INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (10 page)

      
“
My
side!”

      
There was something almost charming in his furious predictability, the way he’d roll his eyes when I’d come upstairs to the pens to visit. The way he’d swagger his way into the interview room as if by sitting down with me he was doing me a huge favor. The way he’d snort before I’d even opened my mouth, as if to say,
I gotta listen to your damn fool nonsense again?
In fact, I could barely get past a friendly hello before he’d unleash a generous stream of invective concerning my “bullshit cocksucking cop-out bullshit” (Alonzo was never one to skimp on repetition).

      
Alonzo didn’t want to be in jail, and despite my counsel he had decided that the best way to go free was to testify in the grand jury. Any attempt to suggest that this might not be such a grand idea prompted an inventive concatenation of curse words, which, simply translated, meant: “I’d prefer not to heed your advice.”

      
My advice, though, was based on the fact that Alonzo seemed to believe that his simply not
wanting
to be in jail constituted an effective legal defense to the robbery charges he was facing.

      
“Alonzo,” I had said patiently, steering clear of the cocksucking cop-out bullshit, “you can do whatever you choose. If you want to testify in the grand jury, I’ll make sure you can, but it’s really important that you at least tell me what you’re going to say, so I can help you prepare.”

      
Alonzo looked at me as if I was speaking Latvian: “I’m gonna tell ’em my side, yo,” he said simply.

      
“Right, Alonzo, I get that, but what
is
your side?”

      
“It’s. My. Side. Yo.”

      
“Right, but what is it? What
is
your side of the story?”

      
“I just told you, fool --it’s MY SIDE!”

      
“Okay, so try to tell
me
your side, just like you would in the grand jury.”

      
Alonzo rolled his eyes. “Yo, I ain’t got time for your damn foolness,” he said as if rather than being in jail, he had a packed social schedule. “I’m going to the grand jury, an I’m gonna tell ’em my side.”

      
I tried one last time: “
Right
, but what is
the essence, the point, the story
, if you will, that constitutes your side?” I asked, thinking maybe, just maybe, he’d get it.

      
Alonzo fixed me with a withering stare: “It’s
my side
, yo,” he said simply.

      
We never got beyond this impasse. Two days later, sitting in front of twenty-three grand jurors, Alonzo said, “I’m here to tell you my side. I got a damn fool lawyer who don’t tell me shit, and I don’t even know why I’m here.”

      
The grand jurors weren’t impressed. They indicted.

      
At least I knew what Clarence’s side of the story was: he was at home, upstairs with his mother, when Shamar was murdered. Moreover, I believed it. There was something else too. Because grand jury cases are so abbreviated, likability plays an important role --often a far greater role than at a trial. And Clarence (unlike Alonzo) was, in my view, very likable.

      
Apparently not likable enough, though. The grand jury indicted him too. And because of that indictment, Clarence is facing a murder trial today.

      
Reaching my office, I drop my bag, hang up my coat, and log in to the computer. I have ten unread e-mails and, according to my phone, four new voice mails. The cheap clock across from me, a relic from my old office, reads 10:08 a.m.

T h r e e

10:08 A.M.

      
Nikki calls.

      
Nikki is tall, slender, and almost model beautiful, with deep brown eyes and a face the color of wet sandstone. She’s almost twenty now and still as fresh-faced as the day I met her --a sixteen-year-old girl charged with murder.

      
“Hi, David,” she says in her naive, singsongy voice.

      
Nikki is calling just to be sure she’s not going back to jail when she comes to court next month. She spent almost a year and a half at Rikers Island before I got her out, and even though I explain that she’s pretty much done all the time she’s going to do, she gets understandably nervous before each court date. I remind her that eventually she will have to step back into a prison cell for a few weeks so that she can then be officially released on parole --but not this time.

      
“Promise?” she asks me.

      
“Promise,” I say definitively. Then we hang up.

      
From the moment I walk into my office until the time I shut

out the lights in the evening, the phone is always ringing. It’s been like this for years. Whether I was in Brooklyn, Harlem, or the Bronx, the pace of inquiring phone calls has been just as relentless.

      
“What are my chances on appeal?”

      
“Is there an offer on my case?”

      
“My son just got arrested.”

