INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (17 page)

      
It is something I always try to remember, even when I am impatient with Clarence or listening to Reginald when I really should be running to another courtroom. Instead of letting their anger enrage me, I work hard to recall that most of my clients are in jail, enduring daily an almost unfathomable horror. They’re angry, resentful, sometimes frightened, and almost always desperate to get out as soon as possible. And they have no one to lash out at. All the anger, fear, and frustration of a steady diet of violence and bologna sandwiches are often hurled at the only available outlet --a public defender they didn’t ask for and don’t trust.

      
After a year or two of being the brunt of this sort of fury --continually abused by the people you are spending your life trying to help --it becomes extremely easy to see the entire attorneyclient interaction as a power struggle. The problem is, that struggle is astonishingly damaging to both the lawyers, who spend their days fighting the clients they are supposed to help, and the clients, who deride the lawyers whose help they desperately need. Finding a way to build an alliance with a mistrustful client is one of the things that separates the dedicated from the fried.

      
Murray, and other private lawyers like him, seldom have these relationship issues.

      
It’s about the money.

      
Those who hire a private criminal defense lawyer are already able to look at their case in ways that few public defender clients ever will. Private clients are far closer to the mythical rational actor. A private client looking for criminal representation will usually do all the things public defender clients are often prevented from doing: they’ll probe and prod, ask questions about the case or predicament, listen for that tone of directness and reassurance that gives a client the confidence and knowledge that although everything might not actually be all right, at least there will be someone to protect them and defend them and try his best to be sure that things don’t get too terrible. If wealthy defendants are not reassured, they’re unlikely to spend their money to retain the lawyer they are talking to. That’s why private lawyers do the dance. There is no question too stupid, no hope too faint, no situation too dire to elicit thoughtful, measured answers and a concerned smile --precisely the things public defender clients almost never get.

      
The ultimate irony is that at the Bronx Defenders, among other offices, clients represented by public defenders get representation as good, and often better, than that provided by most private lawyers. This is because many public defenders, and certainly the good ones, are able to bring in the kind of additional services that make all the difference in a case --social workers, investigators, and experts, precisely the kinds of services none but the wealthiest criminal defendants can afford. Still, even with skilled lawyers and good ancillary services, public defenders are at a terrible disadvantage in creating good client relationships. When alliances are forged in the crucible of need rather than choice, the resultant links are more often fraught with contentiousness having little to do with the skill of the attorney or even the results in a case.

      
Ignoring the yelling from Shateek and Brenner, who are still going at it down the row, Reginald leans toward the mesh. He wants to go over some of the paperwork I sent him. He’s carefully annotated one or two of the DD-5s (the forms the detectives use to record the steps in their investigation). As usual, Reginald’s thoughts are measured and logical, and his questions are pointed and smart. He’s been thinking about this stuff and wants to be sure I understand the significance of what he’s found. We bat his insights around for three or four minutes (something I should have done more of with Clarence), and then I tell Reginald he’s great, to hang tough, and to call me in the office after five someday if he wants to talk about this some more. He smiles graciously and thanks me for coming up. Standing up, I nod at Reginald and, making a fist, press the pinky side of my hand against the grate. Reginald does the same. I retrieve my corrections pass, check the time, and, as the thick steel door swings open, sprint toward criminal court.

S e v e n

12:18 P.M.

      
I break into a dead run the moment the bas-relief doors of the Supreme Court elevators open up. I sprint out onto the Grand Concourse and down the street toward the criminal courthouse. It’s after noon, and I’m more than an hour late for criminal court.

I shouldn’t have gone up to see Reginald. I’ve kept half a dozen clients waiting, packed into crowded courtrooms, wondering where the hell their lawyer is. In well-practiced fashion, I can usually get one quick call in during the trip from one building to the other --this time it’s merely to retrieve another two messages from justifiably pissed-off clients.

      
The Bronx Criminal Courthouse is a gray, modern box just off the Grand Concourse. Unlike Supreme Court, which deals with indicted felony cases, the criminal courthouse processes mostly misdemeanors. On many mornings the line to get inside stretches to the corner and around the block, the kind of queue that would entice an elderly Russian woman to join just with the promise of its length. But on 161st Street, those in line wait to be frisked, inspected, metal-detected, and ultimately processed through a criminal justice system that dockets more than seventy thousand cases a year in the Bronx alone: juveniles carted off to jail, fathers thrown out of their houses, blank-faced kids who can’t explain why they robbed or shot someone, or failed to show up at probation. The apparent calm of Supreme Court is gone; over here, in the assembly-line justice of criminal court, the system’s shortcomings are in your face. For starters, criminal court is always noisy: lawyers yell at clients, clients yell at lawyers, judges yell at lawyers, judges yell at clients, and some lawyers even yell at judges. The uncarpeted hallways reverberate with the constant clamor of a thousand urgent arguments. A massive fleet of court officers --the small army of armed men and women who secure the courthouses and the judges --polices the mayhem.

