Savannah Law

by William Eleazer

“I lucked out. Her two children, my first cousins, sold the property subject to a free lease of the garage apartment to me through my senior year at Savannah Law. They didn’t have to do that, but they did, and it really helped me out financially. I guess they get free legal advice forever.”

  The conversation continued, mostly about classes, professors, and school activities. Jennifer had many questions.

  “I’m really interested in the possibility of getting involved in that trial competition that Professor Nolan mentioned—the Daniel Competition. Tell me about it.”

  “I think it’s a great idea—for next year. You shouldn’t try to get involved your first year. Professor Nolan is doing you no favor.”

  “OK. Not a good idea. I understand. You’ve made your point, but tell me about the competition.”

  He had indeed made his point, and he sensed her annoyance.

  “The competition is sponsored by the Georgia Bar. It’s always a criminal case. It’s set up like most competitions, with two advocates and two witnesses on each team. It starts with opening statements by each side and then the prosecution case, defense case, and closing arguments. Takes three or four hours. Trial lawyers judge the advocacy skills of the students. To win the competition, you have to be good on both sides, prosecution and defense. You may be defending the case in the morning and prosecuting in the afternoon. I wasn’t on that team, but I was on our Southeast Regional team last February, in Birmingham.”

  “How did you do?”

  “We got to the final round. Talk about a trial you will never forget, that was one! I think of that trial often and wonder what we could have done differently. It was only my second competition, but my partner, a senior, had been in four or five. She was pretty stoic about it. ‘Get used to it,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you just get served up some home-cooking.’” Scott gave a light chuckle.

  “‘Home-cooking’? You mean home-court advantage?”

  “Well, Marie, my partner, thought so. She was from New Jersey. When she spoke, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t from Alabama. We got our butts kicked.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Jennifer.

  “We were in a big courtroom in the federal courthouse in Birmingham. We had some really tough matches in the preliminaries but made it unbeaten to the final round. Right after the semi-finals that morning, there was a coin toss to see which side we would represent in the afternoon. We lost the coin toss, and the other team chose the defense. We really didn’t care—we thought we were equally good prosecuting or defending. We had lunch, briefed our witnesses one last time, and went to the courtroom to set up our table. That was the first time we got a good look at our opposing counsel—two gorgeous blondes, put together right in all the right places.”

  “That’s important?” asked Jennifer, with a disapproving look.

  “Well, it never hurts. But let’s just say they were professional looking—dark blue suits and matching shoes, white button-up blouses, and hair styled to perfection. We went over and introduced ourselves. I started a conversation with the one who was going to make the defense opening statement. She couldn’t have been friendlier, or seemed more harmless. She had a soft Southern drawl. It was obvious as she stood there in that Birmingham courtroom that she was not too far from home.”

  Jennifer put her left forearm on the table to get comfortable. She had a tentative smile on her face as she looked directly into Scott’s eyes and said, “Go on.”

  “Right on time, the presiding judge, a superior court judge from Mobile, walked in and took his seat on the bench. He was followed by the jury, trial attorneys who would be scoring us. There were fourteen. And not one—not one—was female. And not one was under the age of fifty. We found out later that they weren’t from just the Birmingham area but from all over Alabama. It was like homecoming! It took them a long time to get settled in the jury box—they were shaking hands and slapping backs.

  “We went through the usual preliminary matters and pretrial motions, nothing unusual. Took less than ten minutes. My opening statement was next. As I walked up in front of the jury, I was feeling really good—I was ‘in the zone.’ I gave the opening statement of my life, best I had ever given. I could hear Marie mentally clapping as I walked to my seat.

  “Then the defense counsel gets up. She walks to the lectern and steps out to the side, eight to ten feet in front of the jury. She takes her time, eyes the jury from one side to the other several times, smiling, and making sure she has their complete attention.

