The Laws of Our Fathers

by Scott Turow

  'Cavalry's on the way,' the second agent said. 'Tammy's 10 - I'd half the county.'

  'Oh brother,' said the agent who held me.

  'You take him in. I'll stay to explain. Fourteen's coming. You sure you got who you want?'

  The agent flipped open the wallet he'd taken from my pocket.

  'Michael Frain,' he said.

  'He's the one.'

  The agent grabbed me by the collar again and jerked me around to face him for the first time.

  'We been looking for you, Michael,' he said.

  DECEMBER 12, 1995

  Sonny

  Tuesday morning status call. Open house in the chamber of horrors. I've had perhaps two hours' sleep. My blood is hot tar; wakefulness at instants feels like an out-of-body experience. And I have lost that convenient armor on my emotions. Words and events strike straight at my viscera with nothing in between. I'm in no condition for the sad procession taking place before me.

  The courtroom teems. Clients and families huddle with attorneys. Cops and PAs, probation officers, the State Defenders, all the felony court regulars greet each other in the corridors and the adjacent lawyers' and witness rooms. They agree on dates for the next appearance or talk out the plea deals, by which most of these cases are finally resolved. Annie polices the spectators' rows, directs defendants to the front, points out the lawyers or court personnel they need to see, while Marietta goes on crying out case numbers, passing up files, and reminding me why they're

  on the call - for arraignment or guilty plea, status report or ruling on motions. Her memory is phenomenal, her notes precise. This guy was supposed to bring in proof of employment; that lady has to make a urine drop this week, per prior order of Judge Simone.

  Some of the morning's crimes have a touch of bathos. One hapless schmo paid a policewoman posing as a hooker $50 to suck her toes. When she badged him, he begged her, tear-struck, to take $400 to let him go. Wired to avoid entrapment claims, she had no choice but to charge the bribery. But for the most part we wallow in sadness.

  'You're old for this line of work,' the transport deputy says, muscling a white-whiskered defendant, a drunk or junkie by the depleted looks of him, out of the lockup toward the bench. He is charged with armed robbery: razor to the throat.

  'Don't I know,' the defendant answers and arrives before me with a wistful look.

  Scanning his rap sheet and its cryptic notations - nine convictions by my count - I do the math. 'How many days ago, Mr Johnson, were you released from the penitentiary?'

  There is no type that has not arrived before me: a senior vice-president of First Kindle arrested in the North End for scoring smack. A seventy-two-year-old grandmother, a valued employee for forty-four years at a garden store, who began a few months ago, for reasons no one can explain, to jigger the receipts, making off with almost $32,000. Often, I imagine, if I remain here long enough, every creature that rode with Noah will appear, charged with something.

  But usually when I lift my eyes it's a young black man who's there, his story, told in his bail or pre-sentence report, numbingly the same - poverty, violence, a shattered fatherless family, little schooling, nobody to care. There is often a special sulkiness that grips them when they face the bench to find another woman. Women have been trying to tame them all their lives, at home, in school, mothers and caseworkers and truant officers whose remonstrations and example never answered the one question that seems to be boiling away in so many: What's this thing they call a man, does he have a peaceful, rightful place in this world? I want to lecture occasionally. 'There was no father in my home, either. I understand, I do.'

  That's never said. It's enough to move ahead. Some come before me defiant, making little effort to hide their hatred for the entire apparatus. But most are simply terrified and clueless. A nineteen-year-old, here for sentencing on a jewelry-store window smash-and-grab, a boy with a head of curls as disorganized as rubbish, wears a jeans company's T-shirt that reads unbutton my fly, a message not calculated to impress the court. The battle-hardened, on the other hand, are often disarmingly familiar.

  'Judge, she sayin I got to take six on this.' The lank defendant, with a sleeveless ‘I that reveals arms scored by tattoos and scars, gestures without respect at Gina, the P D beside him. 'Judge, man, I's just hidin in that store when they cracked me, Judge, I din't even take nothin, Judge, six, that's cold.'

  'You're on probation, Mr Williams, for another armed burglary.'

  'Oh, Judge, that's just a little ol knife, that ain't but a can opener. Six is cold, Judge.'

