Throughout, I marveled at the courage that Scott Rafferty had shown in taking my side without hesitation. It meant giving up a plum job that he had been looking forward to. He had been very happy at Shaw, Pittman as a summer associate, but he was not eager to join a firm where a partner would behave in that way. That disillusionment did nothing to advance the start of his career, but it signaled a measure of integrity that would remain evident over a distinguished professional life in public service.
WHEN THE ANGER, the upset, and the agitation had passed, a certainty remained: I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run. I had been admitted to the Ivy League through a special door, and I had more ground than most to make up before I was competing with my classmates on an equal footing. But I worked relentlessly to reach that point, and distinctions such as the Pyne Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and a spot on The Yale Law Journal were not given out like so many pats on the back to encourage mediocre students. These were achievements as real as those of anyone around me.
My brother’s story was similar. Junior stumbled into a program that put minority kids on a fast track to medical school, essentially free of cost. He wasn’t inspired by childhood dreams of becoming a doctor; he had never considered the possibility. But once he started, he found that he loved what he was doing, loved the process of learning itself, and had excellent study habits compared with most kids in the program, 45 percent of whom would drop out. Affirmative action may have gotten him into medical school, but it was his own self-discipline, intelligence, and hard work that saw him through, where others like him had failed.
Much has changed in the thinking about affirmative action since those early days when it opened doors in my life and Junior’s. But one thing has not changed: to doubt the worth of minority students’ achievement when they succeed is really only to present another face of the prejudice that would deny them a chance even to try. It is the same prejudice that insists all those destined for success must be cast from the same mold as those who have succeeded before them, a view that experience has already proven a fallacy.
WHEN MY NOTE for The Yale Law Journal was finally laid out and pasted up, typeset, proofed, printed, collated, and bound—in short, when it was a physical reality ready to go forth into the world—the editors took the unusual step of sending out a press release announcing it. It was an indication of their belief that my work had practical import beyond the limits of academia: that my argument might even have some influence on the outcome of the status question.
Meanwhile, acceptance of the note had come with an obligation to work on the journal in other capacities, such as checking citations. The teamwork of the job was wonderfully rewarding, and out of that camaraderie, as from my small group, would come some lifelong friendships. I so enjoyed the work that I volunteered to serve also as managing editor of another student-run journal, Yale Studies in World Public Order, which specialized in a rigorous quantitative policy-oriented approach to international law, as developed and taught by Professor Reisman. After editing a couple of lengthy articles by alumni working in the field, I noticed myself feeling intellectually comfortable in a way that I could not imagine when I first arrived at Yale. That, together with the enthusiastic reception of my note among those working on Puerto Rican status issues, provided a feeling of real-world validation that was moving and meaningful in ways student honors could not rival.
Maybe, I thought, I am ready to go out there.
Twenty
YALE WAS ONE of the very first law schools in the country to admit women, and yet every point in the building seemed to be separated by miles of corridor from the nearest women’s rest-room. On a typical trek, of an early evening, taking a break from the library and a treatise on tax law, I passed the open door of a conference room. At the back, I spotted a bonanza—a table of cheese and crackers and cheap wine, the kind of arrangement that passes for hospitality in university budgets and a free meal in the straitened lives of graduate students. The makeshift sign on the door read, “Public Service Career Paths.” A panel of public-interest lawyers were pitching alternatives to private practice to a thin scattering of third-years. Just then, the moderator was introducing the final speaker, a district attorney from New York whose name I didn’t recognize. He seemed none too comfortable at the podium and promised to be brief. I decided it was worth sticking around until he finished so I could make for the cheddar cubes.
My ears perked up when I heard him say that he had a couple hundred assistants who all tried cases. “Within your first year on the job,” he said, “you’ll be going to trial, with full responsibility for how you develop and present your own cases. You’ll have more responsibility than you would have at any other job coming out of law school. At your age now, you’ll be doing more in a courtroom than most lawyers do in a lifetime.” I liked what I was hearing. At Paul, Weiss, I had watched an associate who was thoroughly steeped in the details and strategy of a case brief a senior partner who then did a star turn in the limelight before a judge. The associate was too diplomatic and well compensated to admit to any demoralized frustration, but clearly work in a big firm meant laboring in the shadows for years.
When the presentation was over and we descended on the food, I found myself in line next to the New York district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, a legend unbeknownst to me. His halting, raspy voice was no different talking face-to-face. This was not a man who relished chitchat. But being capable of talking up anybody, I proceeded to ask him to tell me a bit about his background, what he’d liked about each of his jobs. Maybe he was used to talking to ignorant students; he didn’t betray any hint of annoyance. He asked me what my plans were—not sure, maybe a small firm, still exploring—and then he said, “Why don’t you come by and see me? I have some openings in my schedule tomorrow.”
Sure enough, the next morning at the Career Office, there were still interview slots open: among Yalies, the DA’s Office was not the most sought-after place to work. But I was surprised to find my name already penciled in. In fact, Bob Morgenthau had come by, pulled my résumé, and already placed a call to José Cabranes, whom he knew well from their work together on the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. The interview was actually enjoyable and ran a half hour longer than scheduled. At the end he invited me to visit his office in New York.
