Usurper

by Richard F. Weyand

  “She won’t give me any information about specific hires, Galbraith. I was surprised when she told me the push in hiring was for her research staff. I didn’t expect to get even that much. If I did ask, she would probably remind me that she already told me she was hiring research staff. The interesting question is, with eleven appellate judges, just what does she have them researching?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know, Saaret.”

  “I’m not either, Galbraith, but I suspect we will find out. Sooner or later.”

  Under Way, But Undercover

  There were four of them sitting at a cafeteria table in ‘Channel 700’, a VR environment that duplicated the cafeteria they used to inhabit in the Imperial Palace next door. They all had offices now in the new Imperial Research building, but the energy and camaraderie of the old cafeteria were here, in VR.

  Andy Forsythe and three of Valery Markov’s whiz kids – Joe, Peter, and Annie – were discussing new rules for criminal trials.

  “See, here’s the thing,” Peter said. “The prosecutor is getting a lot of pressure on this murder case. But he’s got nowhere to go with it. So he charges some guy to get the pressure off, and now we have a couple-three years of prep and trial and all that. And the guy gets off, because he didn’t do it. But he spent a million credits defending himself, and lost his house, and his wife left him, and he’s ruined. Not guilty, but ruined. And the prosecutor walks away. Ho-hum, all in a day’s work, to go screw some other poor bastard.”

  “That’s not even the worst of it,” Annie said. “Same scenario, but the defendant doesn’t have the million bucks. So they name a public defender, who’s young and inexperienced and has twice the caseload of the prosecutor. So he negotiates a plea deal, and the guy gets twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He loses his house and his wife, and his kids grow up and are out on their own before he even gets out, and he’s a convicted murderer the rest of his life.”

  “The state has all the power,” Joe said. “That’s the problem. Even if you’re innocent, you’re screwed. We have to fix this.”

  “Have you got ideas, though?” Forsythe asked. “Because this system has evolved over time. I’m not sure we can come up with something better.”

  “Oh, sure. You want us to run them past you right now?” Joe asked.

  “Wait a sec. Let me see if Bob is available.”

  Forsythe sent a mail to Bob Finn, asking if he could join them in Channel 700 for a few minutes, and included the position of the end of the table. Bob Finn, and a chair provided by the simulation, popped into existence in the aisle at the end of the table.

  “Hi, guys. Whatcha got?” Finn asked.

  “Run through those issues again quick, to bring Bob up to speed,” Forsythe said.

  Peter, Annie, and Joe summarized their complaints.

  “OK,” Forsythe said when they were done, “they were just going to give me some possible solutions. Go ahead, guys. Shoot.”

  “OK,” Peter said, “so one possible solution is that, since the government is providing both attorneys, at least in the public defender case, then why doesn’t the accused get to pick which attorney is his defender and which one is the prosecutor? You know, like when parents have one kid cut the treat in half, then the other kid gets to pick which one he wants. That’s fair.”

  “The issue there, though, is the prosecutor and the defense attorney are different skill sets,” Finn said. “They aren’t necessarily both good at both jobs.”

  “OK, then try this one,” Joe said. “You double the prosecutor’s office budget. But whatever money they spend in prosecuting a case, they have to pay an equal amount to a fund to pay the defendant’s attorneys. Whether the guy needs a public defender or not. So if the guy is found not guilty, then he isn’t financially ruined.”

  “What if he spends more than the prosecutors do?” Finn asked.

  “Can’t that be handled contractually?” Annie asked. “The defense attorney agrees to work for the prosecutor’s fee on the case. Like a civil case on contingency, except he’s always going to collect something.”

  “Could work,” Finn said. “But private defense attorneys make more money than prosecutors. They have a less stable employment situation, office expenses, all that sort of thing.”

  “OK,” Joe said, “so maybe it has to be parity on an hours-billed basis, rather than on a money spent basis, given the going rate for private defense attorneys.”

  “That’s got some promise,” Finn said. “But now your solution is expensive.”

  “But now you don’t need a public defender’s office,” Peter said. “As a government agency, that’s all overloaded with administration and overhead. That would be at least part of the money.”

  Finn looked thoughtful.

  “OK. I like where this is going. So a person is found not guilty, now he can just walk away, without having been financially ruined. What about the guy who’s found guilty, though. Shouldn’t he pay his fees?”

  “But if he’s found guilty, he can be assessed a fine as well as jail time,” Annie said. “There’s no reason he can’t be fined the amount of his defense attorney’s fees.”

  Finn nodded.

  “OK. I think you’ve got something there. That’s the solution that makes the most sense to me. What about you, Andy?”

  “Sounds good to me, Bob. I don’t think prosecutors will like it much initially. The financial pressure of defending against charges is one of their tools to pressure defendants for a plea deal, but I think over the long haul it’s a better situation. It’s just going to take them some getting used to.”

  “All right. That it for me, then?”

  “Yes, I just thought we should have both sides of the house – government prosecutor and private sector attorney – in the mix for this one. Thanks, Bob.”

