The judge adjourned court and I felt the dread of incarceration return before Deputy Chan and his cohorts could even get to me.
35
Upon my second arrest I was placed back in a single-bed cell at Twin Towers. This time I had even graduated to the outside wall of the jail, which gave me a window—only four inches wide and escape-proof, but it had a partial view of the Criminal Courts Building just a few blocks away as the crow flies. It was enough of a view for me to want to stay in the cell with my eyes on the prize rather than congregate in the dayroom with the other keep-aways. And this, even though I had replaced Bishop with Carew.
So I was feeling safe and secure in the module. The problem was that there were no such protections on the jail buses that moved hundreds of inmates to and from court each day. Whom you rode with and whom you were chained to was mostly a matter of chance. Or so it appeared. No matter what measure I took to protect myself in custody, I was always going to be most vulnerable on the bus. I knew this for a fact because I’d had clients attacked on the buses. And I had seen fights break out and attacks staged while riding them myself.
After the hearing on the prosecution’s motion for sanctions, I waited two hours in the courthouse jail before being shuttled onto a bus back to the Towers. I was cuffed fourth on a chain behind three other men and moved onto the bus. We were put into the second-to-last compartment and I was seated against the barred window in the forward-facing bench. The deputy checked us, closed the gate and locked it, and proceeded to fill the next compartment. I leaned forward to look across the man next to me to the prisoner seated on my row against the opposite window. I recognized him but not from the keep-away module. I couldn’t place him. It could have been from court or a potential client meeting in which I didn’t take the case. He was checking me out as I was checking him. And that fired my paranoia. I knew I had to keep a watch on him.
The bus exited the garage beneath the courts building and trundled up the steep grade to Spring Street. As it turned left, City Hall was on the right side, and several prisoners followed the tradition of flipping the finger at the seat of power. This of course could not be seen by anyone on the marble steps or behind the windows of the iconic building. The bus’s “windows” were actually slotted metal that allowed a confined view out but no view in.
I watched the man I was curious about hold his hand up and extend the fuck-you finger. He did it so routinely, without even looking out through the slots himself, that I knew he was a regular guest of the system. And that was when I recognized him. He was the client of a colleague whom I had once filled in for during a hearing before a judge. It had been a babysitting job, a minor hearing that involved a court appearance. Dan Daly had been stuck in a trial and asked me to handle it and I did.
Satisfied that I had answered the question and that the man posed no special threat, I relaxed and leaned back in my seat, tilting my head up to look at the ceiling. I started counting the days until the start of my trial and how soon I could reasonably expect to walk free after a not-guilty verdict.
It was the last thing I remembered.
36
Thursday, February 6
I could only open my eyes to narrow slices of light. It wasn’t the harshness of the light that prevented me from opening them wider. It was physical impediment. I simply could not do it.
I was disoriented at first, not sure where I was.
“Mickey?”
I turned at the voice, recognized it.
“Jennifer?”
The one word set fire to my throat, the pain so sharp I grimaced.
“Yes, I’m here. How do you feel?”
“I can’t see. What—”
“Your eyes are swollen. You burst a lot of blood vessels.”
I burst blood vessels? This didn’t make sense.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How did I—ahh, it hurts to talk.”
“Don’t talk,” Jennifer said. “Just listen. We went over this an hour ago and then the sedation hit and you went out again. You were attacked, Mickey. On the jail bus after court yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“Don’t talk. Yes, you’ve lost a day. But if you can stay awake, I can get them in here to do the testing. They need to check your brain function to see if there was anything…so we’ll know if there is any…anything permanent.”
“What happened on the bus?”
The pain.
“I don’t know all the details and the sheriff’s investigator wants to talk to you about it—he’s waiting outside but I told him I was going to talk to you first. Basically, another man on the bus got his chain free and used it to choke you. He was behind you and wrapped it around your neck. They thought you were dead but paramedics revived you, Mickey. They say it’s a miracle you’re alive.”
“It doesn’t feel like a miracle. Where am I?”
I was beginning to be able to manage the pain. Talking in a monotone, turning my head slightly to the left seemed to lessen it.
“County-USC—the jail ward. Hayley and Lorna and everybody wanted to come in to see you but you’re on lockdown and they’d only let me in. I don’t think you want them seeing you like this anyway. Better to wait till the swelling goes down.”
I felt her hand grip my shoulder.
“Are we alone in here?” I asked.
“Yes,” Jennifer said. “This is an attorney-client meeting. There’s a deputy outside the door but it’s closed. Also, the investigator’s out there, waiting to talk to you.”
“Okay, listen, don’t let them use this to delay the trial.”
“Well, we’ll see, Mickey. You need to be tested to make sure you—”
“No, I’m fine, I can tell. I’m already thinking about the case and I don’t want to delay it. We have them where we want them and I don’t want to give them time to catch up to us. That’s it.”
