by Ken Gross
43
Above all, there is the consideration of dignity. A courtroom is intended to ratify the dignity of people. The notion is implicit in the presumption of innocence. Whatever acts are committed outside the courtroom, the “day in court” cleanses and elevates the participants to immutable standards of behavior. Guilty or innocent, what matters is the ceremonial fanfare. The ritual is crucial. The court attendants stand guard like vestrymen with grave eyes, enforcing respect. Smoking, talking, and even frivolous reading are forbidden—a reminder of the singular and serious purpose. On the rear wall of the largest courtroom in Queens, where Alice Crimmins would stand trial, was the familiar motto: “In God We Trust.” Indeed, the effort to evoke the feeling of a cathedral was not accidental: rich wood paneling and portraits of former judges lining the walls. The double doors leading from the hectic corridors to the hushed courtroom were a sobering barrier. As spectators passed from the throaty informality of the hallways to the chamber, there was a blast of something like awe. No one was immune. It was a place where people came to find their own dimensions; where raw passions were tamed; where the aggrieved quietly sought what people have always sought—justice.
In the most important sense, Alice Crimmins would stand trial inside and outside the courtroom. She was pronounced guilty in thousands of inadmissible conversations that took place in supermarkets and beauty parlors. It was a judgment that was a reflex of fear. In Queens, where troubled husbands and wives clung together because of fear of transgression, it was possible to resolve doubt with a clear declaration of Alice’s guilt. If it was not possible to eliminate a bothersome mystery, there were some who could at least deny it.
In the second week of May 1968, Alice Crimmins naively went to court seeking vindication. It began on May 9, a Thursday, in the huge ground-floor courtroom of the queens Criminal Courts Building—a room that came to be known as “The Hippodrome.” The relentless chorus of housewives began assembling before dawn. There was Nellie Saladino, a tiny, white-haired professional baby-sitter from Ridge-wood who had difficulty concealing her bristling anger. Santa Ienna would hurry her husband and two children through breakfast, then take two buses to be at the courthouse early. Alice Bagnell would sleep in the corridor to ensure her place in line. They would form an unofficial club, taking turns reserving places for one another, bringing lunch for their friends, having them over for dinner. They shared an obsession and were willing to undergo hardship and ridicule and would gladly postpone every other event in their lives to bear witness. In the club they spoke in a shorthand of mutual understanding. “A mother,” Alice Bagnell would say to the bobbing heads around her, “to do such a thing!” and the nodding heads would change direction and wag horizontally in disbelief.
The beginning of the trial was delayed for two days by Huntley Hearings—a contest to determine if statements made to police were admissible. It became clear that Alice had made no incriminating statements. On Friday, May 10, the spectators were back outside the courtroom, munching sandwiches and chocolate, afraid to lose their places in line. They carried newspapers like scorecards and had already begun to recognize one another and form groups—the courtroom buffs, retired people, who dissect every move and countermove like chess masters, an overlay of dispassion coating their voices; the housewives with angry eyes, suspicious of everyone, afraid each question or comment was some attempt to help Alice; men in leather jackets and folded arms who had closed their minds. And there were the truly detached viewers—bearded young law students who read textbooks as they waited, like monks guarding against contaminating sin.
They all had their reasons. For Santa Ienna, the bruising lines, the inconvenience would all be worthwhile if the trial could provide some answer. “I want to know why,” she said evenly. “I’ve made dinner every night, breakfast every morning. I’ve made all the sacrifices. I’ve got two kids. And I want to know why.”
“All rise.”
The decorum inside the courtroom is deceptive. The place seethes with unexpressed emotion. The judge enters quickly, hurrying to his perch high above the courtroom. He wears his position like the stars of a general and is uncomfortable outside the symbol of his rank.
