  McLarney shakes his head, incredulous. He has been a cop long enough to know that there is no understanding juries, but this is somehow more than he can take. The man who tried to kill Gene Cassidy has been given the right verdict for the wrong reasons.

  The girl seems to read his mind. “I swear,” she says, “if that’s the way the system works, you can have it.”

  Two hours later at the Market Bar, the beer gets good to McLarney and he asks the girl to tell him the whole sordid story again. The girl obliges. A nineteen-year-old waitress at a downtown sports bar, she came to the Market with the cops and prosecutors and the Cassidy family at McLarney’s insistence. She was a hero, he told her, and she deserved a beer. He listens to her alone for a few minutes, then begins calling over others from the Western to add to the audience.

  “Vince, c’mere.”

  Moulter walks over from the bar.

  “This is Vince Moulter,” he says to the young juror. “He worked with Gene. Tell him the part about how the one juror said she thought Butchie was cute.”

  Two tables away, Gene Cassidy sips quietly at a soda, laughing at the occasional joke. He and Patti will be there for an hour or two, long enough for McLarney to bring the young juror by for an introduction an hour or so later.