Lockdown on Rikers

by Ms. Mary E. Buser

  This was true. The inmates were constantly rejoicing or bemoaning their luck when it came to their court-appointed counsel. With so much riding on the competence of the lawyer, an inmate unhappy with his attorney will go to great lengths to persuade a judge to reassign the case. Most are unsuccessful and need to factor in the quality of the lawyer in any trial decision.

  With Chris’s resolve eroding, I had the sinking feeling that he’d never see his day in court and would instead accept the plea bargain and the accompanying felony. If this was the case, there would be no return to Wall Street. Far from it, he would be scrambing for employment, forever faced with trying to explain away the felony. Here was a bright young man with a promising future who was involved in what appeared to be an accident. This wasn’t right! This wasn’t justice!

  When I left the jail each evening to go home, my goal was to turn off my workday. But more often than not, it was impossible. If my mind wasn’t churning with images of another bruised face, then I was angry at a criminal justice system that would never allow detainees like Chris Barnett a fair shake.

  But if I was angry, I was also starting to feel lonely and cut off from friends who had little real understanding of my workday world. One summer afternoon I was at a barbeque with friends, and we were chatting about the usual topics of politics and the economy. But when the conversation turned toward crime, I saw my opportunity. Without going into too much gory detail, I told them about the brutality and tried to explain just how the criminal justice system treats people who don’t have money for bail. Everyone was listening. Emboldened, I pointed out that Rikers Island was a microcosm of jails and prisons across the country, a nation that led the civilized world in incarcerating its citizens, with a record of more than 2 million behind bars. My little speech was going well until I noticed the husband of one of my friends mouthing the words, “Bleeding heart.” “No,” I protested, “these aren’t liberal or conservative issues. These are human rights issues!” Although everyone nodded politely, the afternoon ended awkwardly and I left the party feeling a little foolish. Penetrating deeply ingrained beliefs about our vaunted system was far more formidable than I had realized.

  But there was one person in my life who well understood. Although he’d been unenthused about my Rikers mission from the beginning, I was now speaking regularly to my father, who provided not only comfort, but insights as a lawyer. He patiently listened as I described my efforts to help inmates like Chris to resist the plea bargain and see their day in court. “Good luck,” was his dry response. “The system’s unfair, Mary. If you don’t have bucks, you’re out of luck. Simple as that. None of this plea bargaining is law. When I first started out on Wall Street, we were all thrown pro bono cases now and then, and we did a damn good job with them! It was a nice change-up from the usual contracts we did. But now, with everything so overcriminalized, the volume of cases makes it impossible to try them all. Everything gets plea-bargained. It has to. And these prosecutors and defense attorneys that do these deals, they shouldn’t call themselves lawyers. This isn’t law! And furthermore, I’d like you to get the hell out of there!”

  Ignoring those last wishes, I zeroed in on my father’s observation about the volume of cases and read a book by a prominent New York judge that shed an interesting light on the plea bargain process. In Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice, Judge Harold Rothwax states that in the mid-nineties, in the borough of Manhattan alone, the annual volume of criminal cases averaged 125,000, but the physical capacity for courtrooms, lawyers, and judges allowed for only 1,350 trials! “Of necessity,” he said, “the overwhelming majority of cases must be plea-bargained.”

  The simple matter of clogged courtrooms explains much of the crushing pressure on the detainee to take the cop-out. I’d sat with many an inmate hysterically telling me of some witness or piece of information that could establish an alibi or affirm his innocence. But the lawyers brushed it aside. Court-appointed lawyers, with neither time nor resources to track leads, pay for expert witnesses, or search for evidence, push the plea bargain. As Alex Lugo, the inmate forced to be a gladiator in a California prison, put it, the mantra of the lawyer is “Take the cop-out!”