Peter Farrell was the oldest active judge in Queens. At this time he was sixty-eight years old and had been a judge since 1943. Farrell, the eighth of nine children, was a staunch Roman Catholic. On the walls of his chambers were plaques from the Knights of Columbus. On his desk, in almost equivalent rank, was a portrait of John F. Kennedy. Farrell was a lifelong Democrat and had obtained his judgeship through hard precinct political work. He did not agree with the modern trend of de-emphasizing partisan identification for judges. He found nothing incongruous or compromising about attending political dinners and working for the party’s candidates. A graduate of Fordham Law School, Farrell first dreamed of entering politics, but the dream changed when one of his four children died during an absence, so he decided to seek a career closer to home. Farrell was regarded as a hard-nosed judge of the old school, fighting what he himself felt was a losing battle against a lost generation. “We used to give out stiffer sentences,” he would say ruefully. “We gave them ten to thirty years for robbery—and people did the time. We’re all off base.”
As senior judge, Peter Farrell assigned the Crimmins case to himself. It had been scheduled for another judge’s chambers—Paul Balsam’s—but Farrell by virtue of his position was able to pluck the case away. In most criminal courts there is a concept known as “judge shopping.” That is, defendants postpone and delay until a friendly judge appears on the calendar. In Queens, however, Peter Farrell was able to overrule the four judges underneath him. The prosecutor’s office was happy to let him, for they regarded him as someone who would be friendly to their side.
As she passed through the gauntlet on the first day of jury selection, Alice Crimmins’ face was hidden under her favorite floppy hat. She walked by the crowd, close enough to touch, but there was something uncanny and unapproachable about her. She came and went unmolested. With demure little gestures, as if she were masking an impolite cough, she popped peppermint Life-Savers into her mouth as she walked between her lawyers. Alice Crimmins was always conscious of her breath and hated to offend with human odors.
Among one segment of the press there is a sloppy tendency toward lazy identification. From the first, Alice had been “the attractive 26-year-old red-headed cocktail waitress.” Only the age would click off the passage of time. As the trial began, she was again the “attractive red-headed cocktail waitress,” locked forever in that description. If Alice had been a cocktail waitress for only a few months, it didn’t matter—that was her permanent rank. Because she had once been redheaded and beautiful, it went unnoticed that she now required dyes to keep up her appearance. And in the three years since the death of her children the pressures had taken their toll. She was still attractive, but she no longer looked young.
The case on trial was indictment number 1619, brought in the year 1967. On the right-hand side of the courtroom sat James Mosley and his itchy young assistant, Anthony Lombardino. Lombardino kept playing nervously with the prosecution files, set out in precise, military-like rows. Lombardino had trouble keeping the excitement out of his voice, and Mosley would remind him not to smile so much.
At the defense table Marty Baron and Harold Harrison positioned themselves around Alice Crimmins. They would always try to fit little Alice between them. Although they understood that there were metal parts to her personality, there was something fragile about Alice. It was a quality that brought out tenderness in some men. As she sat at the defense table, no one could say what went on behind the strained smile of appreciation.
“There is a . . . a detachment as you sit there; you can’t believe that they are talking about you. At least, I never did. It’s a very strange feeling—all the things I had done in my life, and there they were, all brought out, all distorted. It never was really like that. It was never like what they m
ade it out to be.”
The potential jurors filed in and took their places, unable to keep their eyes from Alice Crimmins. The spectators, even the judge found themselves searching the expression, the aspect of the defendant, as if these would yield an answer.
During the jury selection it is possible to detect the broad outlines of attack and defense. Lombardino conducted the questioning of the prospective jurors. Blunt, almost crude, he left no margin for subtlety in his bulldog style. “There’s no place for sympathy in a case like this,” he would tell the jurors, virtually daring them to admit to such a weakness. A tremor ran through Alice Crimmins as she listened to his first probings. She turned to Harrison and whispered in a high, vulnerable voice that seemed out of place in the great courtroom, “I don’t like that man.”
That was precisely the reaction Tony Lombardino was after. He wanted Alice to hate him.
The prosecution had a profile for its ideal juror: he would be male, middle-aged, of lower-middle-class standing. He would be a man who had to struggle to make a living. A man with a family and a live morality. Roman Catholic. In effect, someone who would start out with a grudge against Alice Crimmins.
Harold Harrison did not have much hope of getting his ideal juror. He had consulted a psychologist, who recommended that he find a successful young liberal with a touch of skepticism. Such people were rare, and on juries virtually extinct. A successful person could always evade jury duty, pleading the crush of important business.
