INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (16 page)

      
I’m halfway down the hall when I remember that Reginald wanted to talk.

      
Going to the cells upstairs is a twenty-minute investment, and I’ve got half a dozen people waiting over in criminal court. It’s closing on noon, and if I don’t get to criminal court quickly, it is almost certain I’ll wind up spending the entire afternoon there. I do the calculus quickly --Reginald can get to the phones at Rikers pretty easily, and at least three clients have already called the office to complain about waiting. On the other hand, Reginald doesn’t ask for much, the pens above Moge’s courtroom are easy to get to, and one of my favorite corrections officers sits the desk up there. She’ll probably give me a few minutes with Reginald in the high-security area. That’ll save some time, I think, pivoting toward the unmarked door that leads to a dingy staircase that ends in a gray steel door behind which my incarcerated client waits.

      
It’s usually noisy on the inside --inmates yelling between cells, corrections officers shouting out names --but today things seem almost placid. Officer Cordero takes my ID and smiles when I ask her if I can talk to Reginald around the corner rather than go all the way up to the general population interview area on the seventh floor. “Sign the book,” she says, inclining her head toward the back with a slightly exasperated smile.

      
“You’re the best,” I tell her as another corrections officer goes to get Reginald from the big cell where two dozen men wait for their few minutes in court or brief legal visit.

      
From a cell: “Yo, Feige.”

      
It’s Shamar --a kid I represented years ago. Shamar has gotten big since I saw him last. Gone is the skinny kid with the devilish smile and smooth delivery. In his place is a bruiser with a tough-guy face and cold eyes. Sha is lounging conspicuously in his cell, ostentatiously taking up more space than he deserves, the other inmates --four or five of them, old and young --crammed into the small cell, making room by perching on the edge of the bench or sitting on the floor. On seeing me, Shamar hops over to the bars, his perfectly white sneakers signaling a man well taken care of on the inside. Leaning into the bars and affecting a conspiratorial tone, he says to me, “You gotta take my case, man --I ain’t seen my lawyer in months. I’m telling you, months!”

      
“Sha,” I say firmly, “I ain’t takin’ your case. Who’s your lawyer? I’ll call him for you --tell him you need to talk to him.”

      
“Nah, man.” Sha is insistent. “I already called him. I need you, Feige --c’mon, you know me. I need you.”

      
It’s always nice to be liked, even when the admiration is the desperate, transparent hustle of a kid facing a life sentence. In a world that rewards a mien of tough callousness, subtle signs of need or pain have to be carefully masked --presented as hustle rather than weakness. Sadly, taking the time to figure out which is which is a luxury I can seldom afford. There are certainly times when begging works on me. There are a large number of cases that I’ve taken just because an old client asked, or the sister of an old client called, or someone thrust themselves against the bars and told me a tale that made me want to listen, despite the bruising caseload, screaming judges, and constant phone calls.

      
The funny part about Sha’s pitch is that it is almost certainly true --that he, like many jailed clients, actually
hasn’t
talked to his lawyer in months. Even in a reasonably well-funded system like the one in New York City, this is a common complaint. Between the daily crush of the courtroom and the pressure to get cases done, lawyers often don’t bother to see clients --some adjourn cases without even bringing them up to the courtroom. It’s called “waiving a client” --that is, waiving a client’s right to be present for the mundane proceedings against him --this is a tradition in criminal court, and a decision almost always made based on the vagaries of the lawyer’s schedule rather than the client’s needs. In fact, it’s often done without consulting the client at all.

      
Unfortunately every court day, whether they’re going to see their lawyer or not, Shamar and thousands of other incarcerated clients like him are woken up at four in the morning, piled onto rickety old school buses outfitted with metal mesh windows, and driven from Rikers Island to courthouses around the city. The New York City Department of Corrections is almost unimaginably vast, housing more inmates on a typical night than the entire prison population of forty states. In shuttling Sha and his locked-up brethren around, the several hundred DOC buses log an average of thirty-five hundred miles every day.

      
When the inmates actually get to court (a process that, thanks to security measures, can often take several hours), they are offloaded into huge pens (where assaults abound), which in turn filter into smaller pens arrayed around the Supreme Court building. Shamar, like most incarcerated clients, regularly spends an entire day in a bull pen without ever being called to court or even talking to his lawyer. Inmates call it “bull pen therapy.”

      
“I’ll call him for you, Sha. That’s all I’m gonna do. I’m just being straight with you, brother.”

      
“Okay, Feige. Thanks.”

      
I shake his hand.

      
“Good luck with it, okay?”

      
“Don’t worry, Feige. I’ll beat it,” he tells me with more confidence than I suspect he should.

      
Around the corner there are three narrow rooms accessed through locked steel doors. The middle one is for lawyers, the outside rooms for clients. The top two thirds of the long walls in the center room are made of steel mesh, allowing lawyers and clients to face each other. Farther down the hall is the Hannibal Lecter cage. It holds a single manacled client behind its thick grate.

