The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  At home that night, I waited for the latest news report about Antoine Marshall’s appeal with a mixture of apprehension and disgust. A friend from the DA’s office had alerted me to the story on WDKX. “Shows how desperate he is,” my friend had said.

  The story had run at six and was scheduled to air again at eleven. An anchor teased the report just before a commercial break, and my palms began to sweat. I braced myself, knowing that Marshall’s defense team would stop at nothing.

  After the break, the station cut to an interview with Professor Mason James from Southeastern Law School, Antoine Marshall’s lead appellate lawyer.

  The interview took place in James’s cramped law school office. The man looked more like a UFC fighter than a professor. He wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off a bodybuilder’s physique—thick neck, trapezius muscles that stood out like cables, huge biceps, and tattoo sleeves covering both arms. He was completely bald with a dark complexion, square chin, and broad nose that had been on the wrong end of too many fists.

  He was, I knew, Southeastern’s poster-boy faculty member—loved by most students but detested by law-and-order alumni like me. A convicted felon who saved a guard’s life during a prison riot and was then granted a pardon by Georgia’s Pardons and Paroles Board. One of only three former felons licensed to practice law in Georgia, he now headed Southeastern’s Innocence Project, a clinic that filed truckloads of appellate motions for convicted felons.

  The camera zoomed to a head-and-shoulders shot of James with a dry-erase board visible in the background. 4 more days was written on it.

  “Give me a break,” I mumbled.

  “You can’t be serious,” the reporter said. She was referencing James’s latest appellate filing.

  “Dead serious,” James said. “No pun intended. There’s a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental right now—part of the three-drug cocktail used to kill prisoners in Georgia. My sources tell me that the state is getting the drug from some fly-by-night supplier operating out of the back of a driving school in England.”

  James gave the camera a hard look. “You wouldn’t put your dog down with drugs like that,” he said. “We’re just asking for thirty days to investigate.”

  I scoffed at the TV. It would be funny if it weren’t so heartbreakingly sad. Antoine Marshall had shot my mother in the head without thinking twice, desperate for money to buy meth. And now, twelve years after the shooting, eleven years after his conviction, he was complaining about the pedigree of the drugs they would use to gently end his life.

  I couldn’t wait for Friday to be over.

  2

  The debate took place in the Milton High School auditorium. It was less than half-full, and I sat next to my friend and mentor, Regina Granger, the senior assistant district attorney for Milton County. Regina, a large and loud woman, had a boisterous belly laugh that made you think she was warm and cuddly. She was not. Regina was one of the toughest people I knew, an African American woman who earned her stripes thirty years ago in Milton County’s good-ole-boy system.

  If you were accused of a crime in our county, the worst news you could get was that Regina Granger was handling your case. In my three years at the prosecutor’s office, I had never seen her lose.

  We were watching the Republican candidates for attorney general of Georgia debate. I would rather have been getting a root canal or watching an opera. Regina and I were both there for the same reason—our boss was one of the candidates.

  District Attorney William Masterson filled every inch of his chair in the middle seat at the table of candidates and a little more. He was the John Madden of the Milton County Courthouse—demonstrative, gruff, and down to earth. Everyone in the DA’s office loved him or at least respected him. But he was also mired in third place in a five-candidate race with four months left before the primary.

  The leader was the current chief assistant AG, a man named Andrew Thornton. In contrast to Masterson, Thornton was thin, bookish, and deadly serious. I had watched him argue twice before the Georgia Supreme Court, opposing Antoine Marshall’s appeals, though he never returned my phone calls. Instead, he had junior members of the AG’s office deal with bothersome victims like me.

  Toward the end of the debate, the moderator asked a question about the death penalty, and Masterson pounced on it. “I will never apologize for seeking the death penalty for those members of our society who show such callous disregard for the lives of others. We hear a lot about the rights of defendants, but I can tell you this. . . .” Masterson paused and made sure he had everyone’s full attention. “In every case where I’ve sought the death penalty, the victim suffered far more than any defendant executed by the state. I could tell you some gruesome stories about how these victims were tortured, raped, and killed. And unlike the defendants, the victims had no choice in the matter.”

  There was a smattering of applause from the archconservatives who had shown up for the debate. I found the whole thing a little unseemly.

  “My biggest problem with the death penalty is that we allow these cases to drag on for years, costing the taxpayers millions,” Masterson continued. “In the audience tonight is one of my assistant district attorneys, Jamie Brock.”

  I felt my face redden, and I knew what was coming next. I hated playing the victim card, and I hated having others play it for me.

  “As many of you know, her mother was killed by a three-time felon named Antoine Marshall more than ten years ago. He’s still sitting on death row, attacking everyone and everything involved in the process, even though Jamie’s father, whom this man also shot, survived that night and ID’d him at trial. That’s why Jamie is a prosecutor today.”

  Masterson motioned toward me in the audience. “Jamie, would you stand for a moment?”

  I shot him a quick look to let him know that I wasn’t happy, then stood and forced a smile. The crowd applauded politely.