  “No problem. See ya.”

  Finn nodded to everybody at the table and winked out of existence.

  “OK,” Forsythe said, “so let’s write that one up and put it in the hopper with the rest of the output on legal process.”

  Annie, Joe, and Peter looked back and forth among themselves.

  “How about I write it up and distribute it for markup?” Joe asked.

  “All right,” Annie said.

  “Thanks, everybody,” Andy said and disappeared.

  “We need to understand the process so we know what documents we’re looking for,” George Pullman said. “If you can brief us on that, that will be best, I think.”

  “Agreed,” Bob Finn said.

  “All right,” Vasilisa Medved said. “So basically, you have this product. A rifle or something. And so the first thing you do is all the junior QA process people research how it’s going to be used. They have a lot of data on this already, from prior products, from the bid specification, all that sort of thing.

  “Once they have that, they work through the bones of a test plan to cover that space. By that, I mean that there has to be a test of the design for each condition or combination of conditions. Is it going to be used outside? What temperature range? In the rain? All that sort of thing.

  “With the conditions in hand, they break up the handwavy working test plan into individual tests. These get assigned, and all the junior QA process people go off and design the test they’ve been assigned.

  “You with me so far?”

  “Sure,” Pullman said.

  “OK. So when the individual tests are designed, the proposed use tests, or PUTs, are all turned in to the senior people. They get assembled into a Draft Test Plan, or DTP. The DTP includes a lot of boilerplate testing that gets done on every product, and definitions of terms, all that sort of thing, plus the PUTs for this product.

  “The DTP gets sent to the vendor and they send comments back. This is too expensive, could this be done this other way, stuff like that. The Test Plan Comments, the TPCs, come in and the DTP gets modified. Once that modified DTP is approved, it becomes the Approved Test Plan, the
ATP.”

  “So which documents do we want?” Pullman asked.

  “The PUTs would be the most telling. These are the base documents, before anyone accepting bribes has bent them.”

  “But those are internal, right?” Finn asked.

  “Right. You may or may not get them, and they may or may not have been saved in their original form.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be saved?” Pullman asked.

  “Oh, yes. That’s not saying they are, though, or that they haven’t been modified. Illegally.”

  “OK. Got it.”

  “Second best is to get the DTPs. Those are saved internally, but they are also required to be saved by the vendor. Internal archiving is notoriously bad; the vendor archiving is typically much better.”

  “Then the ATPS. Are those easy to get?” Pullman asked.

  “Sure. Either internally or from the vendor. Either way is fine.”

  “And that’s the one that’s bent, right?” Finn asked.

  “Yes. That’s the one that’s bent. The quid for the quo, if you will.”

  “How do we find out who made the changes to bend the document?” Finn asked.

  “Well, every document has sign-offs. The senior guy in technical charge of generating the ATP is one, plus a bunch of people in specific areas. But those aren’t the guys who got the money. They’re just ass-kissers who want their next raise or promotion.”

  “So who then?” Finn asked.

  “The management people those engineers report to. They make it clear to the engineers that, if you want to get ahead, you need to sign off on these modifications. But the engineers aren’t getting the money.”

  “Understood,” Pullman said. “Now which products that came through the group when you were there do you think is the most compromised?”

  “All of them. The relationships are so cozy at this point that every ATP is compromised. It’s a lot easier and less costly to pay off a government minion than it is to meet proper testing requirements, for any product.”

  “I see. OK, I think that’s it for now for me. You OK, Bob?”

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “All right. Thanks, Vash.”

  “Hi, Dick. How’re things going?” Finn asked.

  “Pretty good, Bob,” Simms said. “I wanted to talk to you about some cases we are looking at, and see what you think.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “All right. This first one you might have some personal interest in. There are a group of people who were charged with felony perjury out of the wrongful death case arising out of the M132 gun explosions on Wollaston several years back. The Justice Department prosecutors actually pressed charges in that case, the defendants were found guilty, and their convictions were upheld on appeal.”

  “That’s actually sort of amazing. I wasn’t sure Galbraith would prosecute.”

  “Yes, it would be amazing, if it was real. We think it’s a scam. It’s been appealed to the High Court, and they’ve taken the case. We think they’ll overturn the convictions.”

  “How would that be a scam?” Finn asked. “Why not just take bribes to not prosecute them in the first place?”

  “We think the prosecution of them was to get higher bribe payments from the defendants – put them under pressure to make larger payments – and as a favor for High Court justices from Galbraith.”

  “Because the bribes would go to the justices on the High Court. Interesting. So what’s the basis of the appeal?”

  “On two points. One is that the testimony in deposition of the secretaries should not have been allowed, because they merely testified to things they had heard and documents they had seen, and therefore it is hearsay evidence. Second is that the documents provided by the defense manufacturers under subpoena were not evidentiary because the chain of custody was insufficient.”

  “Of course, I know that case. Those should get thrown out pretty easily, Dick.”