“You’re interviewing where?” said Rudy, aghast. Even José, who had given me a glowing recommendation, seemed disappointed that I found the DA’s Office more interesting than a clerkship. “Do you have any idea what they pay?” Rudy demanded. I did, but I had never seen money as the definitive or absolute measure of success. Sure, I wouldn’t make much compared with an associate at a major firm. But my starting salary would still be more than what my mother had ever made as a nurse, which to Titi Aurora, who worked as a seamstress, had always seemed lavish.
In the end, as I usually do, I trusted my instincts, although I was a bit surprised where they were leading me. I knew I wasn’t ready for a big firm, but apart from applying for a job at the State Department, I had not devoted much thought or effort to public-interest options. Nor was I encouraged to: unlike today, there were few pro bono law clinics at Yale then; I knew of one on prison disciplinary hearings, one of the few settings in which students were allowed to practice, another on landlord-tenant disputes, and a third on denial of veterans’ benefits. But they were not attracting many from our hyper-ambitious cohort. Perhaps Bob Morgenthau’s job stirred a memory of what had first intrigued me about being a lawyer: the chance to seek justice in a courtroom. Despite my success in the trial advocacy program and in reaching the semifinals of the Barristers’ Union mock trials, Perry Mason was a vision that had been eclipsed at Yale amid the immersion in case law and theo
ry and self-doubt. Now, it seemed, that untutored fantasy was beckoning me again, conspiring with a bit of free cheddar to decide my fate.
Twenty-One
AT THE NEW YORK District Attorney’s Office, “duckling” is the term of art for a rookie assistant DA, and in the mouth of a senior prosecutor it expresses gallows humor more than endearment. Forty of us tender, fuzzy types were about to be crunched in the jaws of a huge, complex, and fast-moving machine. Guidance of senior colleagues would add seasoning over time, but meanwhile we would need every scrap of what scant training would be provided during our first few weeks. I wasn’t the only one among us with minimal background in criminal law—just the required basic course at Yale and the mock trials. But even if I had devoted all my studies to the finer points of the field, there remained essential lessons inaccessible in the classroom or from books and acquired only through the fiery baptism of the courtroom. I was about to get that baptism.
New York City in 1979 had been struck by a crime wave of tsunamic proportions. Mayor Ed Koch had been elected two years before on a promise to restore order after a summer of widespread looting, vandalism, and arson triggered by a ten-day blackout. If the immediate threat to public safety had lifted after the lights and air-conditioning came back on, New Yorkers still had reason to live in a state of diffuse chronic fear. The city’s fiscal troubles summed a decade of economic doldrums nationwide, and severe budget cuts were preventing the DA’s Office, as well as the police department, from adding enough staff to cope with an avalanche of criminal cases. To make matters worse, rising tensions brought a rising number of police brutality complaints.
Most of the new ADAs were assigned immediately to one of six trial bureaus, each with up to fifty prosecutors of varying levels of experience, along with support staff. We would cut our teeth on misdemeanors: petty thefts, minor assaults, prostitution, shoplifting, trespass, disorderly conduct, graffiti … Later we would be promoted to felonies, and we might move to one of the bureaus that investigate fraud, racketeering, public corruption, sex crimes, or other specialized crimes. There was no choice in the matter, we were told. Soldiers go where they’re assigned. Ducklings, too, apparently.
First we had to get to know the procedural maze. If a defendant is arraigned on an unsworn complaint, how many days do you have to fix it? Failing that, how do you handle a preliminary probable cause hearing? We also went out on patrols to get a sense of how cops do their job, the routines and the issues we needed to be sensitive to. Every sixth day we were in the complaint room for a nine-hour shift, interviewing arresting officers and witnesses to draw up the initial charges on each case. Every street arrest in the city funneled into the system through this room, which was not unlike a hospital ER on a rough night. Decisions made quickly would have a long tail of repercussions. It looked like chaos, but there was order and discipline under the surface, and that combination appealed to me. So did the pressure to improvise, the comfort of clear rules, and the inspiration of a higher good.
The way Bob Morgenthau, the Boss, structured the office to meet extraordinary challenges was a model of efficiency and integrity for jurisdictions across the country. All of our case work, for example, was organized horizontally, with cases assigned the same prosecutor from beginning to end, rather than handed off up the hierarchy. The Boss also pioneered collaborative efforts with counterparts in other boroughs, as when the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor was established to coordinate investigations citywide so that prosecutions were not restricted by boundaries that the drug rings crossed routinely. He set up units for sex crimes, Chinese gangs, consumer fraud—each a center of specialized expertise and methods of investigation.
But great ideas couldn’t shift the reality that the city was strapped for cash. The physical plant creaked under the burden of incessant use, our headquarters a warren of small rooms, the larger of which had three or four metal desks squeezed into them. My first office was an anteroom, actually more of a doorway, into which a desk had somehow been implanted. Eventually, turnover would deposit me in slightly more commodious shared space, though my desk still blocked the entrance, behind which door was wedged an old couch, horsehair poking out of cracked leather. Papers were piled everywhere, stacks of files, boxes of evidence, somebody’s lunch. In the summer the air-conditioning failed constantly and sweat soaked through my suit, while in winter the same rooms became drafty caverns in which I might need to keep my coat and gloves on all day. The lights were dim, the electrical cords were frayed, and the plumbing leaked—sometimes into the courtrooms.