      
The door to the middle room is ajar. Inside is a cross section of the Bronx legal community. In one corner, sitting across from a well-coiffed white guy, is Murray Richman, the self-proclaimed king of the Bronx bar. Murray’s stature in the legal community is hard to overstate --he represents rappers (it was his client that went to prison in the Puff Daddy trial) and politicians, hustlers and fraudsters, charging them tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege. He is a self-made guy who glad-hands his way through the courthouse as if he’s the mayor. In a sense, he is.

      
Already past the age of usual retirement, Not-a-worry Murray looks a little like a puffin, resplendent in brash tie and matching pocket square. His expensive double-breasted suit covers a thick midsection, and his hair is combed in a way that suggests a great deal of attention has been lavished on every strand. He has a wide, round face and twinkly eyes, and he greets people with a “howyadoin?” honed by years of ingratiating practice. A charmer, Murray brings a winning theatricality to every sentence he utters. And he is utterly unselfconscious --as if he’s completely forgotten that he’d long ago temporarily cast himself in a part written for someone larger, leaner, and more debonair.

      
A colleague of mine once ran into Murray on the courthouse steps. She had her six-year-old kid in tow and introduced the two of them. “This,” she said to her child, “is Murray Richman, one of the most famous lawyers in the Bronx.”

      
“Hi,” said the kid shyly.

      
Leaning in close, his squat frame bulging with self-importance, Murray gave the kid his pitch.

      
“You know what?” he asked.

      
The kid shook his head, his eyes wide with interest.

      
“I’m
the
best lawyer in the Bronx,” Murray said. “And I’ve never lost a case.”

      
“Really?” The kid was impressed.

      
“Really.”

      
Murray, despite the rather compelling documentary evidence to the contrary, was dead-serious.

      
Yet if he has lost more than a few cases here and there, and sometimes has a loose grip on the applicable case law, Richman has great sway with both judges and juries. Judges respect him because he is savvy and fearless, but also because he is deeply involved with the politics of the judiciary. Murray gives generously to judicial candidates and is active in local Bronx politics --something never lost on the judges he appears before.

      
Juries love him too. They like his perpetual tan and his flashy ties, his homespun antics and his theatrical cross-examinations. And he knows how to pick them. Having lived in the Bronx for the better part of a century, Murray knows every corner of the borough like a beat cop.

      
Seeing him, I smile and give a half wave. He nods back at me without interrupting the sentence he’s hurling toward his client --a calm white guy in a wiseguy suit --with utter conviction. And as I sit down and watch him work, I see again the pathological confidence that makes him so appealing.

      
Sitting with his back to Murray, facing a different client in the opposite prisoner room, is the anti-Murray, Mark Brenner. Brenner is so loony that he once hauled off and kicked a client right in the middle of Troy Webber’s courtroom. He also is said to have once pled a client charged with a driving offense to a prison sentence longer than the maximum allowed by law. (Just as scary, Judge Megan Tallmer apparently okayed the plea. On resentencing, Brenner advised the guy to just take the maximum.)

      
Wearing boat shoes and smudged white chinos, Brenner has his long white hair pulled back into something that appropriates the worst qualities of both a mullet and a ponytail. The overall effect resembles a Daniel Boone cap bleached blond.

      
Brenner isn’t a public defender in the usual sense. Instead of practicing with a criminal defense organization, he’s a solo practitioner who gets cases through an “assigned counsel plan.” To a client this is a distinction without a difference. To them, any free lawyer is a public defender. That confusion is unfortunate for the rest of us.

      
Brenner’s client is not white, and not calm. “Yo, I know guys who got six flat for a body!” he exclaims. A skinny kid with a shaved head and spindly arms, he smacks the palms of his hands flat on the desk, producing a sharp sound like a punch hitting bone. Brenner, who should have found other work years ago, sits impassively, a look of disgust on his face. I sit down two seats away, trying hard not to listen, hoping that Reginald will be brought in quickly.

      
“Sha-tak,” says Brenner, a note of world-weary petulance inflecting his voice.

      
“It’s Sha
teeeek
,” the kid says loudly, swinging his head violently back and forth: “Sha
teeeek
,” he repeats, elongating the hard
e
sound, holding it for a full half a second. “You pussy-assed motherfucker, can’t even get my fucking name right and you asking me to cop out?”

      
“Hey, Sh
ateeeeeeeeeeeek
.”

      
Brenner’s deliberately mimicking the kid now.

      
“Sha
teeeeeeeeeeek
, fuck you. I don’t give two shits what you do. You don’t wanna cop out? Huh? Then don’t fucking cop out --go to trial for all I fucking care, get your ass forty or fifty years! I don’t give a fuck what you do!”

      
“That’s right you don’t!” Shateek says, palms up as if he’s made his point.

      
They’re screaming at each other now, and the other lawyers huddled in the small space lean in toward their clients, making sure they can be heard above the din. No one interferes, no one tries to calm them down, and lawyer and client go on yelling at each other for another four or five minutes, during which Reginald, with a sidelong glance toward the shouting, takes his place across the wire mesh from me.

      
The interaction between Brenner and Shateek is more than commonplace --it’s constant. Overworked, underappreciated lawyers and desperate clients are a potent mix. Many lawyers see intimate client relationships as superfluous, and the result, as I see every time I spend an hour or two in the cells, is a system littered with fault lines. And when lawyers cease to even try to understand clients, that mix can become disastrous.