  “For me, being a prosecutor is not just a career,” Masterson said. “I feel the same way Jamie does—what we do is a calling. Victims have rights, and they’re entitled to justice.”

  When the debate was over and Masterson had finished glad-handing every person who’d stuck around, he gave me a hug. “Hope I didn’t embarrass you,” he said.

  “You did,” I said. “But you can make it up to me. We need to talk.”

  Masterson raised an eyebrow. “This can’t wait till tomorrow?”

  “I only need five minutes.”

  He grunted his approval and then decided that if the conversation couldn’t wait, we might as well get coffee and ice cream. Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in an Applebee’s, and Masterson was replaying the debate, asking for my perspective. When his ice cream finally came, he had two questions. “You sure you don’t want some?”

  “No thanks.” I was sticking with just coffee.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Rikki Tate.”

  “So talk.” He took a bite of ice cream.

  I had already formulated my negotiating strategy. I wanted to work on the Tate case. I knew it was the kind of high-profile case where Masterson would want someone from the DA’s office working with the major felony squad detectives right from the start. I also knew Masterson would say I was too busy. I would tell him that I would work overtime and still handle my normal caseload. He would then say that I didn’t have enough experience to handle the case, and I would offer to ride second chair. He would claim that I was too emotionally involved, and I would quote one of his answers from earlier that night when he said that, as prosecutors, we ought to be personally involved in every case. Like I did with every cross-examination, I had scripted the conversation in my head a hundred times and had a response for every objection, a counterpoint for every argument.

  “I’d like to work on the Tate case,” I said.

  “I’m handling that one myself,” Masterson responded, going for another bite. “But I could use a good second chair.”

  It took m
e a second to shift gears—I was expecting an argument, not capitulation. “Seriously?”

  “On one condition.”

  “Anything,” I said quickly. Maybe too quickly.

  Masterson leaned forward, creating that hulking presence that intimidated defense attorneys. The look didn’t bother me; I knew he was just a big teddy bear.

  “I’m calling the shots,” he said. “I’ll ask for your input, but at the end of the day, I’m making all the strategic decisions. If we go to trial, you’ll get to take a few witnesses and maybe even do the opening. Heck, I might have you try the whole case. But when it comes to whether we charge him and if so, what we charge him with—that’s all up to me.”

  Masterson studied me for a moment and I knew I had no room to negotiate.

  “Understood?”

  “Anything you say, boss.”

  3

  On the way home, I called Regina. “He didn’t even put up a fight,” I said excitedly. “He said I could ride second chair as long as he controlled the strategy.”

  There was silence on the other end as Regina processed the information. “I was afraid of that,” she eventually said.

  “Huh?”

  “The boss could be planning on either not charging Tate or negotiating a quick plea. He knows that if he has you involved, the press will have a harder time attacking him for being soft because they know how much you hate Tate. You’re his buffer, Jamie. Blunt any criticism in the midst of an election campaign.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. And for a moment I wondered if I would ever be half the lawyer my mentor was. Or Masterson either, for that matter.

  “But the autopsy’s not even done yet.”

  “When’s the last time the boss reacted instead of being proactive?”

  Regina had a point.

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t take it?”

  “No; he wants you involved,” Regina said. “And you know Bill. If he believes Tate poisoned his wife, he’ll charge hell with a water pistol to convict him. He’s just making sure he’s covered if he decides to pull the plug.”

  “Nice to know I’m valued,” I said.

  My spirits lifted when I walked in the front door of my house and was greeted like a rock star by my black Lab. We wrestled for a while on the floor and played tug-of-war with some well-worn interconnected rubber rings. He growled like a he-man and jerked his strong neck muscles back and forth to pull the toy out of my hands. I growled back and then loved on him and fixed him dinner. He’d been cooped up in the house for more than twelve hours and was starved for attention.

  “It was a good day for the good guys,” I said to Justice. He looked up at me with those adoring brown puppy-dog eyes and tilted his head to the side.

  “We’re going to get this guy,” I promised him.

  4

  On Wednesday, my BlackBerry alarm went off at 5 a.m., a half hour earlier than normal, and Justice decided it was time to eat. Normal people could work their snooze alarms for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, but not me. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, Justice thought the unique alarm on the BlackBerry was designed solely for him and meant one thing and one thing only. He pawed at my hand until I reluctantly rolled out of bed and padded downstairs to the kitchen. I fixed a cup of coffee for me and breakfast for my housemate.

  I lived in my parents’ house, the same house where I had grown up. It was a nice place in the upscale Seven Oaks subdivision of Alpharetta, Georgia. The house was over three thousand square feet, and Justice and I used a grand total of about four rooms. A year ago, my brother and I had decided that my father could no longer live here alone. Chris, a pastor for a small church in northern Georgia, offered for Dad to move in with him. But my father’s independent streak and stubbornness nixed that plan. We quickly realized that the only way my father would accept help was if Justice and I moved back home.