Of all the resources in short supply, time was the shortest, and mine perhaps more than most. Kevin had been accepted into the graduate program in biochemistry at Princeton, so we had moved there from New Haven. After our cozy nest on Whitney Avenue, we found ourselves living near campus in graduate student housing that had been built during and after World War II to shelter the families of returning soldiers. I was commuting by train between Princeton and Manhattan, sometimes up to two hours each way. I left home at dawn and rarely got back before nine. Kevin cooked and we’d share a late dinner every night, though I was routinely dead on my feet until the weekend brought a brief respite. I made it through the workweek on cans of Tab and my own adrenaline.
If the long hours were straining our marriage, I was too preoccupied to notice. What I did see, in the small corner of my awareness not cluttered with cases, procedures, and the minutiae of criminal law, was Kevin finally doing work that excited him and earning recognition for it. He was thrilled to be at Princeton again, this time on his own account, and he was making new friends. He was thriving at his own thing, just as I was at mine.
IN THE PRACTICE HEARINGS that were part of our training, I was cast in the role of the defense attorney. Somehow by pure instinct I realized a witness implied vaguely that she had seen something, though she avoided stating it outright. On cross-examination, I asked an apparently tangential question that led her to describe the precise conditions that would have made a direct line of sight impossible for her. The senior assistant DA leading the exercise came up to me afterward. “I’ve been doing this training for years. You’re the first person who ever spotted a hole like that in a witness’s story and then pried it open.” It was fortunate that thinking on my feet in such a situation came naturally to me, because I was the first of the ducklings to have a case assignment come to trial. It happened faster than I thought possible, just weeks after I’d started in August. None of us had expected to enter a real courtroom before the new year.
The defendant was a young black man who’d been charged with disorderly conduct for getting involved in a street fight. He was a college student, a pretty good one too, and from a solid family; at arraignment he pleaded not guilty. His counsel was Carole Abramowitz, a seasoned Legal Aid attorney, who had defended felony cases for years. I don’t know why she was handling a misdemeanor that day, but she was determined to get the case thrown out, knowing full well that any plea to the least of charges could destroy a black kid’s future. That was all I knew about the case, and I was learning it on the spot as the defense attorney and I stood before Judge Joan Carey in the first conference. Normally, I would have written up the complaint myself and interviewed the arresting officer, but this case had been reassigned after the departure of my predecessor, one file in a big stack of them that had been dumped on my desk and that I hadn’t so much as opened yet.
“We’re ready to go to trial,” said Carole Abramowitz.
“We’ll start Monday,” said Judge Carey.
“But, but, but, but …,” I stammered. It was then Friday. I needed some time to prepare. I needed to find the witnesses. This was a real trial!
Judge Carey looked at me without pity. She complained that we weren’t getting dispositions fast enough. “You’ll start the wah-deer on Monday or I’ll dismiss the case.”
At least that’s what I heard. I ran upstairs to Katie Law, adviser for the ducklings in our trial bureau. Katie was
a Harvard graduate who had returned to law school after raising three daughters and getting a divorce. A southern belle from a wealthy family, she certainly didn’t need to be in the trenches at the DA’s Office, but she was passionate about community service. And she was infinitely patient with beginners.
“Katie, what does ‘wah-deer’ mean?”
She shook her head in despair. “They’re sending babes into the wolves’ den.” It wasn’t my fault, she assured me: not everything could be covered in our two-week training course. It was expected the rest would be learned by example and osmosis during the months new ADAs typically worked in the complaint room covering the pretrial motions before one of their cases went to trial. It was just my bad luck getting there so fast. Katie spent the remainder of the afternoon explaining the voir dire process and jury selection, the strategies for making the most of this chance not just to disqualify unfavorable jurors but to establish a rapport with those selected. Public awareness of voir dire is much greater these days thanks to media coverage of high-profile trials, to say nothing of television court dramas, and the science of juror selection that has spawned an industry of consultants. But when I joined the DA’s Office, it was all rather arcane stuff, especially since New York State is one of the few jurisdictions where lawyers can get involved in the process, which in many states, as in the federal system, is handled by judges.
I wish I could say that my first real trial was a triumph of spirit over experience, but in fact Carole Abramowitz mopped the floor with me, and then bad luck wrung me out. The courtroom was a repurposed office with a few rows of rickety wooden folding chairs serving as a jury box and gallery, and the bench was of painted plywood. In the middle of my summation, everyone’s attention suddenly turned elsewhere: the defendant’s grandfather clutching his chest in a sweat, the old man’s daughter panicking beside him. The judge called a recess; the paramedics came trooping in. And by the time it was clear that the poor man was all right, an hour of confusion had intervened before I could continue my remarks. The jury took less time than that to find the boy not guilty.
My Beloved World Page 22
