The Truth Is Out There

My attorney asks me to take notes at the hearings, because sometimes the court reporter won’t turn out a transcript in time. I guess they are useful to her; my harried summaries of who says what, when they change their story, when they are caught in a discrepancy. The notes are an overload of information, with cross-outs, abbreviations, symbols, but between the lines, I try to piece together the real story of what happened. I start with the bare bones of the plot: here, our client is charged with murder and obstruction of justice. As a matter of practice, my attorney doesn’t ask the client what happened. Instead, she asks, what will the police say happened? In this case, the police say our client shot and killed someone. The police say there were multiple witnesses. The police say our client threatened the witnesses to discourage them from giving statements. Our investigators find one of these witnesses, a woman named Ms. Mills, and she tells is that she is not afraid of our client. To present this information to the judge, we subpoena her, but she comes to court very reluctantly. She does not want anyone to see her at the courthouse. She does not want to sit in the courtroom. I wait with Ms. Mills in a secluded area, making sure she does not leave in case the judge wants her to testify.

My attorney asked me to find out if our client actually threatened Ms. Mills. But Ms. Mills makes only vague statements to about the case. She thinks our client is “a good person,” but after speaking to the police about the shooting, she started to “see things differently,” and was “uncomfortable” when our client started showing up at her house unexpectedly. She accepted a placement in the witness protection program, left her apartment, and moved into a hotel room in the suburbs paid for by the government. While in at the hotel, her apartment was robbed. They took her TV, she said, and she wondered if it was because of the shooting. Who robbed your apartment? I ask. I have no idea, she answers. She tells me again that she is “very uncomfortable” to be involved in the case. By way of explanation, she says, “I have to live on these streets.” She shrugs defeatedly and tells me she doesn’t know who to trust. I nod, to acknowledge the difficulty of her position, but I have nothing reassuring to say.

At the hearing, one woman in the audience sighs loudly when witness intimidation is mentioned. She seems frustrated, but I can’t tell if it’s with my attorney, who argues that the alleged obstruction is being blown out of proportion, or with the prosecution, who argue that witnesses truly fear for their lives as the result of our client’s actions. The prosecution paints our client as a big wheel in the neighborhood drug and gang underworld. Our client is young – probably under 21. His eyes meet mine in the courtroom, and he freezes like a deer in headlights, staring at me blankly before looking away. There is no confrontation in his eyes. I find it very hard to imagine him killing someone. Could it have been a mistake? A heated argument that got out of control? Self defense? The police imply that it was premeditated. I wonder what emotion could so seize a person, what thought could so inhabit his mind, that it would drive him to murder. The only thing I can imagine is that maybe it’s like being in love -- desperately, obsessively in love -- when everything else fades away and all you can do is think about your crush, talk about him to anyone who will listen, wait for him to call. An email from him makes your day; absence of one ruins it. I wonder if our client felt this way about his neighborhood scene, if its petty interactions had become his be all end all; if the world beyond it had ceased to matter, or in his mind, never really existed at all.

My attorney fights very hard for our clients, but in court, she rarely talks to them, smiles at them, or touches them. Usually she acts as if they are not even there, and they try to do likewise, their faces expressionless as the events unfold. But their eyes often give them away, darting back and forth amongst the actors in the courtroom. I wonder what they think about, while their actions are evaluated and their lives hang in the balance. I ask my attorney if our client will testify on his own behalf, and she looks surprised. “He has nothing to add,” she says. Then, in a flip tone, “He wasn’t there. He has nothing to say.” Whatever he would say, I guess, would be unsatisfactory, vague, confusing. It may add to the clutter of information, but it can’t make all this make sense.

Working for the Public Defender

My first day at the office of the public defender, my attorney was late. She showed up minutes before we were scheduled to be in court wearing gaudy red pumps, a black suit, and swearing like a sailor. “Call me Julie,” she replied to my stilted questions directed to “Ms. Charles.” On the way to the courtroom, she railed against the prosecutor's office, specifically, the attorney she was facing down that morning. “She is – pardon the expression – a bitch,” Julie said, dropping her voice just slightly. I nodded, I hoped, sympathetically. The officer Julie was scheduled to cross examine she referred to as “a cocksucker.” Again, I nodded. Prior to accepting this internship, I had worried about the strong ideological bent of the public defender's office. At a brown bag lunch I attended my 1L year, a PD attorney recruiting law clerks responded to a question about his sources of motivation by thundering at us, “There’s a war going on here, people, and if you don’t see that, I don’t know what to tell you!” It was pretty clear he was not talking about Iraq.

