Authors: David Simon
But on rare occasion, when a defendant is talking shit—performing in the courtroom, signifying, passing wolf tickets to the judge and prosecutor—a detective will step through the psychological barrier. Only then will the defendant be acknowledged in any real way; only then does a detective let anyone suspect that he may actually care about the legal outcome.
Earlier in the year, Dave Brown happened to be in a courtroom for the jury’s verdict on two of his defendants—west-siders, age twenty-two and fourteen, charged with murdering an elderly minister in a street robbery near University Hospital the previous spring. Brown remained silent as the jury forewoman read out first-degree verdicts, but the older defendant suddenly lost his chill.
“You happy now, bitch?” he shouted, turning to glare at the detective.
The gallery fell into silence.
“Yes,” said Brown quietly. “I’m pleased.”
Inside a courtroom, it’s as much as a detective allows himself.
W
EDNESDAY
, O
CTOBER 19
At his cluttered desk on the fourth floor of Courthouse West, Lawrence C. Doan rearranges a stack of legal pads and runs one finger along the bottom of his dark bangs and then back over the top, carefully reassuring himself that all is in place. No cowlicks today. No antigravitational shift in the tie’s Windsor. No lint on the lapels. No problem whatsoever, save for the fact that today he’s going to try to prosecute a murder in the city of Baltimore, which is a little like trying to drive a Winnebago through the eye of a needle.
And now, when Doan wishes only to be left alone to review notes and prepare his opening, a homicide detective bounds through the door to yank his prosecutor’s chain over matters large and small—a deliberate act of sadism, born of the same impulse that causes small children to pull the wings off flies.
“Are we ready?” asks Garvey.
“Are we ready,” says Doan. “You come in here ten minutes before court and ask me that?”
“Just don’t fuck up my case, Larry.”
“How can I?” asks Doan. “It came to me prefucked.”
Garvey ignores him. “The photos come in with me, right?” he asks, wondering about evidentiary order.
“No,” says Doan, trying to think bigger thoughts, “I’ll get those in with Wilson. Where’s Wilson? Did you call the crime lab?”
“And the bullets?” asks Garvey, ignoring him. “Do you need the bullets today?”
“Which bullets? Where’s Wilson, does he—”
“The bullets from the trunk of the car.”
“Um, no. Not today. You can take those back to evidence control,” says Doan, preoccupied. “Does Wilson know he’s on this afternoon?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?” says Doan. “You think so? What about Kopera?”
“What about him?”
Doan begins to change colors.
“You’re not going to get to Kopera this afternoon, right?” asks Garvey.
Doan buries his head in his hands, contemplating the known realities. The federal budget deficit is out of control, the ozone layer is being depleted, twenty pissant countries have nuclear weapons and I, Lawrence Doan, am trapped in a small room with Rich Garvey, ten minutes away from opening arguments.
“No, I don’t need Kopera,” says Doan, regaining his calm. “I’ll need Wilson probably.”
“You want me to call him?” asks Garvey, now playful.
“Yes,” says Doan. “Yes. Please. Call him.”
“Well, Larry, if it’ll help you relax …”
Doan shoots Garvey a look.
“Don’t you look at me that way, motherfucker,” says the detective, pushing back the suit jacket to reach his waist holster and grab the butt of his gun. “I’ll shoot you full of holes right here and now and everyone in this courthouse will rule it justifiable.”
The prosecutor responds with his middle finger, and the detective lifts the gun a few inches from the holster, then laughs.
“F. Lee Doan,” says Garvey, smiling. “You better not lose this case, motherfucker.”
“Well, if you’d do your fucking job and get me some witnesses …”
The standard prosecutorial lament, heard a thousand times a day by a thousand police officers in a thousand distant courthouses.
“You’ve got witnesses,” counters Garvey. “Romaine Jackson, Sharon Henson, Vincent Booker …”
At the mention of Booker’s name, Doan gives the detective another look.
“Well,” says Garvey, shrugging, “he’s definitely a witness …”
“We’ve been through this, goddammit,” says Doan, growing irritated. “I do not want to put Vincent Booker on the witness stand. That’s the last thing I want to do.”
“Okay,” says Garvey, shrugging. “But I think you’re making a mistake.”
