I was explaining to him that his trial would be in a couple of months, and that in the meantime he should refrain from ratting on himself to the police—“I’m sorry, my lawyer told me …”—when Tom King, the attorney with whom I shared an office, walked in. He’d just been to court to receive a jury verdict.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
He turned his thumbs down and frowned. “Guilty,” he said.
Reginald slid down in his chair, his eyes wide with fear. “Was that my trial?” he asked.
“No, Reginald, that was somebody else’s,” I said. “Don’t worry, you’ll be at your trial.”
§3-04
It was spring. A million daffodils* had risen to greet the shiny-haired high school girls, back, on their Gold Line buses, like a host of Persephones from the frozen West. As you crossed Indiana Avenue to the courthouse, you could smell their fragrances—the daffodils’, the buses’, the girls’—also the muddy Potomac and the tar streets heating up and the virgin grass and the tree buds bursting and, oh! it was great to be alive in the Nation’s Capital!
The fragrance stopped at the courthouse door. I walked across the lobby to the information counter, to check what courtroom Judge Quinn was in, as I had to go to Richard Joe Madison’s sentencing. On the black slate countertop sat four computer consoles with keyboards and video displays, but no operators. Behind the counter was a wall of glass, and behind the glass were thirty-two TV screens with two empty chairs in front of them. The TV screens showed pictures of closed doors and empty hallways. What has befallen the crew of the starship Superior Court? I found a mimeographed list of judges’ assignments lying on the counter-top and rushed off to face Judge Quinn.
For the tenth time that day, I mounted the gleaming stainless-steel escalator hissing skyward through the court’s vast atrium. As the clattering conveyer bore me aloft, I felt like a pill, tack, nail, or nut, some such fungible item, at an unknown stage in the interminable process of my own manufacture.
As the appearance of a yellow line on the sinking step in front of me signaled the impending dissolution of the illusory step on which I was standing, the entire contraption stopped, all but sending me sprawling. How many times was I going to be the butt of this same joke?
The next flight up had also quit, so I had to climb it, noting, as I always did, with the same degree of surprise I always felt, that climbing a broken escalator is immeasurably more difficult than climbing a staircase that never was an escalator. Psychology may have something to do with this, but I believe it’s mostly attributable to the greater depth (from front to back) of the mechanical steps.
I passed through two sets of doors into the courtroom, which, like all the other courtrooms, had no windows. A curved railing—the bar—separated rows of cushioned theater seats from the semicircular area where the judge and lawyers performed. A circle of spotlights on the ceiling poured random pools of intense brightness on the judge’s right shoulder, the third seat from the left in the front row of the jury box, a spot on the beige-carpeted floor just in front of the defense table. It looked like a set for one of those boring plays where no one wears costumes and you see the stagehands working.
Richard Joe Madison, his mother, and the young woman who counseled him at Washington Streetworks were waiting for me. Richard looked the impeccable gentleman in his suit and tie, his short haircut and protruding ears accentuating the boyish look of his smooth-skinned face. He smiled self-consciously as his counselor reviewed the highlights of his progress, for me to relay to the judge.
It was a very confident attorney-client team that strode to the defense table when our case was called. I reemphasized to Judge Quinn what I had already reported to him in writing: Richard had fulfilled every condition that the judge had imposed at the time of his release. He’d been a well-behaved student at school and a terrific worker at his part-time job in the school library (“very helpful and dependable, easy-going and willing to do any task,” wrote the librarian), kept all his probation appointments, studied with his tutor, stayed away from his old friends, and developed a close relationship with his counselor. Judge Quinn rested his cheekbone on the base of his thumb and drummed his fingers on the side of his head.
The representative sent up from the prosecutor’s office spoke next, never taking his eyes off a note clipped to the case file on the table in front of him. He had no personal knowledge of the case. “The government feels,” he read, “that although Richard may have done all of these things, he has not been sincere. He has done all of this just to avoid incarceration.”