      
“You a shitty lawyer! You ain’t done shit on my case.” Most of the hours I’m not in court or out in the field investigating are filled with responding to stuff like this. Some clients are constant callers, while others never call at all --either they’re content to show up in court and deal with their fate, or unable to muster the juice it takes to get to the gang-controlled phones at Rikers Island. (In many of the facilities at Rikers each gang controls a particular telephone, and lonely inmates longing for a friendly voice must either be aligned with a particular gang that controls a phone --the Bloods, Nietas, or Latin Kings --hustle to get access to one of the very few nonaligned phones, or pay a gang member dearly for the privilege.)

      
LeShawn Jones was one of those rare inmates who had no problem getting to the phone at Rikers Island, but he had no one to call when he did. The result of that strange coincidence was the series of calls that eventually yielded my old nickname at the Legal Aid Society: Mista Fudge.

      
I represented LeShawn in a gun case. There was little that was unusual about it, other than LeShawn himself --a client who literally couldn’t get over the fact that somehow he found himself in jail. As sweet as he was, our attorney-client relationship never really developed beyond a constant conversation about his continuing incarceration. His calls were so relentless and so tragic that LeShawn eventually became a legend in the office. Here’s how it went.

“Hello. David Feige.”

      
There was a short electronic beep --indicating that the call from Rikers had been connected. And then, with no preamble at all, LeShawn’s voice would come tumbling out as if he’d been holding his breath, waiting for the beep, ready to explode with the revelation he’d just had.

“Mista Fudge, it’s LeShawn Jones. I’m in jail, Mista Fudge.
 
I’m in JAIL!”

      
“I know that, LeShawn,” I’d say evenly. “You’ve been in jail for five months already.”

      
“Mista Fudge, please.” His whereabouts seemed to be a source of continuously pained astonishment.

      
“Yes, LeShawn.”

      
“I’M IN JAIL, MISTA FUDGE. IN JAIL!”

      
“Right, LeShawn.”

      
“MISTA FUDGE, I’M IN JAIL!” LeShawn would shift his emphasis from
I’m
to
in
to
jail
as if this recombination might better convey the magnitude of his suffering.

      
“I. Am. In. Jail! Mista Fudge. IN. JAIL.”

      
“What would you like me to do?” I’d say, feebly aware that there was little I could do to help him come to terms with his predicament. Frustrated, he’d hang up, only to call two hours later with the same startled realization.

      
“I’m in jail, Mista Fudge.
In Jail
!”

      
My colleagues noticed this telephonic ritual, and eventually, over the months and the dozens of identical conversations, LeShawn became a macabre joke, an embodiment of the deep pathos churned up by the justice system. His calls were eventually transferred to speakerphone as a small crowd of amazed young public defenders gathered around to hear him say his magic, tragic words. As for me, forevermore Mista Fudge it would be.

      
By the time I’m done with Nikki and the accumulated
 
e-mails it’s 10:25 a.m. and I’m already absurdly late for court, and just as I start to get moving the phone rings again. It’s Alvin. He needs to ask me for the twenty-fifth time about his upcoming sentencing. Harsher than I should be, I tell him I can’t talk and if he needs more reassurance he’ll need to call me at four. He keeps talking, and I put him on speakerphone while I head toward the two rows of hooks behind my office door.

      
I loathe suits. But with Alvin still on the phone, I grab a vaguely frayed chalk-striped suit, and what I hope will be a matching tie, and do the quick change, leaving my jeans in a crumpled heap under the desk. Pulling a plain blue cotton oxford over my head, I tune back in to Alvin. He is still talking, having segued into a story I’ve heard a dozen times about why he needs a note from me to show to someone else so that person can write a note to a third person who will help him get a non-driver’s-license ID, which he can use to get another document, which in turn has something to do with his SSI benefits. His is a complicated life, one I’ve been dealing with for more than six years, but this morning, like most mornings, I can’t give Alvin the answer he’s looking for, and so, having let him fulminate for three or four minutes, I finally say the only thing that works: finger poised above the speakerphone button, I say as calmly as I can, “Alvin, I love you,

      
but I’m hanging up now. Call me at four.”

      
On goes the jacket. Down goes the finger.

      
Click
.

