Fatal Convictions (3 page)

6

Before Alex stood, Aisha leaned over and whispered in his ear. “It was spring break with my friends,” she said, her voice tentative and shaky. “I borrowed one of their bikinis. The tattoo’s not even real.”

Alex looked at his client and saw the tears beginning to form in her eyes. She was certainly embarrassed, maybe even humiliated. “It’s okay,” he said. He put a hand on her shoulder and stood to face the jury.

He walked to the jury box, carrying no notes. He stood there for a moment without saying a word. He definitely had their attention.

“Have you ever done something you regretted later?” Alex asked. “Even something against your religious beliefs?”

He looked down, thinking of examples. “Maybe you went out and tied one on with the boys. Or you cursed and took the Lord’s name in vain. Or in a worst case, you had an affair. Does that mean you should be forced to drink or swear or have sex with someone just to get a job?”

The questions at least had them thinking—he could see it in their eyes. “Doing something against your beliefs doesn’t make those beliefs go away. It doesn’t make you a pagan; it just means you’re human. In my religious tradition, the apostle Paul said that he had the desire to do what was good but he couldn’t carry it out. Instead, he kept doing what he knew he shouldn’t do. Did this make him an atheist? No, it made him normal. A believer beset by his own human nature.

“C’mon, folks. These were three girls on spring break. Aisha didn’t post that picture on her Facebook page; one of her friends did. A sixteen-year-old girl borrowed a bikini because she wanted to be like her friends for a week and not stand out. She rubs on a fake tattoo. And now Mr. Spears wants you to believe that this whole lawsuit is just a scam.”

Alex shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe his opponent could stoop so low. “During the week, I’m a lawyer. But on Sundays, I serve as the pastor of South Norfolk Community Church. And I’ll tell you one thing—if pictures from my college spring break trips were the litmus test, I wouldn’t be preaching very long.

“We all stumble sometimes. That’s why we all need a little grace. If you’ve ever been shown grace, maybe you could extend some yourself. I know that Aisha would really appreciate it.”

Alex thanked them and returned to his seat.

“My dad is going to kill me,” Aisha whispered.

7

While the jury deliberated, Alex tried to do what he did best—cut a deal. He proposed to Kendall Spears that Atlantic Surf Shop hire Aisha part-time. “She’s even willing to spend most of her time in the stockroom,” Alex offered.

But Horse-Trading 101 was apparently no longer offered at Harvard. “I’ll take my chances with the jury,” Kendall said, his arrogance on full display. “Win or lose, we’ve gotten some great publicity out of this case.”

That’s when it hit Alex. There were four camera crews waiting on the courthouse steps. Judge Thomas had allowed one camera into the courtroom as the pool camera, and the newspaper had also sent a reporter. Alex had played right into the defendant’s hands. Atlantic Surf didn’t care whether the politically correct crowd liked their policies or not. They sold merchandise to surfers. And Alex’s little slide show had put the employees on beefcake parade, generating free publicity from all four local networks.

“Good point,” Alex conceded. “If you don’t really care about justice, this could be a win-win for you guys.”

He left the courtroom and pulled out his cell phone. Two could play this game.

* * *

One hour later, the jury returned with its verdict. Judge Thomas looked at the verdict sheet and frowned. “Is this your verdict?” he asked the forewoman.

“It is, Your Honor.”

“So say you all?”

The jurors nodded their heads.

Thomas studied the paper for another moment and looked at Alex and Aisha. Though
Hajjar v. Atlantic Surf Shop, Inc.
didn’t exactly have the high stakes of a capital murder trial, Alex still felt his heart in his throat.
It’s a summer job,
he reminded himself. But he knew it meant a whole lot more.

“‘We the jury, in the case of
Hajjar v. Atlantic Surf Shop, Inc.
, find our verdict in favor of the defendant,’” Judge Thomas read.

Alex felt the gut punch and heard Aisha exhale next to him. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You did the right thing by filing this case.”

It was hard not to stare at the jury with contempt while Judge Thomas thanked them for their service. Alex found himself hoping that they would someday be victims of discrimination. After the jury left, it was even harder to shake Kendall Spears’s hand and congratulate him.

The blow was softened somewhat when Judge Thomas asked Alex to approach the bench before he left the courtroom. “You did a great job,” the judge said softly. “You’ve got your granddad’s style.”

Except my grandfather would have won,
Alex thought. But he was a good enough lawyer to keep that sentiment to himself.