Cases are said to be settled by the time jury selection is completed. That kind of traditional wisdom among attorneys goes unchallenged because it is impossible to prove or disprove. But it’s also said that cases are decided by the choice of judge, the apparel of the lawyers, the quality of the free lunches provided by the state, or even the confluence of planets in their orbits. Still, the jury renders the final verdict. If the jury system works, it works best when truly dealing with peers. People on the fringes of society invariably have a tougher time. In early May, as the process of jury selection began, it seemed that Harrison and Baron had already been defeated. The first man selected, Carl Boyer of Forest Hills, a retired Civil Service employee, set the pattern. The jurors were an accurate reflection of a certain segment of Queens—a linotype operator from Flushing, a milkman from Arverne, a garment worker from Flushing. There were importers, electricians—none young, none women. The defense used up its twenty peremptory challenges merely trying to weed out those people with an obviously closed mind.
Women could get off jury duty simply by claiming that they had children to take care of, and the matter was not pressed. All the women on the prospective panel asked to be excused, saying they believed Alice was guilty. In the late 1960s few women elected to accept jury duty. Jury names were taken from voter-registration lists and young people usually were slow to register. The pool of potential jurors consisted of middle-aged men with a decided blue-collar tilt.
From the standpoint of the prosecution, an almost perfect panel had been picked—men wedded until death to a morality that would become the central question of the case. One man on the jury, however, did not fit the prosecution profile. This was Lewis Rosenthal, at forty, the youngest man on the panel. Rosenthal lived with his wife, Vera, in a two-story green-shingled house in an ethnically fluid part of Jamaica. He was an importer who had been born in Saxony in Germany and barely escaped the Nazis. First he had moved to Israel, where he fought as an officer in the War of Independence. But in 1953 he had come to the United States to collect a small inheritance. Here he had met the woman he would marry, and stayed. When Rosenthal was picked for jury duty, he was upset; it would be a disruption of his business and personal life. Balanced against the inconvenience was Rosenthal’s strong sense of duty. He had always had a deep respect for the American system of justice—the fairest in the world, he was convinced. That faith would become a casualty of the trial.
Rosenthal was surprised when he was chosen for the Crimmins jury. He wore a beard. It was neat and well trimmed, but in 1968 a beard was to many people a statement of rebellion. When he was chosen as juror number nine, another surprising thing happened to Lewis Rosenthal: he was not unhappy about serving. The first flinch of self-pity at being forced to participate in something unpleasant was replaced by an undeniable delight. An introspective man, Rosenthal found himself stretching his beliefs under questioning. He was not lying, but he was taking liberties with the literal truth, telling the prosecution and defense lawyers what they wanted to hear. “Suddenly,” he would recall, “I wanted to be picked. It was a subtle thing. Wouldn’t it be nice to be picked—to be important?”
In the Jamaica neighborhood where Rosenthal lived, Alice Crimmins’ trial was the most urgent topic of conversation. He would hear a pleasant buzz in his wake when he went shopping—“He’s one of the jurors in the Crimmins case!” Being a juror in such a celebrated trial brought a certain local status to Lewis Rosenthal, but it was something he didn’t quite trust.
As the jurors took their places, one by one, in the box, Alice Crimmins wondered whether these men in narrow ties and inexpensive suits, precisely the people she had defied, would be able to understand her. She wore a prim black dress with a collar, her only concession.
During the selection process Anthony Lombardino had implanted the prosecution theme, asking each juror if he could accept the contention that a mother could murder her own child. Again and again it was repeated, reinforced every time a prospective juror, pausing to punctuate the enormity of the response, said: “Yes. . . yes, I could.”
By the time the full jury was seated, Lombardino, by the simple repetition, had all but wiped away whatever natural sympathy a mother might have. For some he had created the corollary—that Alice Crimmins was not a real mother, but a mutation.