“Okay, I’ll object if they try.”
“Who was the guy?”
“What guy?”
“The one who choked me with the chain.”
“I don’t know, I only got his name. Mason Maddox. Lorna put it through the conflict-of-interest app, and there were no hits. You have no prior history with him. He was convicted last month of three murders—I haven’t gotten the case details yet. He was in court for a motions hearing.”
“Who’s his lawyer? The PD?”
“I don’t have that information yet.”
“Why’d he do it? Who put him up to it?”
“If the Sheriff’s Department knows, they’re not sharing it with me. I have Cisco looking into it and a call in to Harry Bosch.”
“I don’t want to pull Cisco off trial prep. That could be the whole motive behind it.”
“No, because he tried to kill you and probably thought he did. You don’t kill a guy to distract his investigators. I filed a motion with Warfield today asking her to issue an order reinstituting bail or ordering the sheriff to transport you by car to and from court. No more buses. Too dangerous.”
“That’s good thinking.”
“I hope to get a hearing on it this afternoon. We’ll see.”
“Is there like a hand mirror around here or something?”
“Why?”
“I want to see myself.”
“Mickey, I don’t think you—”
“It’s all right. I just want to take a quick look and I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t see a mirror, but hold on, I have something.”
I heard her unzip her purse and then she put a small square object in my hand. A mirror from a makeup case. I held it up to my face and managed to get a glimpse. I looked like a boxer on the morning after a fight—and a losing bout at that. My eyes were swollen and the rash of exploded blood vessels extended from the corners of my eyes and across both cheeks.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, not a good look,” Jennifer said. “I still think you should let the doctor test you.”
“I’m going to
be fine.”
“Mickey, there could be something and you should know.”
“But then the prosecution could know and they’ll use it to ask for a delay.”
There was a brief silence as Jennifer considered that and realized I was right.
“Okay, I’m getting tired,” I said. “Send in the investigator, let’s see what he says.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes. And don’t pull Cisco off trial prep. When you hear from Bosch, put him on Mason Maddox. I want to know everything. There’s got to be a link somewhere.”
“A link to what, Mickey?”
“A link to the case. Or the sheriff’s wiretap investigation. Something. We have to look at everybody. The sheriffs, Opparizio, the FBI, everybody.”
“Okay, I’ll tell the guys.”
“You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?”
“I just think it’s kind of far-fetched.”
I nodded. Maybe it was.
“Did they let you bring your phone in here?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, take a picture of me. You might want to show it to the judge when you make your argument for protection.”
“Good idea.”
I heard her getting her phone out of her purse.
“I’m sure Berg will object to it,” she said. “But worth a try.”
“If the judge knows there’s a photo, she’ll want to see it,” I said. “Human curiosity.”
I heard her snap the shot.
“Okay, Mickey,” she said. “Rest up.”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
I heard her step toward the door.
“Jennifer?” I said.
I heard her steps come back to the bed.
“Yes, I’m here,” Jennifer said.
“Look, I can’t really see yet, but I can hear,” I said.
“Okay.”
“And I hear doubt in your voice.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“Look, it’s a natural thing. To question things. I think you—”
“It’s not that, Mickey.”
“Then, what is it?”
“Okay, look, it’s my father. He’s gotten sick. I’m worried about him.”
“Is he in the hospital? What’s wrong?”
“That’s the thing. We’re not getting straight answers. He’s in a care home up in Seattle and my sister and I are not getting answers.”
“Is your sister there?”
“Yes, she thinks I should go up. If I want to see him before…you know.”
“Then, she’s right, you need to go.”
“But we have the case—the trial. The motions hearing is next week and now this attack.”
I knew that losing her could be devastating to the case, but there was no choice.
“Look,” I said, “you gotta go. You can take your laptop and there’s a lot you can do from up there when you’re not with your father. You can write motions, Cisco can get them to the court clerk.”
“It’s not the same,” she said.
“I know it’s not but it’s what we can do. You need to go.”
“I feel like I’m leaving you all alone.”
“I’ll figure something out. Go up there, see him, and, who knows, maybe he’ll start feeling better and you get back down for trial.”
She didn’t respond at first. I had said my piece and was already thinking of alternative ways to go.
“I’m going to think about it tonight,” Jennifer finally said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow, okay?”
“That’s okay, but I don’t think there is much to think about. It’s family. Your father. You have to go.”
“Thanks, Mickey.”
I nodded.
I heard her steps again as she headed to the door. I tried to relax my throat and ease the pain. Talking felt like swallowing glass.
Then I heard Jennifer tell the investigator waiting outside the room that he could go in.
