Aaron Ross, the government attorney, was next up.
“The government maintains that the trial court acted properly in admitting witness testimony from the secretaries present in the room when the documents were discussed, as well as admitting into evidence government documents which had been handled per Defense Department guidelines–“
“Mr. Ross, does your argument depend on the secretaries’ understanding of the technical contents of the documents?”
“No, Chief Justice Gaffney. Only that they be able to identify the documents present in the meetings, which have a Department of Defense document number.”
“They did not testify as to the contents of the documents?”
“No, Chief Justice Gaffney. Just that a document with a specific Department of Defense document number was discussed.”
“Mr. Ross, the documents themselves were in secure storage, is that right?”
“Yes, Justice Cain. They were in secure storage both within the Department of Defense and at the manufacturer, General Armory and Tactical Corporation.”
“And were the documents from those two sources compared, and did they match?”
“Yes, Justice Cain. We had them forensically compared, and they matched, down to the occasional typo.”
“Well, I have to say that I don’t like this one,” Garcia said later during the panel’s private meeting.
“You and me both,” Cain said.
“I think it should be no better than a three to two decision,” Gaffney said. “With a spirited dissenting opinion.”
“Which is it then? The secretaries or the documents?” Heavey asked.
“The documents, I think,” Gaffney said. “That whole setup is specific to the Defense Department. We won’t be upsetting any apple carts on the rules of witness testimony.”
“We should probably still include a statement that the decision is not precedential,” Paul Fairweather said.
Gaffney sighed.
“You’re probably right. All right, who’s three and who’s two, and who’s going to write the concurring opinion and the dissenting opinion?”
“Your time estimate was very accurate, Mr. Finn.”
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
“So now that they’ve published their decision, are we ready to act?”
“Yes, Ma’am. This is the simpler case. You simply reverse the High Court and sustain the lower appellate court without comment.”
“Do you think it’s better to do that, Mr. Finn, or to put forward the reasons?”
“I think what might be best, Ma’am, is to simply note that you find the High Court’s dissenting opinion compelling. That puts a reason out there, but doesn’t add anything new.”
“Very well, Mr. Finn. And when can you have the Imperial Decree ready for me to sign?”
In answer to that, Finn withdrew a folder from his briefcase and produced a stiff document. He set it on her desk.
Dee raised one eyebrow at Finn. He smiled.
“I prepared three versions, Ma’am.”
“Ah.”
Dee withdrew a pen from her inside jacket pocket and signed the document, then touched an icon on a plate set into her desk. Claude Perrin entered.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Mr. Perrin, can you have this document recorded and transmitted to the Council and the High Court?”
“Of course, Ma’am.”
Perrin withdrew.
“Now the fun starts, eh, Mr. Finn?”
“Oh, I think there will probably be some talk about it, Ma’am. I truly do.”
Floyd Gaffney was reading briefs on a case when his senior clerk entered his office.
“Excuse me, sir, but did you check your messages recently?”
“No, I’ve been reading briefs. What’s up?”
“She reversed the High Court, sir.”
“Who?”
“The Empress, sir. She reversed on Haggerty.”
“What?”
“She sustained their convictions in the lower court, sir, reversing the High Court.”
“All right. I’ll look into it. Thank you, Jack.”
The clerk bowed out, and Gaffney opened his messages. There it was, from Claude Perrin, Personal Secretary to the Empress. He opened the message to find an imaged copy of an Imperial Decree, in which Her Majesty noted she found the dissenting opinion compelling, and therefore reversed the High Court and remanded the case directly to the trial court for imposition of sentence.
Maureen Cain tapped on his open door and at a gesture from Gaffney took a seat in front of his desk.
“I assume you saw the news,” Cain said.
“Why?” Gaffney asked.
“Because you look a little flummoxed.”
“Well, I am. Getting reversed by the Empress?”
“Can she even do that?”
“Of course, she can. She’s the Empress. All sovereign authority vests in her. Every other authority in the Empire was delegated by the Throne, including ours. So she can do whatever the hell she wants. But no Empress has reversed the High Court in almost two hundred years.”
“That was true. Now it’s about ten minutes. You did say you wanted a spirited dissent.”
“Yes, I know,” Gaffney said. “The worst part is she’s right, and we all know it.”
“She’s right? Do you think this is all her? I mean, she does have her law degree, but that’s a slim thread for something like this.”
“No. She hired eleven capable appellate justices out of Chief Judge O’Connor’s bunch about a year back. We wondered what she was up to. Now apparently we know.”
“So now what do we do?” Cain asked. “Do we give the defendants their payments back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s any etiquette there. It’s never come up before. The bigger question is what do we do going forward.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t think this is the last time this is going to happen, do you? She has her own appellate court over there. And if I complain, she’s likely to decide to terminate us all for cause and put them in our place.”
“Cause? What cause?” Cain asked.