  This was also the house where my mother was killed. For the first month after I returned home, I had nightmares every night. But my father had refused to move out, believing that he would be severing his last connection with my mom. And so I left the chic urban setting of my apartment at Atlantic Station to move to suburbia, to a neighborhood of families and married couples who embraced me and Justice warmly. And now, after a year in a house with a fenced-in backyard, I doubted whether I would ever be able to go back to the life of studio lofts.

  I let Justice out the back door and started preparing mentally for the day’s events. I put on my workout clothes—long running tights and a T-shirt for a brisk March morning. Justice and I would go for a run through the neighborhood, and then I would be on my way to work by seven.

  I was the busiest prosecutor in Milton County, and I would have it no other way. When I interviewed with Bill Masterson, I explained to him that I was philosophically opposed to plea bargains—deals cut by prosecutors in 90 percent of their cases that usually allow the defendants to serve less time in exchange for a guilty plea. He explained that Milton County handled about eight thousand felony cases a year and that the system would shut down without plea bargains. We eventually agreed on a compromise—I could implement a no-plea-bargain strategy on my own cases as long as I got the job done and handled the same caseload as everyone else. To the surprise of most people in the office, my strategy worked. Many of my defendants pleaded guilty even without a deal, hoping the court might show some leniency.

  Defense lawyers hated me for it. Even the judges thought I was a little crazy.

  At seven o’clock, I left the calm of my home behind and started navigating traffic on the back roads to my office. On the way, I thought about the frantic appeals Mace James would be filing, and I thought about my dad. I also thought about the meeting that would be the highlight of my day. The autopsy had been completed on Rikki Tate.

  Milton County’s top medical examiner, a feisty lady named Grace O’Leary, didn’t look much like a distinguished doctor. She was short and plump with unruly black hair. She smelled like cigarettes, which I found ironic because I knew she had seen up close what cancer could do to a person’s lungs. But she was unimpeachable on cross-examination, a bigger-than-life presence in the courtroom.

  The first time I worked with Dr. O’Leary, she had made it clear who was boss. I was second chair on a murder case, and one of my jobs was to prepare O’Leary for cross-examination. She took this assignment as a personal insult and reminded me that she had been doing autopsies since before I was born.

  In typical Jamie Brock fashion, I’d badgered her for a meeting anyway and she had finally relented. But she had terms. The meeting was to take place at her lab; every prosecuting attorney should understand exactly how an autopsy was performed, or they would never be able to ask intelligent questions about it. It just so happened that she could squeeze in our meeting right after a scheduled autopsy she had the next day. Why didn’t I come by early so I could see it? I should have known it was a setup, but I am Jamie Brock, athlete and hard-nosed prosecutor who is not afraid of a little blood. So I’d agreed to the invitation as though we were going to lunch.

  On the way downstairs to the lab that day, O’Leary was talkative and upbeat. “Did you know that autopsy is a Greek word that means ‘see for yourself’?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m just like every other doctor,” she explained. “It’s just that my patients happen to be dead. Still, they have a story to tell, and it’s my job on the witness stand to help them tell that story.”

  I could already see why the prosecutors all said O’Leary was the best secret weapon we had in Milton County.

  I held up pretty well during the external examination—O’Leary recording the height and weight of the naked, blue body and dictating notes about identifying marks, scars, and tattoos. As she chatted, I started getting a little nauseated just thinking about the fact that the man in front of us had stopped breathing nearly forty-eight hours ago. Rigor mortis had set in, and O’Leary treated him like a slab of beef.

 
; My knees went weak when she performed the Y-shaped incision from both shoulders down through the sternum and then pulled back the skin and underlying tissues. I passed out before she got around to removing the brain.

  When I returned to my office that day, I found out that only three ADAs had made it through an entire autopsy. But I was a little embarrassed to learn that nine out of ten made it further than I had. From then on, I decided O’Leary didn’t require the kind of trial prep that most witnesses did.

  “Jamie, great to see you again,” O’Leary said when I showed up to discuss Rikki Tate’s autopsy. Thankfully, we were in her office. On the way over, I had been dreading the thought of her inviting me to the lab so we could talk while she carved up another dead person.

  “Do you want to sit down before I show you the photos?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” I said and took a seat. There was no sense trying to play macho with somebody who had already made me faint.

  For the next few minutes Dr. O’Leary walked me through the autopsy, illustrating each step with graphic photos, inserting a few stories about other autopsy victims along the way. O’Leary had found no signs of trauma, choking, or any possible cause of death apart from the drug overdose. She had ruled out congestive heart failure and sudden acute heart failure.

  “Rikki’s lungs had pulmonary congestive edema, which is a very common finding in people who die of drug overdoses. It means her lungs were filled with fluid and that she basically suffocated. It’s not a common finding in people who die of a heart arrhythmia.”

  She explained that she had taken blood from a femoral artery and had sent that blood and Rikki’s stomach contents to the state’s toxicology lab. She checked the exact numbers on the tox report. “We sent 134 grams of gastric contents. The lab found 16 milligrams of oxycodone and 9 milligrams of codeine. In the blood they found .74 milligrams per liter of oxycodone and .27 milligrams per liter of codeine.”