      
Even getting inside criminal court can be complicated. There are three lines: one for cops, prosecutors, and other people with badges (they walk right in); one for credentialed defense lawyers (again, since 9/11 a “speed pass” is required for defense lawyers; without one you get searched); and one for the general public. There are more than half a dozen magnetometers, manned by more than a dozen uniformed court officers who inspect the thousands of regular people who come in every day.

      
Just getting through the line and into the courthouse is a trying experience --a little like clearing security at Angry International Airport. This is partly because almost everyone inside the courthouse is in the midst of a personal drama of some sort --scared about going to jail, hoping to see a loved one who was just arrested, or finally seeking protection from an abusive lover or spouse. The tension regularly bubbles over just as people finally reach the magnetometers.

      
Today is no different. Heading through the doors, still hustling, I veer toward the middle line --the one for lawyers. Just to my left there is a woman who is obviously homeless. She is thin, though her frame is padded by the bulk of several layers of clothing. Her two coats bulge with ratty papers. She’s probably been waiting outside in the cold for nearly an hour.

      
“Empty your pockets,” a young court officer barks as the woman approaches the X-ray machine. Slowly, methodically, she begins taking things out of her pockets. Another court officer (his hands covered by plastic gloves) pokes through the junk, pushing most of it through the machine.

      
“What’s this?” he says, pointing to a sandwich carefully wrapped in a clear plastic bag.

      
“A-ah . . . ,” the woman stammers, “that’s my lunch.” “Well, you can’t bring it in. No food allowed.”

      
“Can I keep it somewhere and get it later?” She has a thin voice, but it’s clear and firm. “It’s all I have to eat.”

      
“Nope --gotta go in the garbage.”

      
“Can I promise not to eat it and just keep it with me? I’m homeless; it’s all I’ve got . . . please.” A plaintive edge creeps into her voice.

      
“Put it in the garbage. Or leave.”

      
“But . . .”

      
“I said chuck it or leave!” Several other court officers stride over. One, looking sideways at the young woman, ominously unsnaps the handcuff case at his waist.

      
“Please . . . , Officer . . . I don’t mean no harm. I gotta go to court, and I got nothin’ else to eat. I won’t eat it inside. I’ll leave it here, I’ll pick it up later, please. . . .”

      
“Escort her out,” the original officer tells the backup guys. They close in.

      
“Please, sir, please” --she’s pleading now --“I gotta go to court; I can’t get a warrant --I’ll throw it out, okay? I’ll throw it out. Please don’t make me go through the line again.”

      
Four officers surround the woman; there are tears in her eyes. Looking up at the burly men, she seems even smaller than she had just a moment before.

      
“Take her out.”

      
The officers grab her, roughly spin her around, and march her past me, back up the stairs, and out the door.

      
“Please, sir, can I have my stuff back?” she cries over her shoulder.

      
“In a minute, ma’am,” says another officer. This one is a Latino guy with silky postpubescent facial hair. He’s gathering up the papers, coins, and personal items from the far side of the magnetometer.

      
“What about this?” he asks, picking up the sandwich and glancing at the square-jawed white guy who had made the fuss in the first place.

      
“It’s disgusting,” says Square Jaw, “probably a health-code violation.”

      
“I don’t know,” the Latino guy says, trying to avoid an unnecessary power struggle. It’s too late though.

      
“Chuck it,” says Square Jaw, grabbing the sandwich and arcing it toward the industrial garbage can a few feet away. There’s a little sigh from a few people in the line. Some shake their head; others scowl and look down.

      
Near the trash can, another woman glances around and, reaching down, starts to pull the sandwich out. Square Jaw spots her immediately. “Removing food from a garbage can is a healthcode violation!” he barks. There’s another sotto voce sigh from the line. The good Samaritan, who a second before had seemed willing to lose her place in line to deliver the retrieved sandwich, knows she can’t risk being escorted out and banned from the building, or worse, arrested. And so, with a low shake of her head, she ostentatiously opens her thumb and forefinger, and drops the plastic bag back into the garbage.