  “Then she begins—in that beautiful, lilting, honey-filled Alabama voice. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: What you just heard from...’ —she stops, turns, looks straight at me, and points with an open hand—‘this persecutor... oh, I mean prosecutor...’ —and as she says that, she smiles at her deliberate misstatement and continues, ‘is not evidence. The evidence comes from witnesses, not persecutors... oh, excuse me, I mean prosecutors.’

  “I turn to Marie, and she’s rolling her eyes and turning away, trying not to laugh. We had seen a lot of juvenile cheap shots and made-up facts in trial competitions but never, ever anything as hokey as that. To us it was comical. But we didn’t see anyone on the jury laughing. They’re looking intently at this young lady, and she’s continuing: ‘This defendant comes into this courtroom today clothed in what the law says...’—and she raises her voice on law—‘is the cloak of innocence. Before these...’ —she pauses, smiles, and gets it right this time—‘prosecutors can convince you that this defendant is guilty, they must completely remove the cloak of innocence.’

  “Then she slowly opens her coat, exposing the front of her blouse with its four or five buttons. Then she says, ‘Each of these buttons has to be removed before the cloak of innocence can be removed. They must undo every button.’ She pauses, looks down at her ample bosom then back at the jury. As she does, she says in that soft Southern voice, ‘Button by button...’ —and with that, she unbuttons the top button. Twenty-eight eyeballs zero in on that top button. Then her hands move to the next button, and she says, ‘by button... ,’ and to the next button, and she repeats, ‘by button.’ She does that for every button. She actually only unbuttoned the top one. But after every unbuttoning gesture, she looks down at her breasts and then back up at the jury, all with a smile. And I’m thinking, man, this is so contrived, this is so mawkish, so unprofessional—we’re going to breeze through this trial. No way could we lose this one.

  “The witness examinations go as planned. We’re on a roll, winning every objection. Marie does the closing argument. She nails it. The other member of the defense team, of course, does the defense closing. Her voice is a bit stronger, but every word has the same honey-dipped sweetness. She walks within four or five feet of the jury, surveys them from side to side with a coy smile, pats her left shoulder with her right hand, and says, ‘See, the cloak is still on.’ Then she opens her coat, pokes her chest forward, and goes from top to bottom, touching each button and repeating, ‘And this one is still buttoned.’ Those same twenty-eight eyeballs follow her at each stop along the way.

  “I look over at Marie. She gives another eye roll and turns to keep from laughing out loud.

  “Marie does a quick rebuttal, and we depart the courtroom while the jury deliberates. All of our team—coach, advocates, wit-nesses—gather at the end of a corridor off from the courtroom. After the congratulatory hugs and handshakes, we start making plans for the trip to Texas for the National Finals.

  “In less than ten minutes, a bailiff comes to tell us the results are ready to be announced. Marie and I go to our table and wait for the announcement. The presiding judge makes the usual comments about how impressed the judges were with everyone’s advocacy skills and how difficult it was to choose a winner... blah, blah, blah. Then he says, ‘But the jury has spoken, and....’ He waits a moment—I guess expecting a drum roll, then says, ‘The winner is the defense,’ and points to the defense table.

  “I’m in shock, complete disbelief. So is o
ur coach. He’s sitting in the first spectator row. He stands up and says, ‘You mean that table, don’t you?’ pointing to our table. The presiding judge doesn’t have time to respond before one of the jury members calls out, ‘No! The defense was the winner—and it wasn’t even close’!”

  Scott stopped. He had finished his story, and he just shook his head from side to side as if he were still in the courtroom, in shock and disbelief.

  A smile came over Jennifer’s face, followed by a chuckle. “So, you got a good—and long-lasting—taste of ‘home-cooking.’”

  “Yes, and there’s a moral to the story somewhere—I just haven’t found it,” said Scott. He looked at his watch; it was almost eight o’clock. He knew Jennifer had an early class in the morning, and she had already mentioned that she still had work to do on a couple of the cases. He suggested they leave.

  On the drive back to the campus where Jennifer had left her car, Scott remembered the conversation he was having with Jennifer before the tow truck arrived. “Friday night you were about to tell me about the courthouse in Springfield. Did you ever go there?”

