Bad Lawyer (32 page)

“I had a bad night,” Priscilla admitted on the following morning. “The looks the jury gave me … I felt like I was being convicted on the spot.”

“Well, I had a bad night, too. I screwed up, Priscilla. I should have kept Sergeant Fish on the stand until Delaney was ready to adjourn, but I didn’t. I let the jury sit with Lena Grushko’s testimony and now we have to live with it.” I sipped at a container of steaming coffee, chased it with a sharp pull on the cigarette in my hand. In fact, I’d slept very well the night before, slept a dreamless sleep after an apparition-free evening. Perhaps it had to do with Priscilla’s fear, a fear I somehow found comforting. “Today,” I announced, “Carlo hands the jury a motive.”

“You’re talking about Buscetta’s snitch?”

“That’s right. But don’t worry, by the time I finish with Ms. Norton the jury will think she’s a witness for the defense.”

As if to prove my point, Janet Boroda showed up a few minutes later, bearing a diagram she’d been trying to get from the Department of Corrections for the last two weeks. It depicted an open housing area in the Rose Singer Jail, two rows of twenty-five bunks arranged head-to-head, a twenty-by-twenty foot area containing sinks, showers, and toilets, a few tables and benches. There were no partitions anywhere, and thus no privacy.

I intended to use the diagram (along with her criminal record and the deal she’d cut) to impeach Kaisha Norton’s testimony. Juries love physical evidence, objects they can see or touch. Janet was carrying fifty-one stick pins in her evidence bag, forty-eight blue representing the other prisoners, two red for Priscilla and Ms. Norton, one yellow for the corrections officer who patrolled day and night. I would ask Kaisha to place the blue pins first, knowing full well that she wouldn’t remember the position of every other prisoner. But the jury would get a good look at those pins in my hand, and they’d get the message as well. Especially if I dropped a few as I put them away.

I was in the process of congratulating Janet when Sergeant Mason pushed open the door and stuck his head inside. “Delaney wants you in chambers,” he said. “Pronto.”

Carlo and Isaiah were already present when I arrived, as was a court reporter. Delaney waved the reporter off when her fingers drifted up to the keyboard. “Let’s keep this off the record for now.” He indicated a chair, tossed me a copy of the
Post
opened to page three. The article, under the headline:
GAMES LAWYERS PLAY
, featured a courtroom drawing of my back as I questioned Shawn McLearry. The chalk dot on my jacket was now the size of a ping pong ball.

“Any response, Mr. Kaplan?” Delaney asked.

“To the
New York Post
? No, I don’t think so.”

“How about,” Delaney continued without missing a beat, “a response to
Newsday
, the
Times
, the
Daily News
, ABC, NBC, CBS, or the Fox Network?”

“Whatever they’re referring to, assuming it wasn’t fabricated from whole cloth, must have occurred accidentally.”

“Like your abuse excuse?” Carlo snarled.

“You’ll have to forgive Mr. Buscetta,” Delaney said. “The Appellate Court turned down his appeal of my ruling on the cocaine evidence and he’s a bit peevish this morning.”

“I want him put under oath.” Carlo ignored Delaney’s little dig, though by this time he must have been regretting his decision to appeal. “It should be on the record.”

“And why is that, Mr. Buscetta? Are you planning a
second
appeal?”

Under other circumstances, I might have been severely chastised, perhaps even held in contempt. But no judge likes to have his rulings appealed, especially while the trial is proceeding. After the cocaine charge was dismissed, Jay Harrison had written a column profiling judges who “never met a technicality they didn’t like.”

“I’m going to take you at your word, Mr. Kaplan,” Delaney continued. “As long as it doesn’t happen again. You might want to think about changing dry cleaners. Just to make sure.”

A few minutes later, he reminded the jury that they were only to consider actual testimony. “Under no circumstances are you to allow yourselves to be influenced by rumors or unchallenged demonstrations.” Then he called Lena Grushko back to the stand.

I watched the jury while Delaney reminded Grushko that she was still under oath. They’d spent the night imagining Priscilla loading her own gun and they weren’t happy about it. Latisha Garret, who’d told me that women have an obligation to escape their abusers, sat with her arms folded across her chest, her mouth drawn into a frown of disapproval. Rafael Fuentes, his notebook already out and on his lap, stared straight ahead when I tried to make eye contact.