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

8

Unlike most attorneys, Alex had no law school diploma hanging on the vanity wall of his office. Virginia was one of the few states where a lawyer could still “read the law,” pass the bar, and receive a law license. Under Virginia’s law reader program, an aspiring attorney could study under an approved lawyer and qualify for the bar exam once he had completed certain prescribed courses. Thomas Jefferson had become a lawyer that way. As had Patrick Henry. Several generations later, Alex’s grandfather had followed in their steps.

Alex became a law reader more out of frustration than tradition. He had attended Richmond Law School for a year, but he hated the endless debates on esoteric legal theories and the word parsing that seemed to dominate his law school curriculum. Alex wanted to be a trial lawyer, quick on his feet like his grandfather. But his classes seemed to emphasize intellectual mind games. Some of his professors had never seen the inside of a courtroom.

Having worked in his grandfather’s law firm during the summer after that first year, Alex felt like he learned more about the practice of law in three months than he had in his first full year of formal education. His grandfather, no fan of law schools himself, said he was not surprised. He suggested that Alex consider reading the law while he made some money working at the firm.

Two years later, Alex became one of the handful of Virginia lawyers who passed the bar without graduating from law school. He framed his law license with no small amount of pride, though the phrase “law reader” also came with a little baggage and a huge chip for the shoulder. Like his grandfather, Alex would have to go through his career proving that he belonged.

Taking the place of a law school diploma on Alex’s vanity wall was a framed piece of yellow legal paper with his grandfather’s sloppy handwriting on it. The page was labeled:

Madison and Associates—Competitive Edge

His grandfather had written the list the day he told Alex that he was dying from cancer. “I guess you’ll take over this firm a little sooner than we planned,” John Patrick Madison had said. “Here’s a few things you need to keep in mind.”

He wrote down ten items, talked to Alex about them for thirty minutes, and then told Alex they needed to get back to work. Not one tear was shed. It was like every other teaching session Alex ever had with his grandfather. No nonsense. Keep it real. Can the drama. His grandfather had faced death with the same level of fear he exhibited before a big case. In other words . . . none.

Alex kept the list and had it framed after his grandfather passed away.

The first sentence was characteristically blunt:

Good lawyers don’t advertise.

Alex thought about that advice as he stopped to chat with the news crews in front of the Virginia Beach courthouse. His grandfather never paid for advertising, but he also never turned down a free interview. He told Alex that only legal dinosaurs turned up their noses at the media. “I’m an advocate for my client,” he explained. “And sometimes I want to send a message to the jury
before
we get into the courtroom.”

Alex handled a few questions while Aisha stood next to him. He waited until somebody asked whether they were going to appeal before he made his announcement.

“We’ve decided not to appeal,” Alex said, “because if we win, Aisha would end up working at Atlantic Surf Shop, and it’s pretty obvious they don’t want her there. But fortunately for her, not all surf shops have a Look Policy that forces you to check your religious beliefs at the door. In fact, the owners of Burke’s Surf on Laskin Road believe strongly that the surf culture wants people just to be who they are. They’ve therefore offered Aisha a job for the summer, hijab and all.”

A few reporters congratulated Aisha, and she gave them a beautiful white smile. She told them how excited she was to start at Burke’s. Alex even added that most locals preferred Burke’s to the Atlantic Surf Shop anyway. By the time the interview ended, it was hard to tell who had won and who had lost the court battle just a few minutes earlier.

Alex smiled for the cameras as well but would be kicking himself all the way back to the office. He should have checked Aisha’s Facebook page. He had been complacent. His grandfather would have never missed that important detail.

Alex had not just lost the case. He had violated principle number five on his grandfather’s competitive edge list, a sentence he knew by heart, just like every other sentence on that yellow sheet of paper:

Never get outworked by an Ivy League lawyer.

9

For Khalid Mobassar, sleep had become a luxury. He spent each night in the reclining chair next to Ghaniyah’s bed, waking when she stirred, checking on her while she slept, exulting in each small step on the road to recovery. When Ghaniyah was moved from ICU to the brain trauma rehab center, Khalid followed her, hauling his small duffel bag of clothes and toiletries, his briefcase full of books and papers, his computer, his prayer rug, and his Qur’an. He left her side for only a few hours each day to go home and shower and to stop by the mosque.

The medical side of things was confusing at best. Khalid became familiar with the vocabulary of treatment for traumatic brain injury, or TBI, both from listening to the doctors and from scouring the Internet. Ghaniyah had been admitted to the hospital with a 12 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, indicating moderate brain damage. She had briefly lost consciousness before rescuers arrived at the scene. Fortunately, a CT scan and MRI showed no swelling of the brain or the type of cranial bleeding that would require surgical intervention.

