9
O
UR LAST
visit of the mission was to see Marcus Riley, our client's supposed alibi, who lived on Avenue J, a couple of blocks from Glenwood Gardens.
Marcus Riley was a large man, bulky and lumbering, and he certainly did not look thrilled to see a couple of white people in business clothes knocking on his door. Hip-hop rumbled out of the room behind him:
Kingpins put in bullpens, old connects get paro'
Break out of town when the Jakes take down the Pharaoh.
"We represent Lorenzo Tate," Myra said, when it was looking like Marcus was not planning on inviting us in.
"You represent him in what?"
"You know that Lorenzo has been charged with murder, right?"
"You mean you his lawyers?"
"That would be us."
"Well, you ain't his family, that's for damn sure," Marcus said, finally moving aside to let us in.
Lorenzo had told us that Marcus lived by himself. Even if he hadn't, I'd have been able to guess based on the condition of Marcus's apartment. The living room was cluttered, the furniture stained and ratty, although I noticed that the television was a large flat-screen. There were dirty clothes and empty beer bottles strewn across the floor, and it smelled like a locker room.
"Lorenzo said you were with him on the night of the murder," Myra said, her inflection halfway between a statement and a question.
"Yeah, uh-huh, true that," Marcus said, sprawling down on his couch, grabbing a tallboy from the floor, and helping himself to a hearty swig.
"You mind if I turn this down?" Myra said, pointing toward the stereo. She was still standing, so I was too.
Marcus shrugged, and Myra lowered the music until it was barely audible.
"I'm going to ask too that you don't drink any more just now," Myra said. "You
give us a statement, we write it up, your drinking a beer is the sort of detail
that can complicate things."
"Ain't no thing," Marcus said, putting the can down on the floor.
"Strawberry told me you all was gonna come by."
"What were you and Lorenzo doing that night?"
"We was just chilling."
"Where were you?"
"Where Strawberry say we were?"
"I want to hear it from you," Myra replied.
Marcus hesitated, his face going slack, his whole focus draining out. I realized that he was stoned. The smell of pot was still faintly wafting through the musty air.
"We was here," he finally said.
"Just you and Lorenzo?"
"Ain't that what he say?"
"Listen, Marcus," Myra said, starting to lose her patience. "We
can't just tell you what we want you to say. If you can't remember it on your
own, you're not going to be any use to us."
"It was just him and me is how I'm remembering it."
"And what were you doing?"
"You know, just chilling. Wasn't getting in no kind of trouble."
"Were you here all night?"
"Strawberry ain't gonna want me to say we left, is he? Besides, I
ain't looking to put myself in the mix."
"Nobody's suggesting you had anything to do with what happened in
the Gardens that night, Mr. Riley."
"I know
you
ain't gonna be sayin' that, on account it don't
help your boy. But how I know the law not gonna just come after me, I say I was
with Strawberry? Then I don't help him none, and I'm facing time too."
"I really don't think that's likely to happen," Myra said. "All
we're asking you to do is tell us the truth. Were you with Lorenzo Tate that
night?"
"Lorenzo tell me that I was," Marcus said. "I know he'd been over
to my crib sometime that week, but I didn't write down no date as to when it
was."
"What'd the two of you do?"
"What's Lorenzo say we did?" Marcus asked.
"We need to know what you remember."
"Things are a little foggy in my mind just now," Marcus said.
"Truth be told, I sparked up a Dutch before you all came knocking."
"Thanks for your time, Mr. Riley," Myra said, standing abruptly and heading toward the door.
"
WHAT'S WITH
the quick exit?" I asked once we were back on the street.
"There's no point in throwing good time after bad," Myra replied.
"Is that an answer to my question, or something you got off of a
refrigerator magnet?"
"Do you think we can use him?"
"I can see some problems with using him."
"Yeah, like the fact that he's got a sheet, that he's drinking and
high and it's barely noon, that he probably really doesn't even remember whether
he was with Lorenzo that night. We put him on the stand, we virtually ensure a
conviction."
"So we don't put on our guy's only alibi witness?"
"The burden is on them, not on us. We're allowed to just attack
their version of what happened without presenting our own. But as soon as we
offer our own version, the jury's going to be comparing the two, trying to
decide which is more believable. We should only put a story forward if we either
feel like we have to, or if we're confident our story is a lot more convincing
than theirs is."