  “Yes. Jaak took me and my team for a visit one Friday. His friend, who was the clerk of court, gave us a tour and a bit of the history. There was a trial going on, and we went in to watch. It was a murder trial, a twenty-year-old woman defendant charged with shooting her twenty-four-year-old husband. They lived in a small mobile home. She shot him right through the heart—one shot and he was dead. Her defense was that she was justified because she suffered from ‘battered wife syndrome.’ Are you familiar with that?”

  “Somewhat. I saw the TV movie The Burning Bed, where the wife poured gasoline on her sleeping husband. I believe the jury eventually acquitted her. Apparently the jury believed the husband got what he deserved.”

  “Same defense in this case. But her lawyers were struggling with their defense. They had some real problems.”

  “Like what?” asked Scott.

  “She didn’t have any evidence that she was abused except her own testimony. And he was inside their mobile home when she shot him, and she was outside, with a scoped rifle. I was fascinated and wanted to stay for the rest of the day, but my teammates were ready to go. At the next recess, we were on our way out, and I spotted a guy with a steno pad in his hand and a pen hooked behind his ear—obviously a reporter.”

  Scott interrupted. “Don’t tell me you bummed a ride back to Savannah with the reporter, and your friends left with Jaak?”

  “Right. I didn’t get back to Savannah until almost seven that night. The judge was running a tight ship and wanted to wrap up the trial that week. He scheduled the trial to reconvene at eight-thirty Saturday morning. I was so caught up in it that I drove back Saturday to hear the rest of it. And by then, I knew I wanted to go to law school.”

  “So you credit Jaak for setting it into motion?”

  “No question I was hooked; I was surely going to law school. Of course, SCAD doesn’t have a prelaw curriculum, or any majors that law schools seem to prefer, and that made me think about transferring. But I liked SCAD. The registrar outlined a proposed schedule of courses for the remainder of my time there, and I took it to the admissions director at Savannah Law. She looked at the courses and said that if my grades and LSAT were competitive, I could be admitted, despite my quirky path.”

  Both Scott and Jennifer smiled. “My bad,” said Scott. “I’ll never use those words again, I promise.”

  They were now approaching the parking lot, where Jennifer had parked her Toyota. “It’s over there, far side,” said Jennifer, pointing.

  Scott drove slowly toward her car and parked. The sun was setting behind the big water oaks on the west side of the parking lot. Jennifer stood by the driver’s door and fumbled through her purse for the keys.

  Scott placed his left hand on her right arm, and with his right hand, gently pulled up her chin and softly kissed her cheek. Then he said, “Good night, Jen. I’ll call you tomorrow night and see how your first day went.”

  Jennifer smiled and said, “Yes, please do. And thanks for the dinner and the afternoon.” She then got into her car and drove away, wishing that he had taken a few moments longer and really kissed her.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jaak spent Sunday afternoon in his lounge at the Library, as he usually did on Sundays when his wife visited her sister in Charleston. Part of the time was devoted to examining sales receipts and purchase invoices for the Library. But for most of this afternoon, he was engrossed in Beach Road, a thriller by his favorite author, James Patterson. It was a wonderful afternoon of pure reading enjoyment, and he was looking forward to the evening when his poker group would assemble for their weekly game.

  As he finished and closed the book, he looked at his watch and noted that “20” appeared in the date window. It was August 20—a date that always brought back strong memories of that date in 1968.