  'Yes or no,' I say. We both know it will be ten years after trial. Even I, who swore before taking the bench to remember a trial is a constitutional right, have found myself whacking defendants who rack twelve out of sport or in defiance of overwhelming proof. There is no alternative. I will dispose of a thousand cases this year and have time to try no more than fifty.

  Called to justice, no one stakes a proud claim to their crimes; no one believes these events define them. Their misdeeds, even if only hours old, seem remote as legends. Here at the time of judgment, everyone is mystified by what occurred. Their anger, their isolation, their need for whatever self-respect they were striking toward is, for the time being, wholly forgotten. Most cannot explain. They pensively murmur, 'Don't know, Judge,' when I ask, as I do often, 'Why?' As they stand here, almost everyone knows better.

  This morning I sentence Leon McCandless. Six weeks ago, Leon met a lady, Shaneetha Edison, who was at the Evening Shade Tavern with her three-year-old. By now, I know all about this kind of place. The fact that people have no money is everywhere. There are only a few lights that work, including the reflecting beer sign behind the bar, and what they reveal is filthy and broken. The paneling in the room is so old it has started to fray. The toilet in the back is stained, with a seat that's been cracked in half and a cistern that leaks and is always running. The whole tavern smells of rot. The people here are poor and drunk. There are customers all day, little groups of men standing around, talking stuff nobody believes and now and then dealing little bits of dope in coveys in the corners.

  After a drink or two, Shaneetha asked Leon for a smoke and he went to the corner for some loosies - individual cigarettes the Korean grocers sell from the pack for two bits apiece. When he returned, another fellow had his hand inside Shaneetha's dress. A classic tale: Frankie and Johnny. A moment later, the three-year-old, still at his mother's side, was dead. In Area 7, through whatever mysterious means they seem to employ there, by which almost three-quarters of the black defendants seem to speak freely in spite of Miranda warnings and a lifetime knowledge that confessing seldom makes anything easier - in the police station, Leon, the defendant who stands before me, explained about the gun he'd drawn. 'Damn thing just went off,' he said.

  'Thing just went off,' his lawyer, Billy Witt, repeats now for my benefit. None of us can tell in how many layers of his psyche Leon meant to shoot. I give him fifty years.

  'People just can't imagine. They don't get it' That's what the coppers and the prosecutors are always saying. I scoffed when I arrived here and now hear myself making similar remarks. People think they understand this. They see it re-enacted on TV, and in the privacy of their homes, in the dopey glow of the television, thinking whatever dreamy thought they have, figure they have the picture - they know what it's like to be scared, to see violence, to feel the antagonism of black and white. But that does nothing to convey the shock of foreignness, the distance between their world and mine which I feel in every glance, or the dismal truth that the average citizens of Dusseldorf or Kyoto, people whom my mother regarded as enemies, now share more of my life than four-fifths of the young men who stand before me, my supposed countrymen. I revert all the time to the structuralist stuff I studied in graduate school, about thought and culture and custom being one, and think, again and again, We have to change it all.

  After a brief lunch, as the call is winding to an end, we reach the Crime of the Day. Four members
of the Five Street Diggers, a Gangster Outlaw set, stand before me for arraignment on a newly filed complaint. Rudy Singh has stepped up for the state. Two cops, Tic-Tacs, are beside him with their beerpots, sweaters, and running shoes. Gina Devore, the PD, takes the lead for the defense.

  Singh explains the background. As she was leaving the jail where she had visited her brother, a Five Street homegirl, Rooty-Too, was snatched - kidnapped - by other Goobers, the Hanging Hipsters, a rival group within the gang. I decline Singh's invitation to describe Rooty-Too's injuries in greater detail than saying she is hospitalized with contusions, missing teeth, and lacerations in the vaginal area. The Five Streets were desperate for revenge. They captured a Hipster, a ghetto star known as Romey Tuck, beat him, and then chopped off both his arms with machetes. The defendants were arrested in an apartment at Fielder's Green. There one forearm sat bleeding onto newspaper on the linoleum kitchen table, as it was being displayed to other Five Streets as a trophy.

  'Is the issue bond?' I ask.