But according to the doctors, many closed head injuries produced microscopic changes not easily detectable on the radiological tests. Ghaniyah’s official diagnosis was moderate traumatic brain injury with diffuse axonal injury and ischemia. Her prognosis for a full recovery was “guarded.”

Five days after the accident, a neuropsychologist had performed a basic neurological assessment designed to reveal the extent of the damage. A full battery of neuropsych testing would come later, but the preliminary results were sobering. Though no longer in a coma, Ghaniyah had suffered memory loss, personality change, and moderate impairment to her executive functioning skills. She had a hard time trying to focus and couldn’t handle more than one task at a time. She experienced mood swings and depression. These were all symptoms of right frontoparietal injury, the neuropsychologist explained. For Khalid, it felt like someone had taken the woman he married and placed another person in her body, someone more sluggish and with unpredictable emotions.

But Khalid was determined to love her back to a full recovery. What else could he do?

He read to her for hours each day from the Qur’an, an activity that soothed her and moderated her mood swings. She joined him in the salats as well—from her hospital bed the first few days but on her prayer mat after that. Still, she seemed to lack the religious fervor of the woman Khalid had been married to for thirty-two years. It was this aspect of her personality change that gave him the most heartache.

The doctors said he could take Ghaniyah home in a few days, a prospect that terrified Khalid. His wife wasn’t ready to be left alone—you could tell that by looking in her vacant eyes. But the insurance company was insisting that she could recover at home with outpatient therapy just as well as she could at the hospital. For Khalid, it felt like she would be out of sight and out of mind, the neuropsychologists and brain-injury specialists moving on to the next patient.

These thoughts preoccupied him as he watched the news on Thursday evening while shuffling through some papers. Lying on the bed, Ghaniyah dozed in and out.

The subject matter of a local news story caught his attention—a teenage Muslim girl being discriminated against because she wanted to wear a hijab to work. The young lady was not a member of Khalid’s mosque, but he admired her boldness. It seemed a little strange that she was so insistent on working in a surf shop, but then again, who could understand the mind of a teenage girl? At least she had the courage to stand up for her convictions, even if it made her feel like an outcast.

When the story segued to the courthouse steps, Khalid almost dropped his papers on the floor.

“Him?” Khalid said out loud when Alex’s face first appeared on the screen. Khalid reached for the remote and turned up the volume.

The same lawyer he had met in Ghaniyah’s room last week was explaining how he had landed his client a job at a competing surf shop. He talked about the importance of a pluralistic society and accommodating one another’s religious beliefs. He talked about accepting people for who they were instead of turning them all into Madison Avenue clones. His client stood beside him, beaming at the prospect of working at Burke’s Surf Shop.

When the news moved on to the next story, Khalid turned down the volume and thought about what he had just seen. Maybe he had misjudged the Reverend Alexander Madison. The man hadn’t seemed like a crusader when he came into Ghaniyah’s hospital room; he had seemed like a sleazy, opportunistic lawyer. Maybe he was. But Khalid had to give the man credit—Mr. Madison was resourceful. And they certainly needed that type of lawyer for Ghaniyah’s case . . . if she had a case at all.

Ghaniyah couldn’t remember the impact or the events that immediately followed, but she remembered what led up to the accident. A tractor trailer had pulled out to pass her on North Landing Road—a narrow, two-lane road that wound through the southern part of Virginia Beach. When an oncoming vehicle appeared around the corner, the driver of the tractor trailer swerved back into Ghaniyah’s lane even though his rig was not all the way past her. Ghaniyah had no choice but to swerve to the right. The last thing she remembered was her tires leaving the pavement as she careened toward a pine tree.

Now Khalid faced piles of medical bills and perhaps long-term care for Ghaniyah. If the driver of the tractor trailer had caused the accident, why shouldn’t he pay for the consequences?

They just had to locate him first. The driver hadn’t stopped, and the police had no leads. But one of the men in Khalid’s mosque had worked as an insurance adjuster. He explained to Khalid that such events might be compensable under the uninsured motorist provisions of his automobile policy.

Khalid quietly searched Ghaniyah’s room for Mr. Madison’s card. When he couldn’t find it, he pulled up the firm’s Web site and wrote down the office number. He would call Mr. Madison as soon as Ghaniyah was released from the hospital and things settled down a bit. What could it hurt?

A Muslim imam and a Christian pastor. This could make for some interesting dynamics.