“Yeah,” says Doan, “I know you do. And I’m sure when we lose this case you’ll be the first one to say I told you so.”
“I sure as shit will be,” says Garvey.
The prosecutor rubs his temples, then looks down at the pile of paper on his desk that represents the state’s case against Robert Frazier in the murder of Lena Lucas. For the sake of giving Garvey grief, he has overstated the matter just a bit: The case against Frazier is solid and he does indeed have witnesses. But it is nonetheless a circumstantial prosecution, and therefore—as prosecutors enjoy pointing out—it is subject to circumstances beyond control. Without an eyeball witness or the murder weapon, without a full confession or an obvious motive, the web that connects Frazier to the death of his lover will be thin. To Garvey, who has built the case, Vincent Booker is part of that web; to avoid his testimony as a trial tactic is to weaken the case. But to Doan, Vincent Booker is a loose cannon rolling around on the deck of the ship, a witness who might be seen as an alternate suspect by the jurors.
After all, Vincent did sell Frazier’s cocaine. He knew Lena Lucas and already admitted to his knowledge of the events that preceded his father’s murder. Garvey himself believed that Vincent was probably present when Frazier demanded that old man Booker return the drugs he had taken from his son’s room. Vincent probably stood there dumbstruck as Frazier used that knife to cut his father repeatedly in the face, demanding to know where the package was. He could still have been standing there when Frazier finally used the gun. Given those probable truths, no one could say where Vincent’s trial testimony might lead.
No, thinks Doan again, the risks of Vincent Booker’s testimony are greater than the benefits, though trying to argue the point with Garvey is futile. The detective is convinced that Frazier’s attorney, Paul Polansky, will use Vincent Booker as an alternate suspect in any event. In Garvey’s view, keeping Booker in the background will only play into the opposition’s strategy.
That difference of opinion, coupled with the usual concerns about all the logistics involving evidence and witnesses, is enough to ruin whatever quiet reflection Doan had hoped for before this morning’s arguments. Instead, a detective and his prosecutor begin the day in each other’s faces.
Doan smiles, then waves his tormentor out of the cubicle for a few moments of silence. A veteran of the Baltimore courthouse, Larry Doan is short and stocky, with dark hair, pale skin, wire-rims, and an eye that wanders just enough to deny his face symmetry. In the courtroom, Doan’s appearance and demeanor often suggest a near-permanent state of woe; at times he seems to embody every stereotype about the underpaid, overworked big-city prosecutor, his briefcase crammed with motions, answers to motions and stipulations, his values crowded by the rising tide of human despair. If the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office ever needed a poster boy, Doan would be the odds-on favorite.
Among the other lawyers in the trial division, Doan’s reputation is reasonably good. He is said to be fair, reasoned and methodical with both evidence and witnesses. He preps hard for trials and his closing arguments are always competent, often skillful, though sometimes not nearly as strong or emotional as some think they could be. But in one respect, he is a rare prize for any homicide detective who happens to care about a case: Doan will fight. Assured that a defendant is guilty and that no reasonable plea can be taken, Doan isn’t afraid to take a borderline or marginal case to a jury. Like any trial lawyer, he hates to lose, but he is willing to lose if the only alternative is a stet or dismissal.
Garvey is counting on this: He knows Doan will fight, just as he knows that the evidence against Robert Frazier is sufficient but not overwhelming. Kidding aside, he’s glad to have Doan for this one.
Leaving the prosecutor’s cubicle, the detective walks down the side stairwell to the third-floor hallway outside Cliff Gordy’s courtroom. There are two benches in the hall and a third in the carpeted anteroom just outside Gordy’s court. Because he is a sequestered witness, Garvey will make the three benches his office for the next week, as a prosecution that he worked hard to prepare unfolds without him.
For Garvey, the relegation to prosecutor’s assistant is always hard to accept. Doan isn’t one of those lawyers who wants a cop to be seen and not heard; he’s willing to take advice. On the other hand, he’s going to listen to that advice, evaluate it, and then try the case his way. Garvey, who knows the Lena Lucas case better than any man, is not exactly known for his abundant tact; in fact, he’s never met an opinion he’d be unwilling to venture. Yet Doan must walk through Judge Gordy’s double doors and try the case on the merits; Garvey must sit outside and play shepherd to the state’s evidence and witnesses. The morning banter in Doan’s office suggests the change in status: In February, it was Garvey who was sweat
ing this case, scratching for every available piece of evidence. Now Garvey has the time to joke and tease. Now he can pretend not to know whether Wilson from the crime lab is going to show up for trial. Now he can criticize the trial strategy and demand victory. Now it’s Larry Doan’s turn to carry the weight.