  'Judge,' says Gina, 'the defendants are juveniles. The state's petitioned to try them as adults.' Good, I almost say.

  'Judge, they're being held in the jail. You know what that's like.' In for violence within the gang, they may not be protected by the usual strict codes. None of these boys is full-grown - two are rangy but not filled out, the smallest is still not much over five feet. I understand. 'Judge, if you'd consider bail. They can't go to school. Their visiting privileges are limited. One of these young men, Marcus - my client Marcus Twitchell -' Gina's eyes cheat southward to her file to be 100 percent certain she has got the name. 'Marcus is an honor student. He was selected last summer for Project Restore. He was -'

  Marcus, the last arrested, has been brought straight here from the station and has not yet been processed. He's still 'G-down' or' Gangster down,' dressed in gang attire, which includes a satiny Starter jacket in the glistening aquamarine of the Miami Dolphins and gangsta baggies hiked down so his belt line's at pubic level, revealing several inches of his striped briefs. His Brownies -brown garden gloves worn for scuffing, shooting, and leaving no fingerprints - still hang out of his side pocket. His eyes never reach above a spot two or three feet below me. He is slowly chewing gum. I ask about his record.

  'Three station adjustments,' Rudy reads. Marcus has two thefts, which count for little with me. The poor will steal. Then the third. Agg Battery. Another revenge beating. Someone was stomped.

  'How long ago?'

  'Two weeks, Yaw Onah.'

  I shake my head. Bond at $100,000 full cash. So much for Marcus. So much for his chance. Even on a sleepless morning, with my loins sore from loving and my heart pregnant with what I figure for false hope, I cannot stretch this far. The other lawyers do not even bother with similar motions.

  During this hearing, Loyell Eddgar has found his way into the courtroom. He appears irretrievably somber, dressed in the same wool sport coat as yesterday. His face, like mine, looks ruined by lack of sleep. I would have expected a powerful pol, even a reformer, to travel with a retinue, but he's alone. Being a judge and being a state senator are probably the same, finding you are now the Great Oz, just some weary individual pulling the whistles and levers behind the fearsome mask of great authority. Eddgar has taken the lone chair behind the prosecution table, which Jackson Aires had periodically occupied. In the wake of yesterday's ending, Eddgar and Molto noticeably avoid one another. For the time being, the Crime of the Day appears to have Eddgar's attention. As he absorbs my ruling, and the last of the prisoners are being herded off, he frowns harshly. It brings to mind the disdainful scowl Zora always had for her enemies, the rebuke of a superior spirit. I find myself piqued, even as Eddgar, with his message smugly delivered, looks away.

  Don't you dare turn away, I want to say, especially not you, you who waited for these communities to rise up in the simpleminded fantasy it would change the world. The war that began in 1965 -the war on the streets which you and Zora promoted, rooted for, and helped cause - that war has never stopped. The terrible violence that was released, the expression of an overwhelming grievance, has proved to be a demon genie, never to be forced back into his bottle.

  Yet were they wrong? I think suddenly. Eddgar? My mother? Am I prepared to renounce their commitments? I have been through it a million times in my own mind. I judge both of them dimly. Long ago, I learned their dirtiest, most crabbed secret, that their passion to change the world derived from the fact they could not change themselves. But that confuses the messenger with the clarion she sounds. What my mother shrilled out about, carried on for - the desolating circumstances of Americans of color; the routine abuse of females; the heartless exploitation of the weak; the arrogance of privilege and the corruptions of power; the persistent childishness of greed and the redeeming value of mutual concern and sharing - she was not wrong about any of that. In the ledger book of this century, our greatest achievements are the human ones made in response to those concerns. I will always think of that as Nikki's truest heritage.