  “And at the appeals court they did. But we think the High Court will find one of the appeal claims valid and overturn the convictions.”

  “How can they do that?” Finn asked. “They’ll disrupt all the rules of evidence.”

  “What they’ll do is overturn the conviction on the point, then say that the decision is not precedential, that their decision is based on this specific, rare fact pattern. That’s how you know when the fix is in.”

  “Ah. Got it.”

  “So this is one case in which Her Majesty could overturn the High Court, and let the appellate decision stand.”

  “And they would then stand convicted of felony perjury. What’s the sentence?”

  “Five years. Although Her Majesty could, if she chose, allow the convictions to stand and then suspend the sentences.”

  “And the defendants?” Finn asked.

  “Three Imperial government employees and four employees of the weapons vendor and their part suppliers.”

  “OK, that’s a good one. What else you got?”

  “We’ve got something of a civil rights case. A fellow was sitting on a park bench, and the Imperial Police decided that was suspicious and searched him.”

  “Sitting on a park bench is suspicious?”

  “Wait. It gets better. They didn’t find anything, so they then moved on to searching his apartment nearby. They didn’t find anything there, either, but some of his things were damaged. It was basically vandalism. He sued for recompense of the damage and for punitive damages for the unlawful search. He named the specific police officers as well as the head of the Imperial Police as individual defendants.”

  “Why as individual defendants?” Finn asked.

  “Well, it turns out he’s a well-known political commentator who has been critical of both the Imperial Police and the courts.”

  “Do you think he was targeted?”

  “Very likely. But the Imperial Police are all over this one. He lost at trial, and the appellate court sustained. He’s appealed to the High Court. They’re likely to hear the case, just to drain his wallet if nothing else, although he must have a benefactor to have taken it this far. I predict they’ll decide against him as well.”

  “And you think that’s the wrong decision.”

  “Yes. The precedents are pretty clear. And corporate immunity of the defendants shouldn’t apply here. The violation of his civil rights was way over the line. Also, he read them the applicable precedents at the time, and cited the statute.”

  “Ouch. So he’s alleging willful and malicious.”

  “Yes. In any sane world, he should prevail. But he won’t.”

  “And the High Court will pocket bribes out of this?”

  “Yes, and much of that is likely to be tax money on top of it.”

  “Oh, I like that case, too.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Anything else?”

  “We’re working on a couple more, but those are our big ones for the moment. I wanted to feel you out to make sure we were on the right track.”

  “You are. Those are perfect.”

  “Great. Thanks. I’ll let you know when we have more.”

  “All right. Thanks, Dick.”

  “How are all our little projects coming along, Mr. Finn?” Dee asked.

  “Very well, Ma’am. Val Markov’s group is preparing some changes to the criminal law, Mr. Pullman and I are preparing some subpoenas to the weapons manufacturers seeking documents that Ms. Medved has briefed us on, and Chief Justice Simms has a couple of cases that look ripe for Imperial review once the High Court issues a decision.”

  “Excellent. Good work, Mr. Finn.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am. If I might ask, when will we start rolling some of these things out?”

  “Soon. I think the High Court reversals may come first, Mr. Finn. I can’t control the timing of their decisions, and so I can’t control the timing of events if I do something else first.”

  “I understand, Ma’am. That’s probably six months, then.” />
  “Something like that, Mr. Finn. Then I’ll want to issue the subpoenas to the weapons vendors. Perhaps six months after the High Court reversals. Let things settle down a bit in between. We can work on the new bar association during that period.”

  “Very well, Ma’am.”

  The Perjury Case

  It was almost five months later that the Imperial High Court heard the perjury case.

  Most cases before the Imperial High Court of the Sintaran Empire were heard by a three- or five-judge panel. There were five judges on the panel for the case of Haggerty, et. al. v. Sintaran Empire, the appeal of Joshua Haggerty and his co-defendants of the perjury convictions against them for their sworn testimony in the M132 Osmium Driver wrongful death case.

  The several perjury convictions had been grouped together by the lower appellate court because the defendants had all made the same arguments against their convictions.

  Alain Dupree, attorney for Haggerty, went first.

  “Simply put, the lower court improperly allowed hearsay evidence and documentary evidence without provenance to be admitted into evidence against appellants, resulting in their wrongful conviction–“

  “Mr. Dupree, is it your argument that testimony as to anything one sees and hears constitutes hearsay evidence? Because that’s what it sounds like you are claiming.”

  “No, Justice Garcia. It is in this specific case, in these specific circumstances, that the secretaries did not participate in the discussions about these highly technical documents.”

  “But they were present in the room, Mr. Dupree.”

  “Which is why it is hearsay, Justice Garcia. They overheard technical discussions they were not qualified to understand.”

  “Mr. Dupree, on the matter of the chain of custody of the documents in question, was the chain of custody performed actually that specified by the Defense Department for such documents?”

  “Yes, Justice Heavey, but that chain of custody is insufficient for evidentiary use in a criminal trial. That is why I maintain the evidence was incorrectly allowed by the trial court.”