Part Four
Bleeding the Beast
37
Wednesday, February 19
The world seemed to be on the edge of chaos. More than a thousand people were dead from a mystery virus in China. Almost a billion people were on lockdown there and American citizens had been evacuated. There were cruise ships out on the Pacific that were floating incubators of the virus, and no vaccine was on the horizon. The president was saying the crisis would pass, while his own virus expert was saying brace for a pandemic. Closer to home, Jennifer Aronson’s father had just died in Seattle of an undiagnosed illness, and she was not getting any answers.
In L.A., it was the second day of jury selection in the trial of my life.
We had been proceeding at a rapid pace. The four days scheduled for voir dire had been cut in half by a judge who also felt that there was a coming wave. She wanted this trial over with before the wave hit, and while I wasn’t comfortable hurrying to pick a jury, I was right there with the judge. I wanted this over. Some of the deputies at Twin Towers had started wearing masks and I took that as a sign. I didn’t want to be in lockup when that wave the judge was worried about came in.
Still, picking the twelve strangers who would deliberate the case involved the most important decisions of the trial. Those twelve would hold my life in their hands, and the time allotted to choosing them had been chopped in half. This had caused me to take extraordinary measures to quickly try to find out who these people were.
Jury selection was an art form. It involved research, knowledge of social and cultural data, and, finally, gut instinct. What you want in the end is a panel of attentive people who are there for the truth. What you look for and hope to root out are those who view the truth through the prism of bias—racial, political, cultural, and so forth. And those with ulterior motives for serving.
The process begins with the judge weeding out jurors who have conflicts of schedule, can’t sit in judgment of others, or can’t grasp the meaning of legal tenets like reasonable doubt. It then moves to the lawyers, who may question jurors further to determine if they should be dismissed for cause—reasons of bias or background. The prosecution and defense are also given an equal number of peremptory challenges allowing them to dismiss jurors for unstated reasons. And that is where gut instinct most often comes into play.
All of this must be synthesized into decisions about whom to keep in and whom to kick out. That is the art—to finally arrive at a panel of twelve people you believe will be open to your cause. I fully admit that there is an advantage to the defense in that it has to win the belief of only one juror to be successful—one doubter of the state’s case. One holdout for the defense can hang a jury and force the state to start over, or even reconsider whether to go forward with a second trial at all. The state must win all twelve hearts and minds to get a conviction. Still, the state’s advantages beyond this one are so enormous as to make the defense’s jury advantage negligible. But you take what you are given, and therefore jury selection has always been sacred to me, made all the more so this time because I was the defendant.
It was 2 p.m. and the judge was expecting—no, demanding—that a jury be empaneled by the close of court in three hours. I could push it into the next day, because the judge ultimately wouldn’t want to enforce a demand that was potentially reversible on appeal. But if I did force the issue, there would be consequences down the line in terms of rulings from the bench.
Besides that, I was down to my last peremptory challenge and I knew there was no way I would be able to milk it for three more hours. We would fill the box before the courtroom went dark and the prosecution in the murder of Sam Scales would begin in the morning.
The good news was that the panel was largely set with jurors who I believed ranged on the defense meter from yellow—the middle ground—to deep green for pro-defense. Because of long-embedded and rightful distrust of police in minority communities, Black and brown jurors were always prized by the defense because they tend
ed to view the testimony of police officers with suspicion. I had managed to keep four African Americans and two Latinas on the panel, fending off Dana Berg’s efforts to jettison the Blacks in particular. When one Black panelist revealed under questioning that she had once made a donation to the local Black Lives Matter organization, Berg first asked for the woman to be dismissed for cause. Making the request to an African-American judge took a certain level of courage, but it also underlined Berg’s singular purpose in convicting me. When the judge denied the motion, the prosecutor then attempted to use a peremptory challenge. That was when I swung in with an objection that the move was based on race, a clear exception to the rules of peremptory challenges. The judge agreed and the juror was seated. The ruling put Berg on notice in regard to future efforts to sculpt the jury along racial lines but then allowed me to do just that.
It was a big win for the defense but the last round of challenges had left three new faces in the box and I had just one peremptory. All three were white—two women and one man. And this was where my extraordinary juror profiling came into play. Early the morning before, Cisco had posted himself in the First Street garage, where jurors were directed to park. At that point, a few hundred potential jurors had been summoned for jury duty. Cisco had no way of knowing who would end up on my panel but he took note of character-defining aspects of the people arriving: things like make and model of cars, registrations, bumper stickers, interior contents, and so on. A person driving a Mercedes SL is going to have a different worldview from someone driving a Toyota Prius.
Sometimes you want the Mercedes on the jury. Sometimes you want the Prius.
After the first morning session with the hundred people called for the panel in my case, Cisco went back to the garage at lunchtime and then again at the end of the day. By his fourth time in the garage on Wednesday morning, he was recognizing people assigned to my case and building intel on many of them.
The Law of Innocence Page 22