Judge Quinn felt for his Adam’s apple; then, his eyes darting about the room, he pronounced sentence: Richard Joe Madison was to be committed for an indeterminate period to that institution which someone—an Orwellian fascist or utopian dreamer or both—had named “The Children’s Center.”
As the marshal led him away, Richard silently pulled off his wristwatch and handed it to his mother to keep.
When I set out on the long walk across the street back to the office, there’d been a subtle change in the weather. The spring colors had lost their intensity, as though the blood had drained from the face of the day.
I pulled open a little green door hidden under a staircase along one side of 451 Indiana Avenue, N.W., and hiked down the long, narrow, windowless corridor, its gracefully arched ceiling higher by half than the passage was wide. A bundle of cables ran along one wall, and steel plates in the floor concealed the source of a steamy smell, which, together with the peculiar dimensions of the hall, gave our building the ambience of a Victorian submarine. Crew members, obviously engaged in some desperate, labor-intensive enterprise, hurried in and out of little doorways on either side of the hallway. Phones rang everywhere.
Bang! A loose floorplate announced my arrival at my office. I sat down at my desk and began taking stock, as it were, of all my cases, noting their procedural status. I had to report my caseload monthly to the head of the P.D.S. Trial Division, who’d adjust the number of days you’d pick up new cases according to the number of cases you already had. While I was at it, I paid particular attention to the dates when I was supposed to appear in court. I went through my pocket calendar and checked the notations there against the notification slips the court had sent me, and then checked those against the entries on my case files. When I’d gone through my pocket calendar, I went through the court slips and checked to see if the noticed hearings were entered in the pocket calendar and on the case files. I also went through the case files and checked them against the pocket calendar and the notices. Then I made sure the entries on my wall calendar agreed with those on the court notices, the date book, and the case files. This exhaustive four-way fail-safe system was so enormously complicated that an occasional court date would snake its way through and surprise me. I was trying to tighten up.
My inventory verified what I already knew: an inordinate number of my clients were languishing behind bars. I took things one at a time, and I’d put one client out of my mind the moment I turned my attention to the next; and sometimes they’d all merge, and I’d forget them all, really, and just be pushing papers on my desk, trying to file things on time, keep on top of my calendar. But when I thought about it, there really were a lot of them locked up.
I picked up the phone—a man of action, I was always picking up the phone—and called the mother of the complainant in one of my robbery cases. My investigator had told me that this kid’s mother wouldn’t let the investigator interview her son. I was going to say things, all of which would be true, that I hoped would change the woman’s mind.
(You try to get a signed statement from an opposing witness, so that if his testimony in court varies in any way from his original story—which it almost always does, memory being what it is—you can confront him with his “prior inconsistent statement,” throwing his credibility into doubt.)
“My client is charged with stealing five dollars from your son,” I began.
“No, it’s not a
question of just stealing,” the woman’s voice replied.
“Well, stealing by force and violence,” I admitted. “The allegation is he threw him to the ground and hit him several times.”
“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” she said. She had a pretty woman’s voice. “The man at the Safeway says they’re having trouble with kids taking money from other kids all the time. The boy who did it is black. We’re a black family. There comes a time when we have to stop letting things go. If he’s guilty, he should be punished. Maybe it will do him good. Next time, he could use a knife. Or a policeman could shoot him. I wish he had a mother who would talk to him.”
“I’ll be talking to my client,” I pointed out, “and if I had a written statement from your son, I’d be able to see the strength of the evidence, and I might advise my client to plead guilty.”
“As far as answering questions about it, I’m not sure our boy should have to live through it again,” she said.
“Good,” I was thinking, “maybe he won’t testify,” when the woman mentioned that her husband was a former police officer. End of conversation.
An intelligent and compassionate woman, she was concerned for her son, and her community, and even for the boy who had attacked her son. Where did I fit into this?