“Good morning, Lieutenant.” I didn’t try to approach the jury, thought it better to let them sit with their judgments.

“Good morning, Mr. Kaplan.”

“Lieutenant Grushko, did you find any other fingerprints, either on the gun or on the cartridges, besides the two you described yesterday?” I picked up the revolver, let it dangle from a finger.

“There were no other identifiable prints.”

I responded, my voice loud enough to make Delaney jerk in his chair, before she finished the sentence. “That’s not what I asked you, Lieutenant. Try to answer the questions I ask you. Instead of the ones you want to hear.”

“Objection, argumentative.”

“Sustained. If the witness needs instruction, Mr. Kaplan, I’ll instruct her.”

Instead of repeating my first question, I abruptly changed direction. “Lieutenant Grushko, you found two fingerprints belonging to Priscilla Sweet, one on this revolver and one on an unspent cartridge. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“When were they put there?”

She straightened in her chair, the question obviously expected. “I don’t know.”

“Forty-eight minutes before the gun was fired?”

“There’s no way …”

“How about forty-eight hours or forty-eight days?”

Carlo was on his feet again, requesting that the witness be allowed to answer. Delaney arched his right eyebrow, a warning gesture, before instructing me to slow down.

“You can finish your answer,” he finally told Grushko.

“It is not possible,” she told the jury, “to ascertain with any degree of certainty when a given fingerprint was placed on an object.”

“So, for all you know, those fingerprints were placed there months before you saw them. Is that right?”

“It’s possible.”

I put the gun down, returned to the defense table, picked up a copy of Grushko’s report. “Now, Lieutenant, would you tell us if there were any other fingerprints, besides the two you identified yesterday, found on the gun.”

“No other identifiable prints were found.”

If she wanted to fight, that was perfectly okay with me. I had Delaney instruct her to answer the question, then forced her, inch by inch, to admit that she’d found smudged prints in eight different places on the gun and the bullets, that some were overlapping, that the weapon might have been handled by a dozen individuals.

“Now, you’ve told us that you recovered partial fingerprints that were too small to identify. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you compare these partial fingerprints to those of the defendant?”

“Yes, I did.”

I finally turned to the jury, noting their interest with satisfaction. “In the course of those comparisons, Lieutenant, did you conclude that
any
of those partial fingerprints could
not
have belonged to Priscilla Sweet?”

“Yes,” she finally admitted, “I did.”

“So, even though these partial fingerprints were too small to identify as
belonging
to a specific individual, they could still be used to
exclude
a specific individual?”

“That’s right.”

“And how many partial fingerprints did you find which could
not
have belonged to the defendant?”

“Four.”

“You found
four
partial fingerprints that could
not
have been put there by Priscilla Sweet?”

“Yes.”

I turned then, directed my full attention to the witness. “Would you explain to this jury, Lieutenant Grushko, exactly why you didn’t say this yesterday and save us all a lot of time?”

I
T TOOK CARLO ALL
of sixty seconds to demolish my thoughtful cross-examination. As I dropped into my chair, he strode across the courtroom, picked up Byron’s .38, and released the cylinder. Still without speaking, he dropped six blank cartridges, one at a time, into the chambers before snapping the cylinder shut with a quick twist of his wrist. “Lieutenant Grushko,” he asked as he slowly turned to face the jury, “is there any way, any way at all, that the defendant’s fingerprint could have gotten on that cartridge case …
after
the weapon was loaded?”

I remember Priscilla’s fingers tightening on my forearm when the cylinder slammed home, but I didn’t turn to look at her. Instead, I kept my eyes on Carlo, expecting him to flash some measure of his little triumph, but he didn’t even make eye contact as he addressed the court.

“Call Kaisha Norton.”

Even dressed in an obviously new, smoke-gray pants suit and a pair of sensible, low-heeled pumps, even sporting a jet-black, shoulder length wig, Kaisha Norton’s bony frame and battered face read like a memoir of life on the street. A long, near-miss scar ran directly across her throat, two of her teeth were badly chipped, and she was missing her right canine. I thought of Julie when I saw her, of how this might easily have been Julie’s fate, and I felt a momentary twitch of sympathy for Kaisha Norton, and for Carlo, as well. He would never have purchased her testimony if he hadn’t been desperate.