Yet Garvey wants very much to win this case. For one thing, he has never lost a case that has gone to a jury trial and he’d like to keep that admirable record intact. For another, he would like to see Lena Lucas avenged. She was using cocaine and helping Frazier to deal; still, she was a good enough mother to her daughters and she never hurt anyone but herself. Both of Lena’s daughters and her sister are scheduled as state’s witnesses, and all three are waiting with Garvey. The rest of the family is already inside the court, but earlier that morning, they greeted Garvey in the corridor as if he were Moses down from Sinai. Good people, thinks Garvey, settling in on the bench. They deserve to win this.
The man of the hour, Robert Frazier, is already inside the courtroom and behind the defense table, sitting next to his lawyer with a hardbound copy of the New Testament in front of him, a cardboard marker pressed inside the Book of Luke. Frazier is wearing a well-tailored dark suit and a crisp white shirt, but somehow there’s no mistaking his line of work. Just before the jury files in, Frazier stretches his tall frame, pushes his chair back and yawns like a man at ease in courtrooms. He turns to look at the members of the Lucas family in the back row, stares for a moment, then turns away.
The motions hearings were yesterday morning, with Doan successfully fighting off some routine efforts by Paul Polansky, who tried to have the identification of his client by Romaine Jackson—the young girl who saw Frazier enter Lena’s building from her third-floor window—ruled inadmissible. Polansky argued that Frazier’s photo had been given greater prominence in the photo array shown to the girl because it was in the upper left corner and because the other men seemed younger and less thin. Gordy denied the motion, as well as one that challenged a search warrant that Garvey and Donald Kincaid had written for Frazier’s Chrysler after the arrest. Live .38 ammunition had been found in the trunk.
The rest of the day was spent on the selection of a jury—voir dire—the elaborate process by which potential jurors are screened for bias by the court. Voir dire is, in itself, an essential part of the trial strategy, with prosecutors using their limited number of “strikes” to keep out those potential jurors who have been beaten by police, have relatives in the prison system,
or generally regard the criminal courts of the United States as a sham perpetrated by running dog capitalist jackals. At the same time, the defense attorney endeavors to use his strikes to remove all who are related to a law enforcement officer, who were ever the victims of a crime, or who truly believe that if the man seated at the defense table is accused of the crime, he must be guilty. Because the population of Baltimore generally holds membership in one or more categories, voir dire in the Lucas case took quite a while—at least until the lawyers exhausted the allowable strikes.
From his seat at the trial table, Doan now watches the product of yesterday’s effort walk in from the jury room. A typical Baltimore jury—predominantly black, predominantly female. Polansky didn’t exactly go out of his way to find white jurors willing to sit in judgment on his black client; nor, for that matter, did Larry Doan strike any white strays from the jury box. Still, watching the jurors file in, Doan is generally satisfied. Most are working people, but with the sole exception of the girl in the front row, all seem sharp and attentive, which matters for a case such as this one. The girl in the front row, however, is trouble. Doan watches her slump into her seat, arms crossed, staring at the floor. She’s bored already; God knows what she’ll be like after four days of testimony.
Judge Clifton Gordy calls the court to order and begins his preamble, explaining the legal arena to the jurors. Tall, quiet, serious, Gordy cuts quite a figure on the bench. His language is precise, his humor is sharp, and his manner often seems, to lawyers at least, well suited to tyranny. Attorneys who fail to rise when stating their objections in Gordy’s court generally find themselves ignored. Gordy knows his law and he knows his lawyers; Doan, for example, worked for Gordy when the judge was heading the trial division. One other thing about the judge suits Doan in this case: Cliff Gordy is black, and that takes some of the edge off the fact that two white Jewish guys will be arguing the question of a black man’s freedom. It will certainly help the black jurors to believe that the criminal justice system actually represents them.