  Yet the public understands none of this, believing, as I once had, that acceptance of a plea bargain can mean only one thing—guilt. But what the public never sees is an impoverished detainee who doesn’t have the luxury of sitting behind bars for a couple of years awaiting trial while a family depends on him. They never see that the court-appointed lawyer is inept, or doesn’t want to try the case, and they would never understand that a detainee, terrified in his housing unit, will take the plea as a means of getting on a bus and getting out—to stay alive. The only thing visible is the choice not to go to trial.

  * * *

  When I next met with Chris Barnett, he was getting closer to the decision I dreaded. “You know, Miss B, I could get through all this Rikers bullshit if I knew I had a good shot at trial. Even if I had to sit here two years, I’d do it, but now with this lawyer, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  But I did know, and sure enough, less than a week later, his housing officer called and said Chris needed to speak with me. As soon as he arrived, he made his announcement: “I can’t take it. I’m taking the cop-out. I have to get out of here. They had a search last night and they beat somebody up bad. I have to get out of this place.”

  “But Chris,” I argued in a last-ditch effort to change his mind, “I’m sure they have searches in prison, and unfortunately, people get beaten up in prison too. Leaving Rikers isn’t going to get you away from any of this.”

  “Yeah, but everyone says upstate is different. You work, they have programs . . . but bottom line, I’ll know exactly when I’m getting out. Here, I just sit around all day not knowing what’s happening. I can never reach my lawyer. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going crazy.”

  “Yes, I know it’s very hard,” I said softly. “And I do understand your decision.”

  “I must have been nuts to think I was going to trial. In the time it takes to sit here and wait for trial, I could serve the same amount of time upstate and go home. It just doesn’t make sense. If I had the money for bail, it would be a different story—I could wait it out. But I don’t.” Hesitating for a moment, he added, “I know I’ll have to take the felony, Miss B. But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll lose my job, but I’ll get something else. I’ll find something.”

  “I understand, Chris.” He was in the terrible position of having to forego his future for the sake of surviving the moment, and I told him so.

  “That’s right, Miss Buser, that’s exactly right,” he said tearfully. “I can’t take it anymore—I just can’t. I have to get on with my life.”

  He accepted the plea bargain and two weeks later, during the predawn hours, Chris Barnett was whisked away to an upstate prison.

  24

  By the summer of 1997, the city had yet to decide whether to renew a contract that would expire in six months. Then things finally took a turn—a bad one. In addition to Rikers Island, our employer, Montefiore Hospital, also operated several city hospitals. However, when a dispute arose between the city and Montefiore regarding one of these other contracts, Montefiore threatened to withdraw from all city contracts, Rikers included, if the matter wasn’t resolved to their satisfaction. Overnight, we’d become unwitting pawns in a political gambit. Our only hope now was that the city would reconsider its position and Montefiore would remain on the bidding track and win the contract. Still, it was hard to imagine that the pugnacious Mayor Giuliani would back down. He didn’t. Shortly afterward, Montefiore Hospital sent a memo to its Rikers-based employees stating that the hospital would be withdrawing from the bidding process and leaving Rikers Island on December 31, 1997.

  Dr. Luis Marcos, president of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, paid us a visit shortly thereafte
r. Marcos, a small, wiry man with bullhorn in hand, reassured us that despite Montefiore’s departure, it was business as usual—no need for panic. Prospective bidders were being considered, and a decision would be made quickly.

  Regardless of his assurances, no one was convinced that there wouldn’t be pay cuts and layoffs. One way or another, change was coming, and our worst fear was that our close-knit team would be affected. But no matter how jittery we got, Pat remained staunch. “Regardless of who takes over,” she insisted, “we’ll be fine.”

  It was against this uncertain backdrop that I took on perhaps my most challenging case. In 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Although over twenty years had transpired since its reinstitution and the State of New York had yet to carry out an execution, there were still those charged with capital murder. In 1996, a Bronx policeman was shot and killed; the alleged gunman, Angel Diaz, was held in a Rikers cell facing possible execution. But before his case went to trial, Diaz hanged himself. After his suicide, mental health support became mandatory for any inmate facing the ultimate punishment.