Before coming to law school, I lived in a low income, majority minority neighborhood in Austin, TX for about 10 years. I had many interactions with police and crime. I experienced firsthand how police can denigrate, undercut, or ignore concerns from residents of “bad” neighborhoods. I remember being told by a police officer that there was nothing he could do about the crime in our neighborhood, and how hopeless I felt when he advised me to move if I didn’t like living around the corner from a crack house. I remember asking a different officer to do something about a prostitute meeting johns in front of my house. With a voice full of distain, he said to me, “Do you know how hard it is for me to arrest a prostitute?” Then he turned back to his coffee and conversation with the clerk at the corner store.

I had no doubt that there are some really bad officers out there, a few psychos or bullies, as in any profession. But I also had dealt with good police officers – ones who came to neighborhood meetings, and sat patiently through litanies blaming them for official racism undertaken before they were even born. After a drug dealer threatened me with a gun, I broke down in tears in front of a kind female officer who listened sympathetically to my complaint. She wrote everything down and told me she’d drive around the neighborhood looking for the guy based on my vague description, even though we both know this would probably be a waste of her time.

Basically, before coming to the PD's office, I felt like I had a pretty realistic outlook on the police, and I had little patience for people who acted like police were uniformly racists and sadists or uniformly helpful and professional. I took Julie’s railing against the prosecution and police with a hefty grain of salt, and wondered how professional she herself was, anyway. On the walk to the courthouse, I referred to the man she was representing as “the defendant”. “The client!” she corrected me. “They call them defendants.” As we headed into the courtroom, Julie seemed disorganized and frazzled. When she introduced herself to the judge as counsel for the defense, she spoke quickly, with an air of anger tinged with resignation. The detective testifying for the prosecution started out calm and confident, but as Julie got into the cross examination, his demeanor became more evasive and defensive. He made assertions that no witnesses were pressured to testify as part of a plea bargain, then admitted that he had not been present for any of the witness interviews and couldn’t testify to what had taken place during them. He often claimed that he didn’t know, couldn’t remember, or hadn’t clarified crucial details of the witness testimony on which the prosecution’s case rested. Under duress, he finally admitted that one witness was a drug dealer angling for a plea bargain. The anger in Julie’s voice increased during the cross examination, and the resignation disappeared. During questioning, the detective let slip that an additional person had been present at the crime scene, and that the police and prosecutors conspired to keep this information from the defense. Even the judge was shocked.

After admitting this, the detective looked up, somewhat shame-facedly, I thought. Our eyes met. I was, honestly, flabbergasted at how evasive the police officer was under oath, and I wondered if my shock and disappointment in him was obvious on my face. “You see how shady they are?” Julie demanded after the hearing was adjourned. I nodded, but with more feeling this time.

We returned to the PD's office across the street, and Julie spent some time venting about the experience to one of her co-workers. They laughed at the unfair judges, the lying cops, the stiff prosecutors. They both cursed liberally. Eventually, the conversation wound down and I prepared to leave, assuring Julie that it had been absolutely fascinating and that I was looking forward to coming back the next day for more. Julie made a comment to the effect that the cross examination was perhaps a baptism by fire into the reality of criminal defense. She swore again, laughed, and mused, “And this morning you were calling me ‘Ms. Charles!’”

October 4th, 1957

This is a story I wrote way back in undergrad, but I think about it every October 4th on the anniversary of Sputnik, so this year I figured I'd dust it off and publish it here.

October 4th, 1957

Tommy Morgan died the day Sputnik was launched. He was seventeen, three years older than my brother, Billy; I was ten and had trouble grasping outer space, let alone anything larger. When my mother came to pick me up from school that day, she looked more scared than Mr. Murlitz, our principal, he talked to us about the Russian threat in our annual assembly. “It’s going to be very hard on Billy,” my mother said, shifting her eyes from the road to me. “Tommy was really his best friend.” I nodded automatically. “If you could do anything for him…” she paused and swallowed. “You know,” she continued, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. “Just be a good brother.” I nodded again, quickly, and turned to the window.

When he was thirteen, Tommy Morgan learned how to stand. His parents got him leg braces from the best cerebral palsy doctor in the country which locked his legs into place and set them so he could be lifted upright and then balance, unsupported, his arms jerking with effort and his chin stuck out, proud. My parents and I clapped, and Billy, amazed, rocked back and forth with so much force he almost fell out his chair, his mouth open, one eye trained on Tommy, both of them forcing out raw bursts of incredulous laughter. Two years later Billy was standing too, but since he couldn’t balance on his own, my father built him a standing table to hold onto while the braces kept his legs straight. By then Tommy Morgan was fifteen, and back in his wheelchair, frustrating himself trying to move pegs on a pegboard and relearn exercises he had mastered two years before.