"So we don't put on Lorenzo's alibi witness, even if Lorenzo is
telling the truth and he was hanging out with Marcus at the time of the
shooting?"
"Whether or not something may be true isn't relevant for our purposes," Myra said.
"The only thing that matters is whether or not it's convincing."
10
N
ICE OF
you to join us for a change, Myra," Michael said, once we'd sat down with Zach, Max, Julia, and Shelly in a conference room for our weekly team lunch meeting.
"Where are you on the Gibbons appeal?"
"The first thing was that Isaac had to review the trial
transcripts for any potential ineffectiveness claim. He has and there isn't."
"No surprise there," Michael said. "So where does that leave us?"
"That generally leaves us with prosecutorial misconduct and
judicial error, right?"
"The ADAs break any big rules?"
"Much as I love to bad-mouth prosecutors, I don't see anything
there."
"Okay," Michael said. "That leaves judicial error. Or at least, I
hope it does."
"It does indeed," Myra said. "The judge essentially cut our whole
defense off at the knees. The first thing has to be that he wouldn't let our
expert on false confessions testify."
"But the case law in New York supported that decision, right?"
"The case law in New York is wrong," Myra replied.
Michael raised his eyebrows. "That solves that," he deadpanned.
"So we have point one. What else?"
"I'm working on it," Myra said.
Michael gave a mirthless laugh, shaking his head. "How's Terrell
holding up?"
"I'm going up to see him on Saturday," Myra said. "I haven't had a
chance to go up since he got sent to Sing Sing."
Michael looked at me. "You ever been to one of our real prisons?"
"Not unless Rikers counts," I said.
"It certainly doesn't," Michael said. "You should go up with Myra
and see what high-stakes poker really looks like."
"Sure," I said, glancing over at Myra. She looked like she was trying to come up with a way of opposing the idea.
"I'm going to be leaving really early on Saturday morning," Myra said at last.
"That's fine," I said.
"It's actually a lovely little trip up alongside the Hudson," Julia said.
"Until you get where you're going, that is."
"Ah, yes, the scenic prison drive," Zach said. "The public
defender version of stopping to smell the roses."
"Speaking of prison visits, you ever find a sign language interpreter for your deaf guy?" I asked him.
Zach shook his head. "I took a sign interpreter, but it turned out
he and my guy didn't speak the same sign language."
"People speak different kinds of sign language?" Max asked.
"Apparently Spanish sign language is totally different from American sign language," Zach said.
"Or else the interpreter just wanted to fuck with me."
"What's your guy up on?" Julia asked Zach. Julia was the one member of our team who was fully fluent in Spanish, and therefore often ended up getting drafted into emergency translation duties, though this appeared to be beyond her skill set. She was first generation Cuban American, and entirely too fashionable to be working as a public defender.
"Armed robbery."
"How does someone who's deaf commit an armed robbery?"
"I've got a hard time picturing it myself," Zach admitted. "But
maybe that's just the soft bigotry of low expectations."
"So how about you, Shelly?" Michael asked. "How's it been going so
far?"
"Okay, I guess," Shelly said. "It's a lot to take in right away."
"Is it what you expected it would be?" Max asked.
"Sure," Shelly said. "It's really the number of cases more than
anything else. It's hard to even keep track."
"So," Michael said to Shelly. "Now that you actually work here, as
compared to an interview when everybody on both sides of the desk is lying about
everything, what can we tell you about the job?"
"I don't know," Shelly said. "I guess I just wonder, with the
pressure and everything, how people deal with it."
"Same as people deal with anything else," Zach said. "Sex and
alcohol."
AFTER LUNCH
I was to spend a half day covering arraignments, picking up additional cases. I walked over to the courthouse, took my familiar place in the glum meeting room across from the basement holding cells. My first client was a drug case, looked to be a street dealer rousted in a sweep of Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. Even by the standards of the streets he was fairly young, just nineteen. But Shawne Flynt's face as he sat across from me belied his age; I didn't detect even a glimmer of fear in his eyes. I could tell without asking that this wasn't his first time in the system.
"So," I said to Shawne after doing my introductory spiel, "why
don't you tell me what happened?"
"This ain't nothing but some shit, yo," Shawne said. He was tall and lanky, an athletic looseness about him. His face was narrow and angular, his eyes the stillest thing about him.