“She’s the Empress. That’s all the cause she needs.”
“Well, Saaret, now we know,” Galbraith said.
“Yes. It’s an interesting move,” Saaret said.
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Because it’s true, Galbraith?” Saaret shrugged. “It is an interesting move. She’s exercising oversight over the High Court. But she put together a panel of eleven eminent appellate jurists to do it. It’s not like she’s just overruling them willy-nilly.”
“Pomeroy won’t be happy.”
“No, I suspect he will be out there running up and down the corridor shrieking, if he isn’t already.”
“You find this humorous?”
“No, I find Pomeroy’s ignorance appalling. It’s only his expression of it I find humorous.”
“I’m afraid I don’t share your sense of humor, Saaret.”
“What are you complaining about, Galbraith? Your prosecutor won his case.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t supposed to win it.”
“Look, those guys bald-face lied under oath, in a civil case where they weren’t at any risk of prison or financial penalty. They should have been tried for official corruption and executed, but you didn’t prosecute those charges and I understand why. For that matter, Her Majesty could have found them guilty and executed them on her own – either of them, actually, since Ilithyia I was still on the throne – and neither Empress did. But now they are going to go to prison. It’s only fair, in a way.”
“And the others involved?” Galbraith asked.
“They came clean once caught and testified truthfully, for the most part. These guys doubled down, and they’re going to pay for it.”
“So do you think this is a one-off?”
“No, not at all. Her Majesty h
as an appellate panel over there now, and I can’t imagine she did that for a single case. Chief Justice Gaffney and his fellows better be careful. She could just replace them all with her own panel.”
“High Court justices can only be removed for cause.”
Saaret sighed.
“You’ve been hanging around with Pomeroy too much, Galbraith. I shouldn’t have to keep explaining this. She’s the Empress. The only cause she needs is her own authority. This is an Empire, dammit. The Empress is the sole sovereign. All other authority is delegated by the Throne.”
“Not the Council’s.”
“Yes, the Imperial Council’s authority was delegated by the Throne, in an Imperial Decree three hundred years ago, and which, by the way, this Empress can rescind any time she wants. That’s why I keep telling everyone, we play ball by the Empress’s rules, or we could find ourselves out of a job. Or worse. How is that so hard to understand?”
“I don’t think she would do that, Saaret.”
“I agree. She wouldn’t. Not without damn good reason. But if we become more trouble than we’re worth, that may be reason enough.”
“You know there’s another case coming up before the High Court, right? One her panel of justices may take an interest in.”
Saaret groaned.
“I’d forgotten that. The Ike Solisbury case.”
“Yes. And the Chief of the Imperial Police is an individual defendant.”
“They were way the hell out of bounds targeting him like that, Galbraith.”
“Yes, I know, but it’s not going to make Chief Stanier any happier if it goes against him.”
“I know, Galbraith. I know.”
Lord Pomeroy and Chief Stanier were at dinner.
“How bad is this for you, Larry?”
“Bad enough, George. I have three senior people going to prison for five years.”
“Ouch.”
“And it’s all on this pretend Empress. It was all set. You know. They got convicted. Galbraith made a nice show of winning the trial and the appeal and all. Then it gets to the High Court a year or so later, when it’s died down and out of the news, and they quietly sweep it under the rug. Overturned on some minute technical point. And then she steps in and overrules the High Court and reinstates the convictions.”
“I didn’t even know the Empress could do that, Larry.”
“And no real Empress has, for almost two hundred years. But this woman doesn’t care, because she’s not a real Empress. Look, George. This is bad for the Empire. We need senior people like that to be working to keep this colossal apparatus running. We can’t have them sitting in jail while the wheels come off.”
“Wow. I feel for you, buddy.”
“But what about you, George? You have a case coming up before the High Court, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. This guy Solisbury hasn’t been able to make his case at all. Lost at trial, lost on appeal, now to the High Court, because the poor dumb schmuck is too stupid to know he’s got no case.”
“And if she decides he has a case, George?”
“OK, so the Empire pays him some money. Still not going to be my problem. She doesn’t want to overturn corporate immunity, Larry. She won’t be able to get anybody to work for her.”
“I’m not sure she’s got enough savvy to figure that out. And I don’t mean smarts. By all accounts, she’s smart. But she has no real experience. She has no clue what she’s doing.”
“But what about Saaret? He has to see what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure him out. He just keeps saying ‘Do what she says,’ no matter how stupid it is. Maybe he figures he’ll be gone before the whole thing comes crashing down. The Roman Empire took a hundred and fifty years to fall, and the Sintaran Empire will take longer than that, just because it’s bigger.”
“To hear you talk, Larry, I sure am glad you got Newsom to go ahead with getting us some military hardware. We might need it here, if all this ends up in civil disorder.”
“How’s that working out?”
