A Case of Redemption

by Adam Mitzner

  “Erica . . . hang on here. I can tell that you’re very upset, but let’s slow down a bit. I don’t know anything about those other situations, but I’ve settled many cases, usually for a lot more than ten thousand dollars, and it was just to avoid having to go to trial, not because my client had done anything wrong. Nuisance value, it’s called. Just because people make an accusation, and you pay them to avoid a lawsuit, that doesn’t mean the allegation was true.”

  I knew instantly she wasn’t buying it. From the look on her face, I could tell every fiber of her being knew what her husband really was.

  I was getting the sinking feeling that I knew, too.

  “When he came home after that night at the hotel,” she began in a slow but steady voice, “he was so badly cut up that I knew what had happened. First he tells me that it was a bar scrape. Some misunderstanding with a drunk. Complete bullshit. Those were nail scratches. From a woman. So I tell him that he better not try to play me. I know what I know, and he’s going to need my help, so he better tell me the truth. He looks like he don’t know what to do, and then he finally starts telling me how sorry he is, and how much he loves me, but he had this one-night stand with some waitress. The same BS he’s been giving you. The same shit he’s going to say at the trial. But I know the difference between scratching somebody’s back because you’re feeling it and because you’re trying to get away from something bad. Real bad. And I told him so. I told him that I wouldn’t help him if he lied to me.”

  She began to cry. I looked around my office for tissues, but there were none. No one had ever cried in my office before.

  “I’m still not following you completely, Erica. Are you saying that Darrius admitted to you that he raped her?”

  “He told me that . . . I don’t think he honestly understands what’s rape and what’s not, to tell you the truth. But what he described to me was her clearly trying to stop him, and his not giving a damn. So, yeah, that’s rape.”

  We talked for another five or ten minutes, but nothing was resolved.

  I told her I would explain to Darrius that we wouldn’t call her to testify, but couldn’t make any other promises to her, stressing that I had a duty to zealously represent her husband, even if I believed he was guilty. When I walked her to the elevator, I could tell that she felt she’d wasted her time by coming to see me.

  As soon as the elevator doors closed, I went to Benjamin Ethan’s office. He was on the phone, but I told Janeene that it was important, and she ushered me in.

  When Ethan saw my expression, even before I said anything, he told whomever he was talking to that he had to go, and put down the phone. “Daniel, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s wrong?”

  I told him what Erica Macy had just told me. About the other women who claimed Darrius had raped them and how he’d paid them off, the scratches on his back, what he’d told his wife about Vickie Tiernan resisting, and that Erica was convinced that her husband was guilty.

  When I was done, we sat silently. Ethan’s fingers clasped together under his chin, as if he were praying.

  “I fail to see the problem, Daniel,” he finally said with a smile to reinforce his belief that I was overreacting. “I suggest you mention the discussion to your client, but if he tells you that he’s innocent, there’s no prohibition to your letting him testify to that at trial. In fact, the opposite is true: he has the right to testify.”

  “But his wife is saying he’s lying,” I said, even though I knew the rejoinder I’d hear.

  “She’s not your client. There’s only one question you need to answer: Do you know for certain that your client is going to lie on the stand?”

  “Not for certain,” I said.

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  I stared into space for a good thirty seconds. I knew Ethan was right as an ethical matter and wrong as a moral one.

  “I . . . I really had no idea,” I finally said.

  “And that’s good, Daniel. I hate it when my clients lie in such a feeble way that it’s obvious. If you know Macy is guilty because he tells you as much, then you should stop him from testifying, and even then, it’s not that black or white. Some lawyers would still put their client on, and just let him testify in a narrative. But since it’s your client’s word against someone else’s, there’s no ethical dilemma at all here.”

  “It sure doesn’t feel like that,” I said.

  “But it is like that. Nothing bad is going to happen because you do your job well. Believe me.”

  14

  When I was at Taylor Beckett, a fleet of Lincoln Town Cars would line up along Madison Avenue, like a luxury taxi stand. You’d just get in the first one, hand the driver a voucher so the firm could charge a client for the ride, and that was it. When I became a partner, I learned that the firm also owned the car service, a little fact that was not disclosed to the clients as part of the billing.

  The travel arrangements for Sorensen and Harrington were far less luxurious. We walked the fifteen or so blocks from my apartment to the courthouse. The moment we turned onto Centre Street, a caravan of news vans came into view, their weather vane antennae seemingly stretching on for blocks.

  “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore,” Nina remarked.

  The Honorable Linda A. Pielmeier was something of a cautionary tale in state judicial politics. There was a time when she was considered United States Supreme Court timber, but that time was long past. She was elected to the bench in the late 1980s when she was only twenty-nine, the youngest judge in New York State history. That she was an African-American woman with a compelling biography—grew up in the Brooklyn projects; reared by a single mother; scholarship to Columbia; law review at Harvard; and then eschewed Wall Street for public interest law—put her on every politician’s radar.