When I got home from school, Billy was in his chair, a pegboard on his lap, crying in rough barking sobs as Miss Burch, his tutor, sat across from him. “I think we’ve done all we can do today,” she said when we came in, putting her hand on Billy’s shoulder for a minute before she gathered up her papers and pegs and put them in her bag. After she left, Billy kept crying and my mother walked over to him slowly, then bent and hugged his jumping shoulders in silence.

“Do you want to take a walk, Billy? I’ll go with you for a walk,” I volunteered. He swung his head no. “Do you want to watch American Bandstand?” Watching TV and riding in the car were two of Billy’s favorite things, but he swung his head again. My mother stood up and moved to the seat at the table that Miss Burch had sat in.

“Do you miss Tommy?” she asked softly, leaning forward and looking into Billy’s face. He nodded, then pitched his head forward and made a little crying wheeze, a question she couldn’t begin to answer. “You know Tommy wouldn’t want you to be sad,” my mother tried, her voice tense as if she was walking a tightrope. “Everyone has to die sometime, don’t they?” Billy twisted in his chair. “For some people it’s sooner, but Tommy lived a lot in the time he had,” She shifted her eyes away from Billy’s crumpled face, her voice stretching out. “You do what you can while you can, Billy, and keep hoping that’s worth something. It’s all you can do.” He twisted further away, so he was looking at the opposite wall, gasping raspy, irregular breaths and crying slowly.

“Do you want to go for a ride –“ I started, reaching for anything that could make it better, but even before my voice gave out it was overwhelmed by Billy’s awkward sobbing. I walked over to the TV and turned it on low, then sat right in front like I was never supposed to do with my back to both of them. After a minute my mother wheeled Billy over and he sat a little behind me, shifting in his chair until I moved over to the couch and sat next to him. We sat like that until my father came home, wrapped in silence except for the muffled voices on the TV and the occasional chokes of sobs that caught in Billy’s throat.

We were back in those same positions, watching the television news about Sputnik when Uncle Clint came by after dinner. “The skies are red tonight, thanks to Eisenhower!” Uncle Clint waved his stubby hand at the screen as he dropped down on the other side of the couch. Immediately I looked over at Billy, whose arm jerked in response. “Well, I know you’ve got a fondness for him, Bill, but as your parents should be telling you, that man’s taking this country straight to hell.”

“Clint –“ my father warned, but Billy cut him off with a raw angry squall and a twist of his knees that rattled his chair.

“Settle down, now!” Clint reprimanded, taken aback as Billy broke into hiccupping wails and bucked in his chair, rocking it back and forth. “It’s only my opinion,” he added, ejecting himself from the couch and moving towards the door as my father went to the closet to get him his coat. Uncle Clint forced an arm through one sleeve and turned back towards us, hunting for some apology. “You know I’m not saying that I could do any better,” he shrugged over his shoulder.

After an hour, Billy’s crying stopped and we went to bed, tucked in and quiet, just a few feet apart. Down the hall, I could hear my parents talking about the whole scene, my mother’s voice starting, sad and plaintive. “Part of the problem is that Clint is just clumsy with people. He can’t help it, you know.”

“Part of the problem is Clint drinks too much and shows up in people’s living rooms without an invitation,” my father answered gruffly. “If he had just asked how we were doing before he jumped in…” his voice trailed to an angry, dry cough and we heard the easy chair squeak as he sunk into it.

We were silent in the bedroom, except for Billy’s uneven, heavy breathing, which didn’t relax until I crawled out of my bed and crossed over to his. He lay on his back, arms pinned down by the sheets and blanket tucked in tight around him. His head, as always, held between two “teddy bears” – the inserts which kept him from rolling over and smothering in his sleep. I reached down and hugged his confined body the best I could, pressing my cheek to his collar. I stayed for a bit, almost forgetting Billy’s tense and shifting body, then when back to my own bed, slipping in as quietly as I could. As we went to sleep, I kept remembering Tommy’s asymmetrical smile, the proud angle of his chin when he stood for us in his living room, and Billy’s pain now that he saw how it had turned out.

Monday evening, Uncle Clint came back with a signed picture of Eisenhower that he got at the Republican office in Buffalo, which my mother arranged on our living room mantle. Billy smiled softly at Uncle Clint, who sighed with relief and reinstated himself on our couch, and we watched the news together quietly, until Billy and I went to bed. In our room that night we stayed awake a long time, both staring up at the ceiling above our twin beds, each minute wondering how many more we had before we’d fall asleep.