Kaisha’s history of drug possession, larceny, prostitution, and burglary ran to four pages in her rap sheet and included two felonies. Her last bust, the one she was trying to get out from under, occurred six months before Byron’s death. Charged with criminal sale of a controlled substance in the second degree, a B felony, she’d been unable to make the twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail and had been incarcerated on Rikers Island when opportunity in the form of Priscilla Sweet knocked on her bunk.

As a persistent felon, Kaisha had been looking at a twelve-year minimum sentence if convicted. The deal she’d made with Carlo (and which he put on the table at the start of his direct examination) was simple. In return for her testimony, her charge would be reduced to criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, a D Felony, and her sentence reduced from twenty-five years to fourteen months. As she’d already been incarcerated for nearly ten months, Kaisha would be on the street before the end of Priscilla’s trial.

Her testimony, delivered in a hoarse, raspy whisper, was equally simple. On January 18, the day before Thelma Barrow entered my office, Kaisha had offered Priscilla a cigarette, then struck up a conversation. In the course of that conversation, Priscilla had admitted shooting her husband.

“He thought I was stealing,” she’d told her new friend.

“And was you?” her new friend had asked.

“I got what I needed from that asshole,” she’d answered. “I got everything he had to give.”

Priscilla had done hard time in Bedford Hills; she knew the rules and she knew about prison snitches. I remember her leaning forward to catch the details, then settling back with a shake of her head. For a moment, I thought she was going to flash that sardonic smile. Instead, she picked up a pencil and began to doodle on a yellow pad.

“Do you recognize her?” I asked when Carlo turned the witness over.

“Kaisha was in the dormitory.” Priscilla shrugged, raised an eyebrow. “It’s not the kind of face you can forget.”

“And not the kind of face that inspires confidence?”

Instead of a smile, I got a lecture. “Mother Theresa,” Priscilla told me, her voice tight, breathless, “wouldn’t inspire confidence on Rikers Island.”

I spent the first thirty minutes of my cross-examination taking Kaisha back over her criminal history. Until I felt the jury’s collective attention begin to wander. Then I switched to show-and-tell. I had Janet Boroda set a blow-up of the diagram supplied by the Department of Corrections on an easel while I picked up my colored push-pins. “Miss Norton,” I asked as I crossed the courtroom to stand next to the easel, “do you recognize this diagram as an accurate representation of the D233 housing area where you were incarcerated on the eighteenth of January?

She stared at it for a long moment before replying. “Yes, I do.”

“And were all fifty bunks occupied that night?”

“Yes, sir.”

Those were the only affirmative answers I got from Kaisha Norton. She thought her conversation with Priscilla had taken place on Priscilla’s bunk, but she wasn’t sure where Priscilla’s bunk was. She couldn’t place the corrections officer who walked the housing unit, couldn’t recall her (or his) name. When I asked if any of the closest bunks had been occupied, she replied, “Might have been. I don’t remember.”

“Miss Norton, besides you and Priscilla Sweet, there were forty-nine women in that housing area, is that correct?”

“I guess.”

“But you don’t remember the position of a single individual, is that also correct?” I shook the heap of pins in my hand, held them up for the jury to inspect.

“I must’a been not payin’ attention.”

“And why is that, Miss Norton? Why, with forty-nine other people in the room, were you so preoccupied with Priscilla Sweet, a woman you’d never met before that night?”

“I don’t know. We just got to talkin’.”

“And in the course of that ‘just talking,’ Priscilla Sweet admitted to committing a premeditated murder? Is that what you want this jury to believe? That she admitted this to
you
?”

Rafael Fuentes was scribbling furiously. Latisha Garret was leaning away from Kaisha Norton as if trying to avoid a foul odor. Several other jurors were looking at their hands. One, Maureen Baker, kept glancing at her watch. Wondering, undoubtedly, what she was going to have for lunch.

If Kaisha was aware of the fact that her performance was bombing, she didn’t let it show. Her deal was cut, this appearance her end of the bargain. If her testimony failed to convict Priscilla, it was no skin off her nose.