  Her star turn came when she took over the trial of the Chen-Tao Tong—universally acknowledged to be the most savage of the Chinatown gangs. She was the second judge on the case, her predecessor having been gunned down in front of his apartment building. The Chen-Tao trial lasted six months, during which Judge Pielmeier and her family were under twenty-four-hour security protection. In the end, all five defendants were convicted, and she gave each the maximum penalty. Rumor was that she had a security detail for years after.

  The conventional wisdom after Chen-Tao was that Judge Pielmeier would get the next open appellate spot or the nomination for state attorney general. Neither of those things happened, however, and the Chen-Tao trial ended up being the high-water mark of her career. Whispers of crossing the wrong party boss about something. Whatever the reason, she was now a lifer in the purgatory known as the Criminal Division of the New York State Supreme Court. Of course, that didn’t mean that Judge Pielmeier didn’t want another turn in the spotlight, and the trial of Legally Dead might just be her last opportunity to bask in its glow.

  In what she claimed with a straight face to be a nod to free speech, Judge Pielmeier got the chief judge to allow her to use the ceremonial courtroom for all Legally Dead–related matters. This increased the spectators from the fifty or so people who could fit in her courtroom to more than two hundred, nearly all of them members of the press. That still left hundreds more out in the cold, and so to curry favor with them, Judge Pielmeier devised a pool system, not unlike the one used by the White House, in which different reporters were permitted inside the courtroom each day, and then had to brief their colleagues on the day’s events.

  Judge Pielmeier entered the courtroom fifteen minutes after the hearing was supposed to start, which was more or less on time by judicial standards. Judges, as a group, show little concern for wasting the time of the lawyers appearing before them, even while most of them wouldn’t think twice about holding a lawyer in contempt for returning the favor.

  She was smaller than I’d expected, especially given her outsize reputation. Wearing the black robes, she looked something like a child in a witch’s costume, a gavel in her hand instead of a wand. She wa
s also older-looking than I’d imagined her, fully gray to the point of almost white, which contrasted sharply with her ebony complexion.

  “Please be seated,” she said in a soft voice after she’d sat down behind the bench. “First, allow me to welcome the members of the press. I’m also aware that we have a new counsel present today for the defendant.”

  I stood, buttoned my jacket, and said, “Good morning, Your Honor. My name is Daniel Sorensen. My partner, Nina Harrington, and I filed our notice of appearance yesterday.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Sorensen,” she snapped. “I’ll get to you in a moment. Before anything else is said on the record, however, I need to bring in the defendant. You do want your client to hear what’s going on, don’t you, sir?”

  Perhaps it was out of bitterness over her stalled career, but among Judge Pielmeier’s less admirable traits was that she was known for making lawyers feel utterly stupid. In this case, she needed to show me that I was a bit player in her courtroom; she was the one and only star of the show.

  Legally Dead entered through the side door. From the moment he was visible, you couldn’t help but think he must be guilty of something just by the way he looked. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit (gray must have been the home uniform, with orange worn on the road). His hands were cuffed behind his back, and his legs shackled around the ankles, which made him walk in a duck waddle. On either side of him were court officers, conspicuously displaying firearms.

  The guards pulled L.D. toward our table the way you might drag a dog. When he arrived, his handcuffs were unlocked, but the ankle shackles remained.

  Judge Pielmeier did not even give me the opportunity to say hello to my client. While the guards were still unlocking his handcuffs, she said, “Mr. Patterson, the Constitution of this great country guarantees you more than just a right to a lawyer. You are actually entitled to effective legal representation.” She emphasized the word effective, using the long e sound. “While it is ultimately your decision whether Mr. Sorensen can provide such effective legal representation to you, I have been on this bench for too long not to know that if you are convicted of these charges, the first argument you’ll make to the appellate court is that you didn’t have adequate counsel before me. Now they tell me, Mr. Patterson, that you’re something of a celebrity. I gotta be honest with you, I’d never heard of you before this case, but by the size of the media who want to watch this trial, I’m sure that there are lots of lawyers who would represent you solely to get their name in the newspapers. Let me be as clear as I can on this point: I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that’s Mr. Sorensen’s motivation here. It may well be that Mr. Sorensen is exactly the right lawyer to defend you in this case. But you need to be sure of that. Even more importantly, I need to be sure that you’re sure. So I want you to state on the record that you wish to proceed with Mr. Sorensen as your counsel.”

  I placed my hand on L.D.’s arm, gently pulling on him to convey that he should stand. He did as he was told, but then looked at me for advice as to what to say. Given that we were in open court, my ability to communicate with him was limited, so I only nodded.

  “Yes, Judge,” he said in a weak voice.

  “I’m not sure what you’re agreeing to, sir, so I’m going to ask the question again. Do you want Mr. Sorensen to be your lawyer, in place of Marcus Jackson, who was your previous lawyer?”

  “Yes,” he said, this time a bit louder than before.

  “Okay, then,” Judge Pielmeier said, turning her focus back to me. “Mr. Sorensen, I accept your notice of appearance. I’ll tell you this, though, you better have gotten whatever retainer you’ll need to see this through to the end, because under no circumstances will I sign another substitution of counsel. Do you understand that?”

  “I do, Your Honor,” I said.