  Although we’d been thus far spared the trauma of a capital case, this changed with the arrival of Jerome Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old charged with a double murder. When Pat assigned the case to me, I was uneasy, unsure whether I could handle a close relationship with someone who might be put to death. But as I prepared to call him to the clinic for the first time, I figured that at the pretrial stage, the possibility of execution was remote. At least I hoped it was.

  When Jerome arrived, I thought the housing officers had surely sent the wrong inmate. I don’t know what I imagined of someone facing the death penalty, but I certainly didn’t expect a cheery young man waving to me as if he didn’t have a care in the world. But there was no mistake. Jerome, wide-eyed and pleasant, affirmed that he was, indeed, “the one.”

  “You seem so calm about it all,” I commented.

  “Miss Buser,” he responded in a thick Southern accent, “I put my life into God’s hands. God will take care of me.”

  Then he told me what had happened. After completing his second year at a community college in Louisiana, he and his younger brother were visiting relatives in a rundown section of Brooklyn. “It was our first time to New York!” he beamed. A couple of days into the visit, Jerome noticed that he and his brother were being eyed by a few guys on a street corner. “This one afternoon,” he said, “me and my brother went out for a walk while our cousins were at work. On our way back, my brother stopped off at a bodega, and I went back to the apartment.”

  Unbeknownst to Jerome, the corner thugs had followed him, and when he unlocked the door, they pushed it in behind him, one of them holding him at gunpoint while the other two ransacked the apartment. “They told me to give up the drugs and the money or they would waste me. But I didn’t have any drugs, and the only money I had was a couple of dollars in my wallet. Now I’m scared they’re going to shoot me, but what I’m really scared about is that my brother’s on his way back—I’m terrified they’re going to shoot him. And then I hear him at the door, and the guy with the gun turns around, but the gun gets tangled up in his shirt. He had on one of those fishnet kind of shirts, and I see my chance. I reach for the gun and I’ve got it, and he’s trying to pull it back, and the two others are grabbing my arms, but I’m the one who gets it, and I just start shooting and shooting. It all happened in seconds. I don’t even remember pulling the trigger, but all of a sudden it’s over and the three of them are laying on the floor, bleeding. And my brother—he’s just standing there holding a carton of milk. So I pick up the phone and call 911 and tell them to send an ambulance. But two of those guys—they didn’t make it,” he said, with a hint of sadness.

  The fact that two people had been killed qualified Jerome for capital murder, while his brother was simply arrested. “My brother’s here on Rikers in one of the other jails. I don’t understand why he’s in jail—he didn’t do anything! I’m so worried about him, and about my mom. Once a week I talk to her in Louisiana. She can’t afford to come up here, she can just afford two collect calls a week—one from me and one from my brother. All she does is cry.”

  The one person Jerome didn’t seem worried about was himself. He showed up for his sessions wearing his white cafeteria scrubs while on break from his job in the kitchen. Instead of dwelling on his nightmarish predicament, he recounted tales of a gentler life along the Louisiana bayou. As he chattered away, images kept cropping up in my head—horrible visions of this young man being strapped to a table and injected with some kind of lethal formula. It was unreal, it was sickening, and it was entirely possible.

  But anxious as I was, Jerome remained inexplicably calm. “God will take care of me,” he insisted. Never once did he waver in that belief. But I wasn’t nearly as confident. If I’d learned nothing else at Rikers, it’s that justice is not guaranteed. The implications of this are chilling, especially so when it comes to life and death. With the nationwide resumption of executions, there were more and more accounts of defendants being represented by inexperienced or incompetent lawyers, of innocent people being executed, and of the uneven application of the death penalty resulting in executions of higher numbers of minorities and the poor.

  The trial took two weeks, and because Jerome left for court in the early morning hours and returned late at night, I had no chance to talk to him and find out how things were going. But I thought about him constantly and I prayed hard.

