“It happens. Proceed.”
Campanella consulted his notes, backed onto the highway, and pressed down on the gas. “The defendant has been participating for several weeks, probably longer, in a notorious chat room, the so-called Candyman E-Group, used by pedophiles to discuss fantasies about child sex abuse and exchange pornography.” Campanella flipped a page and looked up at the bench, dropping his voice. The change in tone conveyed the feel of an ad-lib, but it obviously wasn’t. Norcross could picture Campanella practicing it in his office.
“Actually, I shouldn’t say fantasies, because based on some of that man’s”—Campanella pivoted in the same transparently rehearsed way and pointed at the defendant—“comments, he may have actually abused children.” Then Campanella returned his gaze to the judge. “We know from his own words that he’d very much like to. Your Honor has the transcripts of some of his conversations attached to the government’s sealed motion. Defendant appears under his chat-room code name ‘Luv2look.’ At one point, he brags about molesting his niece. I quote, ‘I love to rip her little diaper off, and stick my—’”
“I’ve seen the transcripts, Mr. Campanella. You don’t have to quote them.”
This was going to be Page One already. Too much lurid pretrial publicity, and he’d never be able to piece together a neutral jury. Besides, it was piling on, which reminded him of Ray.
Judge Norcross felt a plunge in his stomach at the possibility that his brother’s aggressive, buccaneer spirit might pass from the world entirely. The man was not easy, but he was rooted in Norcross’s heart. What would happen to the girls? And how would his father, already weighed down with his mother’s illness, ever survive this new blow?
Campanella had paused and was looking up at the judge, stroking his goatee.
“Okay,” he said uncertainly. He’d clearly been relishing the prospect of two or three nauseating quotes. He flipped two pages of his yellow pad and soldiered on. “Very good.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “Okay. Then there’s the DVD itself. Which he personally ordered in response to a flyer sent out by the FBI as part of its ‘Window Pane’ sting. The title of the video, which includes the phrase ‘Playing Doctor,’ is too disgusting to repeat in full. I assume Your Honor has seen it? The video was purchased with the defendant’s MasterCard, including both the number, expiration date, and the security code.” Campanella glanced back at Patterson to confirm this. The agent, without expression, nodded. “Okay.” Campanella paused and looked down at his notes. “When the agents arrived to execute the search warrant? The defendant gave a voluntary statement essentially confessing to the crime, admitting that he ordered the video, and confirming that it was his.” Campanella gave the judge a full blast of eye contact. “I assume Your Honor has viewed the video in its entirety?”
Norcross was not going to be pushed. He leaned forward and returned Campanella’s stare. “I have reviewed all the material the government has submitted.”
“Respectfully, has Your Honor viewed the last four minutes, where—”
“Mr. Campanella,” Judge Norcross interrupted, tapping the bench with the butt of his pen. “I just told you I have reviewed all the material.”
This was mostly true. The court of appeals had made it clear that a judge was required, before issuing a search or arrest warrant in these cases, to actually look at the targeted pornography. Norcross, however, did not interpret this precedent as binding him to sit and watch the entire ghastly DVD—only enough to get the gist. If Campanella was concerned that Norcross had not had his stomach turned or his heart wrenched, he didn’t need to worry.
“Let’s move on. What can you tell me about the potential penalty the defendant is facing?”
“Fine.” Campanella looked down and flapped another page. “It’s, Your Honor, it’s enormous—basically life, given the defendant’s age. Calculation of the sentencing guidelines will include enhancements for use of a computer, number of images, depictions of sadomasochistic conduct, and images of prepubescent children. We estimate that with these adjustments, the applicable guideline range will be two hundred and ten to two hundred and seventy-six months, roughly eighteen to twenty-three years, with a minimum mandatory sentence of at least five years, lifetime supervised release, and a requirement that he maintain registration as a child sex offender for life.”