  Judge Pielmeier waited for us to sit down before she began again. “You are the new kid on the block here, Mr. Sorensen. Is there anything you’d like to raise at this time?”

  I stood again. It was a long shot to get bail, especially on a motion to reconsider, and I wasn’t sure L.D. could meet even a minimal amount of bail. But clients who swear poverty when discussing their attorneys’ fee have been known to find funds necessary to buy their way out of jail, and so it was worth a try.

  Marcus Jackson had initially asked that Legally Dead be released without bail, the same released-on-recognizance request that I’d made for Darrius Macy. He must have figured it was a negotiating tactic—begin by asking for release without bail and meet somewhere at a reasonable number, just as Judge Ringel had done with Macy.

  But Judge Pielmeier was very different from Judge Ringel, and she did not react well to Jackson’s proposal. She found the request to be so out of bounds that she went 180 degrees the other way, denying bail altogether.

  “We ask that the court set bail at an amount that is feasible for Mr. Patterson to meet,” I said, trying to sound as reasonable as possible. “This defendant is not a flight risk because—”

  Judge Pielmeier began to talk over me. Looking only at the court stenographer, she said, “No, I see no reason to reconsider my initial order denying bail. Nothing has changed concerning the nature of the crime alleged, or the motivation for this defendant to flee if released on bail. Accordingly, it’s the order of this court that the defendant’s motion is denied.”

  Damn. Even though the result was not that surprising, it still hurt. If L.D. had been out on bail, the entire dynamic of the case would be different. Time would be on our side, and there’d be no reason to rush to trial. Not to mention that I’d be a hero in my client’s eyes. But now everything was going to be that much tougher.

  The judge looked back to me and smiled. Then, in a syrupy-sweet voice, she said, “Anything else, Mr. Sorensen?”

  “A few housekeeping matters, Your Honor,” I said. “First, we’d like the court to impose a deadline for the people to provide us with discovery.”

  “Ms. Kaplan’s a professional,” Judge Pielmeier said with a dismissive air. “She doesn’t need me telling her how to do her job. She’ll get you what you need as soon as it’s available. Isn’t that right, Ms. Kaplan?”

  Kaplan rose. She was actually much younger than I’d previously assumed—mid-thirties, at most. She was also very attractive, something that’s never a good thing for a defendant. Her dark blue suit was well tailored, hugging her very trim figure. It looked expensive, the result of either family money or a rich husband, because no one bought designer clothes on an ADA’s salary.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Kaplan said, even though I had no doubt that she was going to hold back discovery until the last possible moment.

  “But just so we’re on the same page here, Ms. Kaplan,” Judge Pielmeier said with a sly smile, “I’m assuming you won’t have any difficulty getting Mr. Sorensen what he needs before Christmas, will you?”

  Kaplan looked betrayed. “No, Your Honor.”

  “Good,” the judge said as if it were a two-syllable word. “We done, Mr. Sorensen?”

  “Your Honor, the defense would like to examine the crime scene, but Ms. Kaplan has insisted that both she and the police watch over our shoulder. As you can imagine, we’d rather not have the prosecution seeing what we think is important. Clearly, when the police investigated the crime scene, we were not permitted to be there and take notes.”

  “It seems to me that Mr. Sorensen is making a reasonable request,” Judge Pielmeier said, with more surprise in her voice than I believed to be warranted. “What say you, Ms. Kaplan?”

  “We have no objection, so long as it’s just a counsel inspection. We would object if the defendant were also on the premises.”

  Kaplan had previously taken a hard line with me on the issue. Now, apparently sensing that Judge Pielmeier was going to grant our request, she decided to switch to the winning side, but not without trying to get something to make my life difficult.

  “How about that, Mr. Sorensen?” Judge Pielmeier said. “That seems
pretty fair to me, too, and I must say I do like it when the lawyers in my courtroom make my life easy. So, you get to go snoop around all by your lonesome, and then you can report back to your client about what you found.”

  “Your Honor, that would raise Sixth Amendment issues,” I said.

  “Since when?” she said with a mocking laugh.

  “For effective representation to truly be effective, Mr. Patterson must be able to participate in all facets of the case. That includes helping us to see what’s important at the crime scene and what’s not.”

  “You see, Mr. Sorensen,” Judge Pielmeier said in the belittling tone she seemed to reserve solely for me, “I throw you a bone and then you ask for the steak. So, here’s what I’m going to do. You want to look around, just you and Ms. Harrington, that’s fine by me, and I don’t see the need for you to have a chaperone because I trust that, as officers of the court, you’re not going to remove anything or disturb the scene in any way. But your client is not an officer of this court; he’s—as Ms. Kaplan tells me at every opportunity—an accused murderer. So I’m not letting him roam free without a chaperone. The choice is yours.”

  “Your Honor, I appreciate the court’s concern about maintaining the integrity of the crime scene, but, with all due respect, any such fear is unfounded. For one thing, the prosecution has numerous photographs of the scene, so they’d know if anything were disturbed. Also, Ms. Harrington and I will be with Mr. Patterson at all times. We’re certainly not going to allow any disruption of the premises.”