Not only were virtually all of my clients black,* the great majority of the complainants were black, as were almost all the jurors. Even half the cops were black. The 25 percent of Washington’s population that was white included practically no poor people or even working-class people, but was almost entirely middle class, like me, and lived mostly in one narrow sliver of town, which a colleague of mine dubbed “Caucasia.” (The city as a whole he called “Johannesburg on the Potomac.”) In a typical criminal case, the only whites involved were the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, and maybe a cop—the four faces of “the authorities.” Being a public defender did not necessarily make you a champion of the poor in the eyes of the poor. Some said we were elitists who exercised our principles (and egos) at the expense of the black community. When we put a client on the street, we didn’t put him on our street.
I got a call from Yeats Moore’s group home counselor, asking my help in dealing with a crisis situation.
Yeats had been arrested several months before, for smoking on a bus. It is against the law to smoke on a bus, but not just anybody could manage to get arrested for it. Yeats had what it takes. Yeats had an attitude.
I’m sure Yeats put on quite a show—waving a big fat jay around, blowing reefer smoke rings, laughing like the coolest dude alive, letting everybody know exactly whose bus they were on. He was wrong, as usual. This bus belonged to a “mod squad roller” (plainclothes cop), and Yeats’s antics offended him. He arrested him simply for “smoking on a bus”—Yeats threw the herb out the window; and when he searched him—a cop is allowed to search you after he makes a legal arrest, because you could have a weapon or evidence on you—he found a hypodermic needle in Yeats’s pocket. Yeats had ridden right into trouble again: count one—smoking on a Metrobus; count two—possession of implements of a crime (hypodermic needle). The syringe had traces in it of Bam, as phenmetrazine is called on the street. (Phenmetrazine, a powerful stimulant, is taken alone or in conjunction with heroin.) And Yeats had just gotten off probation for disorderly conduct three months before this arrest.
He was put back on probation, with the condition that he report regularly for drug testing. The first time he appeared for urinalysis at the Youth Abstinence Program, an attendant, who was reading a newspaper, told him to have a seat, and continued reading the paper. This infuriated Yeats. He left and never returned.
Everything infuriated Yeats Moore. Having violated a condition of his probation, he was put into a group home. Now his counselor there was calling me for help.
“Yeats won’t go to school,” the counselor said. “He won’t go to the doctor for lice. He’s cursed out everyone here except the cook, and that’s only because her four huge sons are here all the time. He doesn’t keep his curfew; he’s been in fights; he told the head of residence to fuck herself. The chief of aftercare services for the whole city came to see him. Yeats told him to kiss his ass.
“Yeats is very disturbed. He needs evaluation.”
The counselor wanted to know if I would cooperate by not opposing placement of Yeats for forty-five days at St. Elizabeths* psychiatric hospital—he was afraid of what might happen during a delay. I said I’d talk to Yeats about it.
I called up Yeats, who professed that he “didn’t give a shit” where they put him.
“Good,” I said. “So we’ll let them put you in St. E’s for a while. It’ll be a nice vacation for you. The food’s not bad. You’ll enjoy the change.” I meant it. I’d had kids in the evaluation program before. Yeats said he’d go quietly.
All that remained was for me to clear the plan with Yeats’s other lawyer. (Many clients had more than one case, and more than one lawyer.) This other lawyer was not a slouch; he was a real go-getter. He fought for every right his clients had. “If they want to put him in St. E’s,” he said, “they can give us thirty days’ notice and schedule a full hearing.” Period. The man was an expert on the law. Yeats Moore wouldn’t see a psychiatrist for a long time.
§3-05
The word for Cheryl Lee Harris was formidable. She was only fifteen, but looked much older. Intelligent, sophisticated, and self-possessed, she could look you in the eye and lie, and you’d never suspect a thing. She had the delicate wrists and elegant hands of an artist, and an artist’s eye for clothes, and a face … She had presence: you wanted her to like you, and she did—she was a real sweetheart, very friendly. Of course, she was quite pretty, and I am inclined to ascribe all good qualities to pretty girls, but everybody liked her. The detective liked her. The FBI men liked her. Even the teller she robbed at the bank liked her, as much as could be expected.
