Courthouse (11 page)

“Hello, Judge,” said George rising. Marc rose too. They all shook hands.

“Gentlemen,” he said. He nodded to Maria. He was vital again. “Didn't know you fellows came here too. Business must be good at City Hall.”

“Always busy, Judge,” said George.

They all smiled pleasantly again. Ruggierio showed the Judge to a table.

Marc, George, and Maria settled back waiting for their lunch. “As long as I'm going to spend the city's money and pick up the tab, we might as well talk a little business,” George said.

“Who says you're going to pick up the check?” asked Marc.

“That wouldn't be fair otherwise,” said George.

“Who said anything about being fair?”

“A fine thing. I ask you to lunch, and you pick up the tab.”

“One good turn deserves another, George,” said Maria.

George smiled. “Well, how about it?” he asked Marc. “Do you think you'll have time to do some discreet snooping in the courts for the Mayor?”

Maria looked to Marc.

“I'll do it for you, if you want, George,” Marc replied.

“I do.”

“Only don't expect me to do any in-depth statistical analysis or anything. I'll just be able to tell you about individual cases and situations, point you in the right direction perhaps.”

“That's exactly what we want, Marc,” said George.

“You give the Mayor the leads, and he'll follow them up.”

Marc looked at George skeptically.

“He will, Marc, he will. You don't know this Mayor,” George assured him. “He's really a very progressive guy.”

Marc poured some wine, then leaned forward, his elbows on the table.

“George, the Mayor's a politician, and politicians are only interested in what the voters are interested in. And the voters, the general public, hardly care about defendants' rights. That is, until one of their kids or someone they know is arrested.”

“The public isn't as cold as that,” George said.

“They're not cold,” said Marc. “They're afraid. They read all the sensational stories in the papers, and get so scared they want to destroy every hint, every mention of crime, including the defendants.”

“I really don't think that's true, Marc,” said George.

“No? Go into court as a defendant—even if you're innocent—and see how you'll be treated. Look at the laws, and how the courts apply them; see if even the Legislature permits a defendant the means to protect himself.”

“You're not saying what all these hippie demonstrators say, that the system is evil, fascistic, are you?” George asked.

“Not at all,” Marc replied. “But it's an uphill struggle just to defend yourself from the moment you're arrested. It shouldn't be stacked against the defendant that way.”

“How is it stacked, as you say?” pressed George.

“Take the start of a case, the preliminary hearing to determine if a crime has been committed,” said Marc. “The Legislature gives a defendant the right to a hearing within a certain number of hours or days. That's only theoretical, however. Practically speaking, when a judge refuses to give a defendant his hearing, which happens twenty times a day in 100 Centre Street alone, what can the defendant do about it? The Legislature hasn't provided a way of enforcing the law until an appeal after the trial, after the whole case is over. But, it's too late then. So why does the Legislature go through the motions of making laws that have no teeth?”

George was silent.

“How about the way we send people to jail, George,” Marc continued. “Why do we send a person to jail who's committed a non-violent crime for the first time? No question about it, he committed a crime without violence, say embezzlement, a stock fraud, income tax evasion. And he has no previous criminal history whatsoever. Why do we send him to jail?”

“The classic answer is to rehabilitate him,” said George, with a shrug.

Maria sipped her wine, quietly listening.

“Penologists have been saying for years that in the first place, jails are not rehabilitating,” Marc countered. “Second, it's a known fact that more than sixty-five per cent of the people who commit a crime for the first time will never commit another crime whether you give them one day, one year, or ten years in jail. They learn their lesson right off the bat. And the other thirty-five per cent if you give them one year, or ten years, or twenty years in jail, they'll commit a crime the first chance they get when they get out, no matter what. So how does a judge know to which side, which percentage group, a defendant who's never been in trouble before is going to fall? Why not put all non-violent first offenders on probation? If they step across the line and violate probation, even once, they can always be sent away for the full time they should have gotten in the first place.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said George. “But it takes time to change traditions and old principles.” George thought for a moment. “The Mayor's the right guy to do it, though, Marc.”

“Why then are there so many mayorally appointed judges who act like D.A.s with black robes on?” asked Marc.

“This guy never stops, does he?” George said to Maria lightly.

She smiled. “You ought to know that by this time, George.”

“Okay, put this in your pipe and smoke it,” George said to Marc. “How would
you
like to be screened for a judgeship?”

Maria stared at George, then Marc.

“Come on, George, let's not talk nonsense,” said Marc.

“I'm very serious.”

“I haven't even been a lawyer long enough, have I?” he asked.

“Sure you have. It'll be eleven years next June,” said George. “You only need ten.”

“But I have no political affiliations, George. Your Mayor isn't interested in a guy like me. Besides, I don't want to be a judge. I like what I'm doing.”

“But if you say we're not appointing the right men,” said George, “and then the Mayor says to you, okay, we'll appoint you, don't you have some kind of obligation, at least to your own principles, to consider the offer? I mean, if all good men say, I like what I'm doing, I don't want to be bothered, then the only ones left for the Mayor to appoint are hacks.”

“I agree with George,” said Maria.

The waiter came with trays of steaming food. He set a plate in front of each of them and refilled their glasses with wine. George rubbed his hands together, picked up his fork and began eating.

“Man, this dish is fantastic!”

“It's extra good today,” agreed Maria.

“What the hell happened to eleven years?” amused Marc. “I mean that's a long time, George. What the hell did we do with all that time?”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” replied George. “You know, when you're younger, you think, gee, guys who have been out of law school eleven years, they're old. But suddenly, you turn around, yourself, and here we are, ten years later.”