      
“Have a nice day,” the court officer nearest me says wryly.

- - - -
 

      
As I walk away from the magnetometers, I’m wondering whether I should find out what courtroom the homeless woman was going to so that I can alert her lawyer or tell the judge that she really did try to come to court. But with the swarm of people heading through the revolving doors and the crowd outside, I can see neither her nor the cluster of court officers.

      
There’s nothing to do.

      
As I head around the corner to the escalators, I pass another court officer. This one is marching back and forth in front of a huge metal pen calling out names through a bullhorn. There are fifty or sixty people standing around listlessly.

      
“Here,” yells a hugely fat Hispanic man with a goatee.

      
“Yo,” answers a kid in a black-and-red velvet tracksuit.

      
Both of them are waving little pink slips --criminal court summonses. Summonses resemble traffic tickets and charge offenses like disorderly conduct, possession of an open container of alcohol, or truancy. They are adjudicated in the part just to my left.

      
Summonses are both the least serious and most bountiful of criminal court actions --the krill of criminal court. The summons part, known as SAP-1 or the “SAP part,” is in session several days a week, including today, and handles even more cases than the criminal parts upstairs --sometimes over a hundred a day. Although many of the cases are technically misdemeanor criminal offenses, it is an unwritten rule that no one emerges from the summons part with a criminal record. Still, a summons is a summons, and on the days that they are heard, the ground floor of criminal court can become horrifically crowded --hence the barricade / bullhorn system.

      
Summonses play a starring role in the overpolicing of underprivileged communities, and if you want to understand why so many poor people view the police with animosity and skepticism, you need only examine the role that police and those pink slips play in the lives of poor folks.

      
In the Bronx it is routine to see hardworking people who earn minimum wage come into court owing a thousand dollars in tickets issued
at the same time on the same traffic stop
. These people, scraping to get by, don’t have any problem paying the summons for the rolling stop at the stop sign --in their view, they did wrong, and they accept it. But the fact that they also got a ticket for a crooked license plate, five more for inappropriately tinted windows (a separate one for each window), a seat-belt violation issued
after
the officer ordered them out of the car, a ticket for an improper lane change because they failed to signal while pulling over for the policeman in question, and a bonus ticket for a cracked side-view mirror --well, that just makes them hate the cops.

      
The police would never pile on tickets like this in Manhattan or Beverly Hills or Highland Park. Outraged citizens wouldn’t just challenge every one of the tickets, they’d complain --to the precinct captain, to legislators, to their friends at the DA’s office. Cops who police wealthy neighborhoods don’t want to risk being reamed out by their captains for being assholes to a friend of a deputy commissioner. And since the police can’t possibly know who those friends are, neighborhood and race become proxies for access. This access to the power structure moderates the nature of policing, keeping it inside acceptable norms in affluent neighborhoods. The odds that someone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan knows the mayor are a helluva lot better than the odds in the Soundview Oval.

      
My clients, of course, have no access to anyone, so if they do complain, they do so to utter deafness. No matter how outrageous the police conduct, the presumption is that the client is whining, gutless, and guilty --certainly not a serious citizen with a legitimate complaint. With no check on their behavior, the cops in the Bronx tend to be a lot rougher and a little faster with the old summons book. For example: Bronx cops give thousands of summonses for open containers of alcohol --a rule flagrantly flouted in most of the tony public spaces where Manhattan’s wealthy gather. In Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, a popular summer tanning spot for Manhattan Yuppies, beer peddlers wander openly among the sunbathers and Frisbee players, patronized without a second thought. But have a beer after your soccer game in one of the poorly tended green spaces of the Bronx, and you can expect to get a ticket. At an opera in Central Park a bottle of wine is expected and accepted, but listen to some rappers in Crotona Park with a nice cold one and you’ll get to spend a day waving your pink ticket at the guy with the bullhorn.

      
Reality, as many poor people eventually understand it, is that between the rules about truancy, trespass, loitering, disorderly conduct, and dog walking, most any adventure can wind up getting you a summons. And that’s if you’re lucky.

      
Michael wasn’t.

      
It all started on a warm August day. Michael Johnson, a quiet nineteen-year-old who worked part-time as a stock clerk at a hardware store, offered to walk a friend’s dog because its actual owner had a family emergency.