- - - -

      
It’s a ten-minute walk to court --out through our library, past a small white table filled with lawyers and social workers talking in hushed tones to huddled clients and their concerned families, past Lillian in her usual spot, clutching the plastic bag of grimy papers that she sorts and resorts almost every day, sitting alone at a table at the end of the lunchroom. “Hi, Lil.” I smile as I go by her, heading toward the door. “Hi, Dave,” she says haltingly, eyes darting around the room --guarding her precious papers. And finally past the reception area, where two kids in matching red do-rags and desultory looks lounge on a couch in affected tough-guy poses.

      
Outside, just up the block, I pass the Gaseteria, with its oilcaked pavement and rickety pumps, and the weird car lot where Robin and I parked for a while after the weekly turn-signal thefts began.

      
I usually make the hike to or from court at least twice a day, sometimes more often, and it’s the rare day that I don’t pass someone I know --someone like Ms. M., whose kids are almost always in jail. I’ve represented two of the three and helped out on her third son’s case. Every time I see her she gives me updates: this one’s coming home, that one just got a little sentence, the third has been taken by the feds. She’s a sweet woman and loves those boys, and I tell her to send them my love and then continue up the block past Frank, a former client, who is selling incense on the corner.

      
José, with his two blue Latin King teardrop tattoos, waves from a car, shouting to me that he’s doing good --gone legit, working construction and raising his son. He smiles and gives me the thumbs-up. I’m not sure whether he’s legit or not, but with his record, any new violent felony and he’d be facing a life sentence.

      
There are people lounging around the bodega across the street. Several kids, invariably attired in the street uniform of uncannily clean clothes and immaculately maintained shoes, keep watch on the vestibule of the project building directly across from them, on my side of the street. The complex is called Morrisania II --as if it’s the
QE II
’s cheap housing-project cousin.

      
Next to the bodega, several large women jam themselves into what might arguably be the most cramped nail salon in the known world: Honey Nails. Built into an embankment, more like a missile silo than a commercial establishment, Honey Nails sports unwashed windows plastered with faded posters of outrageously elaborate fingernail designs. Though I’ve seen people inside, I have yet to see anyone enter or emerge.

      
I’m nearly two blocks from the office.

      
Almost every time I cross Morris Avenue I have a pang of nostalgia for the old Bronx Defender offices. Built in a renovated ice factory, they felt like a massive, superhip downtown loft. With its thirty-foot ceilings and totally open floor plan, “the Ice House” (as it was known) was dreamily spartan and chic --a message to clients and staff alike: this is no ordinary public defender office. Sadly, the Ice House lasted less than three years. In a generally unnoticed bit of irony, it was demolished to make way for a new courthouse.

      
The skeleton of that new courthouse stretches two full blocks now, and the humming of cranes and clanging of burly workmen using their hugely outsized wrenches to bolt I beams together masks the reggae music the guy selling pirated CDs is playing on a boom box powered by electricity conspicuously stolen from the adjacent lamppost. The block is always crowded: welfare, parole, and the Administration for Children’s Services are all housed in the massive, dreary brown brick building that takes up the entire block across from the construction. As I weave between the people, my backpack or litigation bag barely avoiding collision, my brain takes in the snippets of almost invariably angry overheard conversation: “he cut me off . . .”; “waited there for four hours . . .”; “locked him up for bullshit . . .”; “he don’t know shit.”

      
The swirl of voices thins as I come alongside the tall black wrought-iron fence of the incongruous mall across from the criminal court building. The mall was where we started out. Eight of us, committed to creating a new kind of public defender office, opened the Bronx Defenders for business on September 1, 1997, in a tiny office sandwiched between the Radio Shack and the Rent-A-Center.

      
The “mall,” of course, is not what most people who are used to seeing shopping centers imagine. There is no glistening glass. There are no elegant escalators. There are no department stores, no bookstores, no quaint jewelry carts in the middle of regularly swept corridors. The main mall attraction is a food court composed almost entirely of fast food --McDonald’s, KFC, Arthur Treachers. There is one set of escalators that leads to the underground movie theater and only works sporadically. I once saw someone collapsed there on the immobile top step, still bleeding from a bullet wound.

      
The mall has a few other stores too, mostly down-at-the-heels retail joints selling low-grade electronics, sneakers, and knock-off jerseys. The biggest tenant by far, taking up one entire side of the open rectangle, is a grocery store, fully stocked with the culinary preferences of a predominantly immigrant community. On the other side is a vaguely linear crowd of about two dozen people.

      
They are waiting to see their probation officers.