“I don't feel old,” said Marc.

“Me neither,” said George. He laughed and then continued eating. “You remember Professor Stone? Did we ever tell you about Professor Stone, Maria?” George asked, turning to Maria.

“Many times,” she smiled. “But tell me again. I love to hear about him. I would have liked to have known him.”

“He was a great man,” said Marc. “Even if he started all this aggravation.”

“What aggravation is that?” asked George.

“The criminal law,” replied Marc. “Stone is the one who got me started in it.”

George nodded, then continued eating. He thought about the Professor, a bright, interesting teacher, a hard taskmaster, who brought about results. Professor Stone taught them to think, to stick to the point, not to assume anything, to deal only with facts. You had to know the difference between the chaff and the wheat, the incidental from the real for Stone.

George remembered Professor Stone standing on his teacher's platform, looking around the room, that almost-smile ever present on his full face. Stone was a big man, tall, full-chested, with dark hair.

“Okay, let's see what they taught you in those colleges you went to,” the Professor said to his first-year law students. “The first problem I want you to solve is as follows. If we call a cow's tail a leg, how many legs does it have?” Stone looked over the faces of his skeptical students. “I'm serious now.” He pointed to a student.

“Four.”

“Oh, come on.” He pointed to another.

“Five.”

Another said four. Another said five.

Stone stopped pointing, a mocking smile spreading on his face. “They didn't teach some of you too much, I see,” he taunted. “You can call a cow's tail anything you want, but it's still a tail, and the cow still only has four legs. Boy, that's really dumb.” The Professor was smiling, his criticism never reaching down to viciousness or embarrassment. “You let me fake you right out. Listen; you people, you want to be lawyers or accountants?”

His eyes ranged over the class. No one answered.

“Well, accountants are important. But they deal with facts and figures, two and two, five and five, black and white. But lawyers deal with concepts, things that aren't always even, always odd, or always easy to add up. As a lawyer, you have to deal with things that you won't always be able to look up, won't always be solved by the application of formula.”

George remembered that Marc, who sat next to him, was right from the start, rapt with attention when Stone spoke.

“The law is the essence of our civilization,” continued the Professor. “It's what separates us from the animals in the jungle. Or at least some of us,” he said sardonically. “And as long as there is the discipline of the law, civilization lasts. When people run berserk, stampeding their desires any old which way, that's chaos.

“But remember,” the Professor cautioned, “the law doesn't stand still. As life changes, so too must the law. When the ghosts of old laws that once applied—the laws regulating the speed of horse carriages, for instance—stand clanking their ancient chains across the way of progress, they must be struck down like some useless cobweb in the barn at springtime.”

George remembered studying the Professor when he made that remark about barns and springtime. He looked like a big, rawboned farm kid, who somehow grew and got himself involved in the law. Stone looked as though he'd be more at home behind a plow, or driving a truck, something rugged, outdoorsy. But his mind was a well-honed cutlass.

“And if some of you are unwilling to reach out and grasp at the unknown, the new, then maybe you ought to go to Poughkeepsie to hand up your shingle. You could handle a few real estate closings, a few contracts between the farmers and the Grange. New York City, well, that's something else.”

“You remember that summer intern program the Professor started between our second and third year?” Marc asked, turning to George.

“Sure,” said George. “Weren't we in that together?”

“So we were.”

The Professor, when he wasn't teaching, handled cases for defendants who couldn't pay a lawyer's fee. He wouldn't handle a case for a paying client. There were enough lawyers to do that, the Professor had always said. Not that he'd take just any case, but money wasn't an issue with him.

To help with the cases, the Professor always picked two or three top students and let them intern with him, that is, when they were not in class, they could go to court with him and assist him, and help in the preparation of briefs.

“The Professor taught me never to get angry or emotional in a courtroom,” Marc said, smiling at the remembrance.

“I can't imagine you getting angry in a courtroom,” George said. “How'd that come about?”

“Well, once the Professor was representing a poor Black guy who had spent about ten years in jail. He'd been trying to find someone to handle his case, because he said he got a raw deal.”

“And naturally, he found Professor Stone.”

“Naturally,” agreed Marc. “During the investigation, we discovered that originally our defendant was indicted with another man. At the beginning of the original trial, the D.A. said to the Judge that because of some new circumstances concerning only the other defendant, circumstances which required investigation, the D.A. wanted to separate the cases and just put the Professor's client on trial.”

“What did the Judge do?”

“He permitted it. It turned out there were two main witnesses in the case,” Marc continued. “One was a former girl friend and the second a friend of the other defendant. They both testified that the two men planned the robbery together, right in the girl's apartment, showed pistols, and went out to pull the job. They also testified that the two men returned later on and admitted they had robbed a Greek man and shot him.”

“Sounds like a fairly strong case, to say the least,” said George.

“True. All through the trial, although only one defendant was on trial, the D.A. told the jury that the two men acted in concert and committed the crime together. The D.A. told the jury that they were equally guilty.”

“Did the jury convict the first defendant?”

“They did,” replied Marc. “And then, a couple of months later, the D.A. made a motion to dismiss the case against the second defendant.”

“How come?” asked George.

“The D.A. actually said in an affidavit that the two main witnesses—that is, the girl friend and the other friend—were unsavory, unreliable characters, whose credibility was highly doubtful.”

“
The two same witnesses
the D.A. used to convict the Black guy?”

“Right,” said Marc. “In addition, the D.A. said that the second defendant had an alibi; he was at work, and it was very unlikely that he could have left his job, committed the crime with the Black guy, and then gone back without being noticed.”