At the periphery of his vision, Norcross could see that Campanella’s words were landing on Cranmer like repeated blows over the head. The defendant seemed to be slipping lower in his chair each time Campanella flicked a hand at him. It was hard to imagine that a person would respond this way if he were innocent. The guidelines range was obviously too high, but the sentence would almost certainly come in well above the minimum five years. Hasta la vista, Professor Cranmer.
The defendant would likely die before he finished his sentence. A colleague in Boston had once sentenced an aged mobster who protested that he would be in his grave before he could serve out his lengthy prison term. “Just do the best you can,” the colleague had replied. “Just do the best you can.” Even if Claire eventually accepted the truth that her friend was guilty, which she might not, the severity of his sentence would break her heart.
The thought of Claire’s distress made Norcross think once more of how much he needed to speak to her, to get her help about what he should say to his nieces. Would they cry? Of course, they would cry. Would he? Claire was the only person on earth he could talk to about this.
He knew Lindsay, the older girl, a little. They’d had some contact when she’d briefly attended nearby Deerfield Academy, but she’d been a poor fit for boarding school and had returned to Washington after a semester. An essay she’d written condemning the death penalty had gotten into the newspapers during his capital trial. Her few months in western Massachusetts hadn’t brought them close. Jordan, whom he’d only seen at occasional family holidays, had so far been too young for much conversation. Some years back, one Thanksgiving at Ray’s when Jordan had been a toddler, she’d hopped up into his lap to watch a football game. He’d enjoyed feeling her curled warmly against his chest, but she’d gotten bored and hopped down after a few minutes. How would he manage to make a home for these girls, even temporarily, if they needed a place to stay while Ray recovered? And what if Ray didn’t recover? Norcross didn’t even know what they ate for breakfast.
Campanella kept rattling along. His argument regarding the defendant’s supposed dangerousness was feeble. The pretrial services report informed the judge that Cranmer was sixty-eight years old, with no prior criminal record of any kind, and had been living with his mother. In Norcross’s experience, all child abusers looked at child pornography, but relatively few people who looked at child pornography ever laid their hands on actual children. Like this soggy morsel, they mostly just “loved to look.” Beyond the pornography itself, which was bad enough, the record so far offered no evidence that the professor would do anything to hurt anyone, or cause any sort of problem, if he were released pending trial.
The risk-of-flight argument was stronger. If the defendant stuck around to be convicted, his life would basically be over, except in the very unlikely event that he was found not guilty, and defendants rarely beat child pornography charges. Under the circumstances, who wouldn’t think about heading for the hills? He certainly would, especially if he knew that certain European countries would not extradite for this class of offense.
Linda Ames, however, seemed unfazed by Campanella’s rhetoric, looking at him with a half smile that suggested she was about to burst into laughter, totally unimpressed. She was good, but what would she come up with?
“Thank you, Mr. Campanella.” The tone of Judge Norcross’s voice should have made it clear that it was time for Campanella to sit down. He’d scored all the points he was going to score, and he was in fairly good shape. Unfortunately, he lacked the experience to know when to stop.
“If I might have just
thirty seconds?” Campanella held up a finger. “For a word with Agent Patterson?”
After receiving Norcross’s nod, Campanella stepped around to the back of counsel table and lowered his head to confer with the case agent. The purpose of this, the judge knew, was to confirm that Campanella had not left anything important out. Usually, the agent’s response was a shrug or a quick nod, but in this case Patterson had something to say that took up most of Campanella’s half minute. As they finished up, Norcross noticed that Patterson briefly patted Campanella’s arm, like a lineman encouraging a running back as they broke the huddle.
The emotion that this gesture provoked in the judge took him by surprise. He felt something surge into his throat, and he quickly bent over and began retying his shoe. In two or three hours, he would be talking to his nieces. Very likely, by the time he got there, his only sibling, like his wife, Faye, would be dead. Darkness was waiting for everyone.