"All they got on me was I was parked up on the street. Wasn't no product on me,
wasn't even no cheddar. They just swoop me up when they clear the corner."
"They're charging you with possession with intent," I said.
"I just got done telling you I ain't possessed a goddamn thing
when they took me. All they got on me is I was there."
"Did they sweep up a lot of people?"
"They took in everybody who be standing on Grand Avenue," Shawne said.
"Did they get anybody who was actually holding?"
"You arrest enough niggers on the corner, somebody's going to be
holding, know what I'm saying? But that ain't got nothing to do with me."
"You know the guys who were caught?" I asked. The vibe I was getting that Shawne ran the corner, and that he'd been clean when picked up because he no longer had to take the direct risk.
"You ain't gotta worry about none of them," Shawne said dismissively.
"They soldiers. None of that is gonna come back on me."
"Soldiers have been known to flip," I said.
"Not on Grand Avenue they ain't," Shawne said. "You got no call to
worry about my crew."
"Your crew," I repeated.
Shawne smiled and offered a little shrug. If it'd been a slip it wasn't one that bothered him.
"True that," he said. "They my crew. But they ain't gonna come back on me. You
don't got to do nothing here, yo, else I'd get me a real lawyer to take care of
it."
I ignored the offhand insult, which I'd gotten used to. "Why'd they pick you up at all then?" I asked.
"Politics as usual," Shawne said. "They trying to clear out the
corner, fancy up the hood. They trying to do to the Hill what they done to Fort
Greene, get shit all safe for the white folks to move in. The five-oh already
shut the hotel where all the hos be trickin'; now they move on to the corners.
They already snatched me up once before; didn't nothing come of it."
"When was this?"
"When this nonsense all started, two months back maybe."
"What happened to those charges?"
"The fuck you think happened? Ain't you been listening? They don't
got shit on me."
"Have they actually been dropped?"
"Hell, yeah. Once they realized nobody was going to be snitchin'
they backed up off of that shit."
"Okay," I said. "We're probably going to have to wait them out a
little, but hopefully that same thing will happen here."
ONCE WE
were out before the judge, Shawne slouched beside me, flanked by court officers, a vacant look on his face. It never ceased to amaze me how many defendants had to make a point of showing their indifference or hostility to the judge, despite the fact that a defendant's demeanor could be the single most important factor in the judge's snap judgment regarding bail: pissing him off was often the difference between going home and being carted off to Rikers.
"What do we got?" Judge Robinson asked ADA Narducci once Shawne's case was called, the bailiff reading a laundry list of charges—possession with intent, conspiracy to distribute, loitering, disorderly conduct. It sounded as though they'd rounded up a drug kingpin, rather than a teenager on a corner.
ADA Narducci went into a spiel about the numerous arrests that'd been made in the raid on Grand and Putnam, stressing that the police had discovered drugs with a street value of several hundred dollars along with several thousand dollars in cash. The numbers suggesting that the cops had only found the small street stash, not the major cache where the bulk of the drugs were kept. When Narducci was finished the judge turned to me.
"My client pleads not guilty to all charges, Your Honor. I didn't
hear anything whatsoever linking my client to any drugs. No drugs were found on
his person; he had roughly forty dollars in his pocket. The fact that someone
else somewhere on the block might have been holding drugs has nothing whatsoever
to do with my client."
"The police made a sweep in which they picked up an entire drug crew," Narducci said.
"By 'drug crew,' you mean every black person who happened to be standing within fifty feet of the guy who actually had the drugs?" I replied.
"We're not trying the case now, gentlemen," Judge Robinson interrupted.
"Bail's set at ten thousand dollars. Who's next?"
I huddled with Shawne for a moment before he was led away. "That bail number's ridiculous," I said apologetically.
"It's just because of the number of charges they've thrown at you."
Shawne shrugged. "Not going to be no problem. I got a bondsman who
know me. Me and mine be out of here later today."
I wasn't surprised; making bail was part of the price of doing business for the drug trade, just another form of overhead, like taxes for a regular business.
"I'll make a discovery request of the DA, set up a meeting to see what they
think they've got. I'll give you a call when I know where things stand."
"Just let me know when they're done with this nonsense," Shawne said, as the court officers led him away.