Cheryl, unarmed, had walked into a big bank in the middle of Washington, in the middle of the day, handed a teller a note (“This is a hold-up. Give me 20’s, 50’s, and 100’s. Don’t give me no funny money or you are dead”) and walked out with $1,000, leaving behind her image on film.
Detectives, suspecting a gang that had used teen-agers as note-carriers in past robberies, showed Cheryl’s picture around a neighborhood the gang was known to frequent. Someone recognized the picture and put a name on it. The detectives staked out Cheryl’s house.
“You take a pretty picture, girl,” one detective said as he grabbed her. Nobody loves a line like a cop.
Cheryl thus became one of the females who are the respondents in 15 percent of all cases referred to juvenile court. (Girls are the respondents in just 11 percent of cases involving acts against persons, such as assault and robbery, but 59 percent of “status offenses”—“beyond control,” truancy, runaway.1)
Cheryl had no prior record, and the judge had no factual basis on which to decide that she posed a danger to herself or others or was likely to flee, so he had to release her to await her trial.
We walked across the street to my office, where I set about taking pictures of her, to record what she looked like at around the time of the robbery—it might be a year before she would be tried. We went out into the parking lot in pursuit of enough light for the office’s balky Polaroid. Cheryl stood, hands on hips, shoulders back, head tilted gracefully, the white kerchief around her head nicely accenting her white terry cloth V-neck top. The pictures showed a young woman looking at someone with a mixture of tolerance and amusement.
Back in the office, I sat down behind my big desk and cleared an area in the center of it large enough to accommodate the emblem of my profession (American equivalent of the British wig), a twelve-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-half-inch yellow pad of paper.
“Tell me about your life in crime,” I said.
Cheryl took a deep breath, blinked her memory into focus, and began: “Harry Smith is a professional bank robber. I was messing with this guy Tony, and To
ny and Harry used to swing together real tough, so I knew Harry.” She paused after each phrase, to give me time to write it down. “Harry approached me and asked me, was I about making money? I asked, doing what? He said, going into a bank. He told me how he’d do it: I’d go into a bank with a note, and the lady would give me the money. So I said okay.”
Harry’s goal, of course, was to minimize his own risk by sending an agent into the bank, rather than venturing in himself. His problem—not uncommon in the world of banking—was, how do you get someone to take all the risk without demanding all the profit? His solution was to get kids to do it. Not only were kids easily manipulated by someone who was a bank robber with a big car, and a gun, and drugs, but they faced substantially less risk than an adult: Harry, if caught robbing a bank, would be looking at fifteen years, or up to life imprisonment if he were armed. As a juvenile, Cheryl could be incarcerated until she was twenty-one, but, as a practical matter, wouldn’t do more than a year or two, tops. That kind of time she ought to be able to swallow with her mouth shut, particularly when snitching on Harry would make him very angry.
The juvenile messenger method promised to breathe new life into the bank robbery business, which had been showing a very poor return: on account of those little cameras on the walls, and because there are always plenty of witnesses, and because there aren’t a whole lot of people in the field—bank robbery is a specialty, and the police know whom to look for—bank robbers are caught far more frequently than other criminals. The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s annual “clearance rate” (number of cases closed as a percentage of number of new cases filed) for bank robbery runs around 85 percent, compared to under 30 percent for all robbery.2 In United States district courts nationwide, in cases that proceeded to judgment, 1,362 bank robbery defendants were found guilty, and 22 not guilty, in 1980.3 There were only 62 bank robberies in Washington in the year ending in September 1980, compared to 1,146 robberies at other commercial establishments, and the bank robberies netted an average of less than $1,000 each.4 One of the robbery detectives handling Cheryl’s case told me that the smarter robbers were switching to jewelry stores, where security was relatively lax, and you could steal a single watch worth a couple of thousand dollars.
How Can You Defend Those People? : The Making of a Criminal Lawyer Page 8