  When it was over, I called him to the clinic. I was nervous because if he’d been acquitted, he would have been released. But his name remained on the GMDC census.

  “Hello, Miss Buser!” Jerome said in his usual cheery fashion.

  My stomach was roiling. “Jerome—is it over?”

  “Yes, yes it is. Let me tell you how it went. When I took the stand, I told the jury exactly what happened. And that DA, she kept on trying to trick me. She said, ‘What’s the real reason that you murdered these two young men?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t murder anyone. I grabbed the gun and started shooting because I was afraid me and my brother were going to get killed.’ She kept trying to trip me up, but it didn’t work. And then she brought in the third guy that got shot—as a witness. At first he was all calm and cool, but when my lawyer asked him if he’d been involved in a murder in Virginia, he said to my lawyer, ‘Fuck you!’ Just like that, Miss Buser! And when the judge scolded him, he said ‘Fuck you!’ to the judge, and then he jumps up and starts cursing out the DA and the jury. He went nuts! The court officers had to pull him out. It was a big mess. I don’t think that witness worked out too well for that lady DA,” Jerome said with a mischievous smile.

  “So after that, they call a recess and bring me back to the bullpen. Next thing I know my lawyer comes running down to talk to me, all smiles, telling me he’s got great news, that the DA is willing to make a deal. If I cop out to lesser charges, they’ll give me fifteen years! Fifteen years! Can you believe it? So, I just look at him and say, ‘No, thank you.’ And then he gets mad and tells me this is a good deal, and that I shouldn’t say no so fast. So I say to him, ‘How’s fifteen years a good deal? I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done, and the jury’s going to see that.’ And he says, ‘You can’t count on that! They might not see it that way at all!’ All the while he’s sweating and sweating. Next thing I know, he grabs me by the shoulders and starts shaking me. ‘Listen to me! Listen to me! If the jury finds you guilty, the state is going to try to kill you. Do you understand that?’ And I tell him that yes I understand. Now he’s sweating right through his shirt and he says, ‘You’re only twenty-three years old, you’ll still be a young man when you get out! take the fif–teen years!’

  “But I say no, that I’ll take my chances with the jury.

  “So the trial starts up again and a few days later the lawyers are done, and the jury goes out. All the while, I’m feeling
so bad for my poor mom. She took the Greyhound bus all the way up from Louisiana and she’s sitting there all by herself, just praying and crying, crying and praying. So the jury comes back and we all have to stand up. They start reading the verdicts. First my brother—not guilty on all counts, so he goes free. I’m so happy about that. He didn’t do anything, Miss Buser. Why did they have to arrest him? And then me: on the two counts of capital murder: ‘Not guilty.’ My lawyer, he just collapses in the chair—poor guy. And my mom is crying and hugging me, and then the jurors came up to shake my hand. But there was one catch: they found me guilty of manslaughter. Some of those jurors told me they wanted to acquit me of that too, but they felt they had to give me something because two people were dead. I told them I understood. Looks like I’m going to get five years. I’ve already been on Rikers for a few years, so I just have to do a little more time upstate.”

  When he was through explaining, the two of us sat together in peaceful silence. Although it bothered me that he got any time at all for what was clearly self-defense, in light of what the outcome could have been, the relief was huge. In the months that I had worked with Jerome, my anxiety about this case had made for sleepless nights and harrowing dreams.

  Finally, it was over.

  After the trial, there was no reason for us to continue meeting, but we opted to meet one more time, for old time’s sake. Jerome had frequently told me that he liked to write—“poetry mostly”—and was constantly asking me for different words that meant the same thing. For our final session, with the clinic captain’s permission, I brought him a little gift, a thesaurus. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but as he leafed through it, a smile crept across his face. “This is exactly what I need! Thank you! This will be just the thing for when I’m upstate and I’m trying to write.”