As Campanella returned to the podium, Patterson’s eyes followed him.
“Okay,” Campanella said. “One final point, if I might, for just one more minute?”
“I’m watching the clock.”
“I want to emphasize that the existence of a market for this material, with customers like that man”—he pointed once more at Cranmer—“ensures that this sort of incredibly cruel, heartless abuse keeps happening.”
Norcross broke in, with an edge to his voice. “I’m very aware of that, Mr. Campanella.”
“I know, but in this case, Agent Patterson informs me that they have uncovered the actual names of some of the victims in the videos and still pictures the defendant has been sharing around. These are real, identified children, Judge, with real, terribly damaged lives.” Campanella pushed forward, finally ignoring his yellow pad, speaking extempore and more confidently, with increasingly intense eye contact to keep the judge with him. “The little blond girl you saw in the DVD? She now lives in eastern Oregon. She’s fifteen, Judge. She’s in foster care. She participates in twice-a-week psychotherapy to deal with her anorexia. She already has a serious drug problem.”
Campanella looked to the side and took a deep breath, gathering himself and trying to get his fury under control. He’d been speaking fast. Now he turned to the bench and continued, more slowly.
“Fifteen, Your Honor. We have a statement from the victim’s aunt about what this abuse, which went on for years, did to her. She also tells us what the ongoing distribution of this video, which will go on forever—for as long as people like this defendant continue to order or download it—still does to her to this day. The charge here may be just receipt, but it is not a victimless crime, Judge. It is not a victimless crime. Thank you.”
This worked. No one in the crowded courtroom made a sound as Campanella returned to his seat. No one even moved, except Linda Ames, who was shaking her head slowly. Patterson turned and gave Campanella a brief approving look.
Norcross looked down at defense counsel. “Ms. Ames? What do you say?” Linda Ames rose.
“What I say is that no one has argued to you, or is going to argue to you, that this is a victimless crime. That’s a straw horse. What I also say, respectfully, is that the nature of this crime is irrelevant at this point. That’s what we have trials for.” She placed her hand on her client’s shoulder. “And finally what I say is that Sid Cranmer is presumed innocent unless and until he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is something that I suggest brother counsel over there conveniently forgot.”
She dropped her hand and moved to the podium. She took no yellow pad.
“Pretrial detention—as you know, Judge—is not intended to be punishment. It is only justified in two narrow circumstances. First, when the government can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant is likely to flee. Or, second, where the government can carry the even heavier burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that a defendant will present a danger to a specific person or to the community generally.”
She paused and pointed at Campanella. “For the past ten minutes, my brother has put on a performance for you designed solely to sell you the sizzle instead of the steak.” She held out her hands palms up and lifted her shoulders. “Pardon me, but where was the evidence relevant to either of the issues you’re actually supposed to be deciding? All sizzle, no steak.”
“I get the barbecue metaphor.”
“We all love children, Judge. I have a son. If anybody tried doing that stuff to him, I’d kill them.” Ames glared over at Campanella, as though Sid were her child and the AUSA was abusing him. “I really would. It’s not that tough to go ballistic about how abusing little kids is bad. It’s bad. It’s horrible. But the first question, the first relevant question, today is: Will Sid run if you release him? And the answer is: Of course he’s not going to run. He’d be nuts to try running with the conditions you can set for his release. He’s almost seventy years old, for heaven’s sake. If he tried to run, he’d just get caught, and he’d be a dead duck. If you have any worries, you can have Sid post his house, you can put him on a curfew or on home confinement, you can have a probation officer monitor him with an ankle bracelet.”
As Ames’s argument gathered momentum, Judge Norcross felt his mind being drawn away from his brother and his nieces and into difficult but blessedly familiar terrain. In about five minutes, he was going to have to decide where Professor Cranmer would be sleeping for the next six or eight months. Norcross had been leaning toward detention, but it was central to the discipline of judging that, while he could prepare ahead of time, he could not, without cheating, decide ahead of time. He had to listen.