  Fresh out of Parris Island boot camp and the Infantry Training Course at Camp Lejeune, he had shipped out to Vietnam as a PFC. Assigned to Charlie Company, First Battalion, Third Marines, near Quang Tri, in the northern part of Vietnam, he barely had time to learn the names of the other members of his squad before he saw his first combat. This was Operation Lancaster II/Jupiter, a search-and-destroy mission into the DMZ. Charlie Company was the first unit in, landing by helicopter. The landing zone immediately came under heavy mortar fire. The battalion suffered seven dead and ninety-nine wounded. Jaak was not one of the wounded in the initial landing, but four days into the operation—August 20, 1968—a mortar round exploded nearby, and a piece of shrapnel tore into his left forearm. The blast left him dazed and with ringing ears for a while, but the shrapnel did not cause serious damage to his arm. After his wound was stitched and treated, he rejoined his squad. He would remain with Charlie Company for the remainder of his thirteen-month tour in Vietnam. By the time he “made his bird”—the Marine Corps term for catching his flight out of the country—he had received another Purple Heart, had been awarded a Bronze Star Medal, and had been promoted to corporal.

  All this seemed so far in the past, yet each August at this time, he returned to that first combat operation and that exploding mortar round almost forty years ago. And each August, he gave a silent prayer of thanks that he survived not only Operation Lancaster II/Jupiter but also thirteen months of combat, all in the I Corps Area, near the DMZ.

  Despite such strong memories, his Vietnam service was not something open for discussion by either family or friends—not because he had psychological scars, but because he felt such discussion would be boring at best, and at worst, could be conceived as self-adulatory “heroism.” He recalled one of his professors at the University of Georgia, after hearing an Army veteran discuss a personal Vietnam experience, respond using the word “rodomontade”—a word unfamiliar to Jaak. He could not tell if the professor was impressed or perhaps incredulous, but he himself had thoroughly enjoyed the story. Leafing through his ever-present dictionary, he found it meant “boastful or bragging talk or behavior.” The experience reinforced Jaak’s personal belief that only someone who had been there could appreciate such wartime experiences.

  The Vietnam war was not a popular war, and Jaak knew it. There was no awe-inspiring photo like the one by Joe Rosenthal of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi. But there was the ugly, unforgettable photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan using his pistol to execute a captured Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive. No, it was not a popular war, and only occasionally, when an old comrade from his Marine Corps days would visit, did he permit himself to recount his combat experience. There would be no whispering of “rodomontade” behind his back.

  The law students who visited the Library were not unmindful of Jaak’s military service. Marine Corps memorabilia was prominently displayed around the Library. Recruiting posters, such as “We Didn’t Promise You a Rose Garden,” hung behind the bar. His gold-framed H
onorable Discharge certificate hung from the wall in his lounge. To the left of it, in a matching frame, was his promotion certificate to sergeant, awarded a few weeks before his discharge. And on the right, his Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V”. And that was it. There was no mention of his two Purple Hearts. Sometimes a friend, aware of those two awards, would comment that they were missing from the display. If pressed for an explanation, he would just chuckle and say that if anyone should receive a medal for his being wounded, it should be the North Vietnamese soldier who fired the round. He had survived both wounds without any disability and considered his two Purple Hearts to be in a different category from those disabled veterans who had made a permanent and precious sacrifice. Nevertheless, he was personally proud of them. He thought of them as his private rodomontade; they simply were not for public display.

  Jaak’s reverie was broken when he heard the roar of a motorcycle pulling into his parking lot. He knew it was Jimmy Exley from Springfield, one of his oldest and closest friends. Jimmy always drove the round trip of fifty miles on his motorcycle and was usually the first to arrive for the Sunday night poker game. He and Jaak grew up together, though Jimmy was a year older and a grade ahead of Jaak in school. He joined the Army the year he graduated from high school. He was shipped out to Vietnam, seriously wounded the second month there, hospitalized for a month, and medically discharged—all during Jaak’s senior year in high school. Jimmy entered the University of Georgia the year Jaak joined the Marine Corps. Three years later, when Jaak arrived at Athens to begin his studies, Jimmy was a senior and helped Jaak get acclimated to college life. When Jaak left college to help his ill parents, Jimmy was already established in business in Springfield and helped Jaak through those difficult months.

  The front door was unlocked, and Jimmy was soon in the lounge, taking off his well-worn leather.

  “That didn’t sound like your old Harley Fat Boy. What are you riding tonight, Jimmy?”