“Oh, it’s great. We’ve been working on getting familiar with the stuff. Training people. You know. And they’ve gotten pretty good with most of it. The new shuttles are gonna take some time, though. Our pilots aren’t used to that much power and mass. One makes up for the other, but you still have all that inertia to deal with.”
“Excellent. Well, I hate to say it, George but you might need that stuff before this is over. She might just break something badly enough it brings people out into the streets.”
“I hope not, Larry. That’s always a sordid mess, no matter how you play it.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
The Civil Rights Case
“Now what are we going to do?” Floyd Gaffney asked the associate justices gathered in the High Court conference room.
“Well, we already said we were going to take the case, so I don’t think there’s any going back there,” Maureen Cain said.
“Why did we take this case, anyway? Stanier and the government would have won if we just let the lower court ruling stand, like the appellate court did,” Paul Heavey said.
“They wanted an Imperial precedent, not just a Sintar decision,” Gaffney said.
“Who wanted?” Rosario Garcia asked.
“Our patrons.”
“Oh.”
“Well they’re likely to get an Imperial precedent if she steps in again, just not the one they wanted,” Aparna Sultana said.
“And that doesn’t begin to address the individual liabilities of Chief Stanier and the officers involved,” Oleg Popov said.
“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Gaffney said. You still haven’t answered my original question. What do we do?”
“How about a decision that the Imperial Police have liability, for not providing better training, and then mandating training. Or suggesting that to the trial court as a remedy on remand?” Guan Ju-Li said.
“And Chief Stanier?” Gaffney asked.
“Perhaps a combination of corporate immunity and respondeat superior,” Sultana said.
“I’m sure Councilor for Law Enforcement Newsom will be thrilled with a respondeat superior ruling. ‘Let the boss answer’ points to Newsom,” Gaffney said.
“But not as an individual liability,” Sultana said.
Gaffney considered for a few seconds.
“All right, that might work. Well, let’s see how the oral arguments go, but that’s the way I’m leaning.”
Donald Sullivan, attorney for plaintiff, went first.
“Defendants’ actions in this regard were so egregious, it is clear that it was a deliberate attempt to punish appellant for his political commentary, which the defendants found objectionable–“
“Mr. Sullivan, your complaint here is not just that Mr. Solisbury was improperly targeted, but that he was targeted for his political commentary. On what do you base that conclusion?”
“Justice Sultana, the actions by defendants were so far outside the scope of their authority and custom that it is clear it was motivated by animus.”
“Much as a murder victim being stabbed thirty-six times indicates it was a crime of passion or hatred.”
“Yes, Justice Sultana.”
“And you further conclude that animus was based on his political commentary?”
“Absent any other basis, that is the only possibility, Justice Sultana.”
“I see.”
“Mr. Sullivan, your argument makes much of Mr. Solisbury being obviously targeted. On what do you base that claim?”
“The security recordings from the park indicate Mr. Solisbury was simply sitting on a park bench, enjoying the first warm sunny day of spring, Justice Popov, just as many others were doing. There was nothing to single him out from many others in the park that day.”
Luke MacReady, attorney for defendants, was next up.
“It must first be acknowledged that defendants are profess
ional police officers, without anything in their records to indicate that they have ever betrayed the public trust by acting in the manner that has been alleged–“
“Mr. MacReady, the record shows that, having searched Mr. Solisbury and found nothing, the search then moved on to his nearby apartment, without warrant or probable cause. How do you justify that?”
“Defendants claim that they did have probable cause, Justice Guan, because plaintiff was abusive and challenging throughout their search. They thus concluded he had something to hide, and, it not being on his person, it must be in his apartment.”
“So you claim that citing the statute regarding police search of individuals is abusive and challenging?”
“In the manner that he did it, yes, Justice Guan.”
“Appellant claims the damage to his belongings in the search of his apartment was so extensive as to amount to vandalism. Can you discuss the professionalism of that, Mr. MacReady?”
“Justice Heavey, we dispute the characterization. The search was thorough, but it was not vandalism.”
“Do you believe it is possible to search behind or under a piece of furniture without tipping it over, Mr. MacReady?”
“That was an accidental occurrence in the course of being thorough, Justice Cain.”
“Which accident occurred multiple times during the search, Mr. MacReady?”
“Yes, Justice Cain.”
“Now what do we do? You all heard MacReady’s answers,” Gaffney said.
“He’s just doing the best he can for his client,” Popov said.
“And he wasn’t supposed to be required to have good answers. The fix was in,” Cain said.
“I just wish I hadn’t watched the recordings,” Sultana said.
“I don’t think they knew his whole apartment was wired for VR recording,” Cain said.
“That much is clear. But the looks on those thugs’ faces. They were positively enjoying wrecking his beautiful apartment,” Sultana said.
“He had lovely things,” Guan said.
“Had is the operative word,” Cain said.
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