The jury knew that they would be together for a long time. Most had served on juries before and, understanding the signs of a lengthy trial, began to pace themselves for the ordeal. At first Lewis Rosenthal listened carefully to the judge’s instructions and took strict care not to read or listen to anything about the case. Gradually the diligence was eroded as he noticed the other jurors reading and talking about the case and growing more and more careless about the judge’s orders. Was it always this way? Rosenthal didn’t know, but he noticed that the court correction officers who guarded them were careless and blindly ignored the jurors’ abuses.
As the trial began, Harold Harrison finally devised a strategy of sorts. He didn’t have any real plan to counter the prosecution because—aside from knowing that there would be a mystery witness, hearing hints that it would be a “woman in a window”—he simply was not aware of the strength of their case. But in his direct, almost childlike way, Harrison would try to create some sympathy for Alice Crimmins. As he passed a reporter in the hallway on his way to lunch that first week, he clutched Alice’s elbow and said in a stage whisper: “Be careful, remember your condition.” When the reporter asked if Alice was pregnant, Harrison was coy. “Use your imagination,” he said. To other questions, he retreated behind a theatrical “No comment.” Eddie was let in on Harold’s tactic, and when he was questioned by reporters, he said: “Isn’t the husband the last to know?” an inadvertent homily usually applicable to another kind of secret.
The next morning the Daily News headline on page five said: “Strain Hits Mrs. Crimmins; She is Reported Pregnant.” By that afternoon, however, the Long Island Press had aborted the story: “Mrs. Crimmins Isn’t Awaiting the Stork.”
Harrison’s tactic backfired. Reporters felt betrayed and would no longer trust him. Publicly humiliated, some reporters wrote off the Crimmins defense team as capable of supporting any lie to enhance their case. The regular courtroom reporters would not be so easily misled again. Whatever Harrison told them would be weighed against that first cheap trick. At the prosecution table, Tony Lombardino was delighted. In a stroke Harrison had destroyed his own credibility and enhanced the District Attorney’s. Lom
bardino winked at his friends in the press corps—he couldn’t help gloating, saying he had tried to warn them.
But if Harold Harrison’s public-relations efforts were clumsy, it was a measure of his desperation. His cause, he was beginning to discover, was not a popular one. In his own legal firm, Donald Manes was remaining as remote as possible. Manes, who had first brought Joe Rorech to the firm, did send a note to Harrison suggesting that his partner remind the jurors that people were innocent until proven guilty, and that he should avoid letting anyone be picked for the jury who was related to a policeman.
After the first few moments of Lombardino’s opening statement, there was no more mystery—it was to be a slugging match. James Mosley would sit at the prosecution table looking slightly bewildered while his partner delivered the blows.
“We won’t produce motion pictures of her doing it,” said Anthony Lombardino, his voice thick with contempt, but there would be ample proof under the law to convict Alice Crimmins of murder. Marty Baron was stunned. Harold Harrison’s instinct for combat was aroused. They expected the judge to step in and bring Lombardino within bounds. But Judge Farrell allowed Lombardino latitude. The judge did not even interfere when Lombardino moved onto very shaky legal grounds, suggesting that although no one could connect Alice with her son’s death, both deaths were a package.
Baron immediately demanded that a mistrial be declared. Farrell waved him away from the bench and issued a confusing instruction to the jurors. He told them they should consider only the crime of Missy’s death, but they were permitted to note that Eddie was dead, too. It was the first sign of the list in favor of the prosecution.
Marty Baron was the wrong man to pit against Tony Lombardino. He did not have Harold Harrison’s relish for a gutter fight, and, like James Mosley, he would find himself crowded off the stage by the two brawlers—Lombardino and Harrison. Baron, however, delivered the opening for the defense. He had agonized over it for days, reviewing Harrison’s proposed drafts and then deciding to make it brief. “We do not know how this child met her death,” he began, “but we will prove that Alice was a loving and a good mother and was emotionally incapable of doing this terrible thing.” He was asking the jury to accept an existential mystery that had almost driven dozens of policemen mad. Worse, he was appealing to a level of intellect while Lombardino aimed for the gut. At the prosecution table, Lombardino had trouble keeping his face in an expression of indignant rage. He could tell that his reaction was having an effect on the jury.