Each time, as he approached the moment when he would need to make a hard call, he felt like a man being carried slowly to the top of an old-fashioned roller coaster, click by click to the summit. When he reached the peak, he’d have heard all he was going to hear, he’d open his mouth, and words would plummet out, formed into sentences—conveying to counsel, to the courtroom, to the transcript, to the court of appeals, and to all of posterity exactly what his decision was and why. As Ames shifted to the next segment of her argument, Norcross had only a shadowy idea of what his decision would be. All the glow lights of his brain were lit up with the effort of taking her argument in and weighing his decision. He was getting to the top, and, thank heaven, the steady rise to the precipice was, for the moment, blotting everything else out.
“Now let’s talk about the crime,” Ames was saying. “Used to be, you had to go to the grimiest part of town and knock on some back door to get this garbage. You’d have to be desperate, maybe dangerous, to even get your hands on it. Now it’s available at any time to anyone in the world, anyone in this courtroom, including, respectfully, Your Honor, with a few clicks of a mouse in the privacy of your home or anywhere. There’s an ocean of this manure floating around out there. Anyone can dive into it, anywhere, any time. It’s practically a new form of spam. And”—she held up a finger—“if you intentionally pull it up on your screen, even if you are just curious, you’ve committed a felony, and the government can stick you in prison to serve a five-year mandatory sentence just for looking at it. That’s where we are. That’s where technology has taken us.”
Ames shifted around and nodded at her client. “Sid Cranmer poses no threat to any child and never has. As Mr. Campanella knows very well, my client has no brothers or sisters. He’s never married. He has no niece, and no nephew either for that matter. I’m not going to defend what was said by Luv2look in that chat room. It makes me want to throw up. But I have to point out that speaking those words, awful as they were, was not a crime. More than that, if the government wants to put those words into evidence, they’re going to have to convince you that they’re somehow relevant, and that they actually came from Sid Cranmer. Neither of these things will be easy.”
As Ames’s argument moved toward its climax, Norcross found himself grappling with the most difficul
t dilemma these bail hearings posed: the problem of the visible mistake versus the invisible mistake. If he released Cranmer and the man absconded or hurt a child, Norcross would have made a very serious, very visible mistake. Everyone, including him, would know it, and there would be painful blowback on many levels. People would hate him. He might even hate himself; he’d certainly hate his mistake. On the other hand, if he detained Cranmer when it was not necessary—when Cranmer would never have fled or hurt anyone—the defendant’s loss of liberty would be an invisible mistake. Nobody would ever know it, not even him. It was always tempting to avoid visible mistakes simply by making sure only to commit invisible ones. Bad judges did that.
Ames turned from her client to face the bench. “Let me tell you what’s really going on here, Judge. The government wants to punish my client, an Amherst College professor with no criminal record and a multidecade history in the community, and make headlines without ever having to prove he’s committed the crime he is charged with—or any crime. That’s not right. Sid Cranmer’s no danger to anyone, and he’s not going anywhere. He’s entitled to be released on his own recognizance or with a minimal unsecured personal bond.”
Ames turned and sat; she knew when to quit.
Campanella immediately rose, “May I be heard, Your Honor?”
“There’s no need.”
“Just one point I overlooked, if the court please.”
Norcross nodded, not happy. “All right, but be quick.” Ninety percent of the mess occurred in these proceedings after ninety-nine percent of the useful argument was at its end. Things could unravel over nothing. “I have a lot on my plate today.”
Campanella spoke from behind counsel table, avoiding the podium as a way of indicating he would not be long. “It is significant that Professor Cranmer’s academic specialty is the writer Lewis Carroll, a well-known pedophile.”
At this point, as Norcross had feared, things began to go frizzy. The defendant lifted his head, looking angry, and began whispering furiously to his attorney.
The One-Eyed Judge Page 7