  Just as the call is winding to a close, as a transvestite hooker in an orange dress pilfered from a Goodwill box is explaining why she sliced her John, a formidable presence blows into the courtroom. Raymond Horgan, former Prosecuting Attorney for Kindle County and head of the Judicial Reform Commission which recruited me for the bench, tosses a wave to the deputies at the door and moves to the front of the courtroom, trailed by two younger lawyers, a fair-skinned African-American woman and a tall, thin man with an Adam's apple prominent enough to make me wonder about goiter. Raymond hands Marietta a half-sheet notice of motion while he turns back to the door, awaiting someone else. Grown stout in the land of corporate excess - his face is now little more than a rubbery mask - Horgan retains an impressive public bearing. He wears his money: a handmade shirt, dark grey with white cuffs and collar, a fancy grey suit, a mohair overcoat squashed beneath the same arm that totes his briefcase. His cologne and hair tonic can almost be sniffed from the bench. Finally, the stragglers he is awaiting arrive -Tommy Molto, hurrying, and last, Hobie, with a harassed expression. Molto and Horgan, well acquainted from Raymond's years as Tommy's boss, confer briefly. Raymond has him by more than half a foot and there is a fleeting impression of parent and child. Then Marietta calls out Nile's case.

  'Raymond Horgan for an unnamed intervenor,' Raymond says as the lawyers circle before me. ‘I have a motion, Your Honor, which I would like to make in chambers and under seal.'

  Not in front of the press, in other words. Hobie steps forward to object, which, these days, is sign enough for me that I should grant Horgan the opportunity he wants. I wave everyone back to chambers, while in the jury box Dubinsky, the lone early arrival from the media, glowers furiously and heads out, probably to phone the Tribune's lawyers. Nothing is more important to the press than what they are not allowed to know.

  We wait some time for Suzanne, the court reporter, who has gone to renew her paper. A tall, slender, quiet woman, she carries in her stenograph machine and takes a seat. There are not enough chairs for everyone, and so only she and I sit. The others - Raymond and his minions, Tommy, Rudy, Hobie, Marietta, Annie - stand, circling the round side table that occupies the corner of my chambers. Nile has elected to remain in the courtroom. Raymond's male associate draws from his briefcase a mass of papers that are handed to Marietta, while Raymond, in stentorian baritone, reviews the circumstances for me.

  In our lengthy dealings before I agreed to take this job, I found Raymond wily, wise, a slick former politico, beguiling with self-deprecating Gaelic charm. His white hair, slightly yellowed now, crinkles back above the brow in waves that seemed to have been stamped from the forge of age and wisdom. Yesterday, Raymond says, late in the day, the River National Bank was served with a forthwith subpoena demanding production of certain banking records relating to a $10,000 check. He is here to ask that the subpoena be quashed.

  'Who issued the subpoena?' I ask.

  'Me,' says Hobie.

 
; 'He's doing it again, Judge,' Tommy says. 'He's going to pull another end run around the discovery rules.'

  'Mr Tuttle, let me say right now that better not be true.' 'Judge, I gave Molto here a copy of the subpoena.' 'After Mr Horgan notified me of it.'

  'Your Honor, I just became aware of this evidence,' says Hobie in that ridiculous blank-faced way he has when he's lying. I don't even bother to reply.

  'Judge,' Tommy whines, 'Judge, I mean, look how unfair this is. He turns up a new document for cross-examination, I can't talk to the witness -'

  'Go talk to him,' says Hobie. ‘I don't care.'

  'He's not very eager to talk to me today.'

  'Not my fault,' says Hobie.

  'On the contrary, Mr Tuttle,' I intervene. 'It is your fault. Mr Molto made tactical decisions based on the available evidence, as he understood it. If you had some eleventh-hour discovery, then you should have notified the court and Mr Molto before his direct. I warned you. I told you no more, and I meant it.' I push my hair back, using the instant to reassure myself it's not my nerves, stripped bare by lack of sleep, that are speaking. 'Mr Horgan's motion will be allowed.'

  'Judge!' Hobie actually jumps. Two hundred fifty pounds if he's an ounce, he lands a foot behind where he started. 'Judge Klonsky. This is my whole defense, this is the crux of my case.'

  'Which you just discovered yesterday.' I give him what you would call a dirty look, which brings Hobie to a rare silence. He looks on with the wrenching vulnerability that falls over a bully out of bluffs.

  'Your Honor, I'm begging you. I'll beg you, Judge.' He reaches toward a metal file cabinet for support and on old football player's creaky knees begins sinking toward the floor.