Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Quite to the contrary, Barrow’s behavior after taking the photo demonstrated an openness he’d had about it, a matter-of-factness that belied any special interest in the subject matter. He’d taken the roll of exposed film to a local store for processing, had written his own name and phone number on the envelope, and had even brought his daughter along when he’d come to call for the prints the next day.

  All it was was a photograph, plain and simple. And even though it might show bad taste, questionable judgment, and a lack of sensitivity on the part of the parent who’d taken it, none of those things made it lewd. Not to Flynt Adams, anyway. And, the way he saw it, not to anyone else who was willing to stop and think about it for a moment.

  Like Justice Wainwright, for example.

  All that was the good news.

  The bad news was that at this stage of the proceedings, the prosecution didn’t have to prove its case the way it would at trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. All Jim Hall would have to do to survive Flynt Adams’s motion to dismiss would be to convince Judge Wainwright that the lewdness issue was a question for a jury to decide. Wainwright was a former district attorney himself, and his rulings in criminal cases tended to side with the prosecution. But he wasn’t an assassin, a hit man - one of those judges whose greatest pleasure in life came from hurting defendants, and by extension, their lawyers.

  He wasn’t, for example, a Priscilla McGee.

  The more he read, the more he thought about it, and the more he wrote, Flynt Adams was beginning to think that it was very possible - he didn’t dare say probable - that Everett Wainwright might do the right thing. The judge knew how unpredictable a jury could be: They might convict Barrow, or they might not. But even if they did, there was a chance that some appellate court would reverse them. And whose fault would that be? The judge’s, of course. Better to toss the thing out right now, save everybody the time, trouble, and expense.

  At least that’s the way things played out in Flynt Adams’s little fantasy. And as he worked long into the night on his motion to dismiss the charges, his conscious goal was to make his argument so compelling that Wainwright would have to grant it, would have no choice but to toss the case out. Adams had once heard someone say, “If you think you can do something, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right,” and he’d adopted the saying as a sort of informal motto. Not that he’d made a sign of it and had it framed and hung on the wall above his desk, or anything corny like that. It was just something he liked, and thought about at times like this.

  If Flynt Adams’s optimism was of any consolation to Stephen Barrow, it would have been hard to tell from looking at him. Back in his cell after his brief visit with Tom Grady, Stephen sank onto his cot and draped a forearm across his eyes to block the glare of the lightbulb in the ceiling. By now he’d gotten into the habit of sleeping away most of the day. At first, he’d rebelled against what he recognized as an obvious symptom of depression, and had resisted the urge to sleep. But after a while, he stopped fighting and simply gave in to it. It came down to this: There was just nothing worth staying awake for.

  He was in jail, and he was there for something he’d done. But it wasn’t a crime, what he’d done, it couldn’t possibly be. Yet here he was. And God only knew what was going on with Penny. He tried his best not to think about that. But it was impossible, of course.

  So he slept.

  On the tenth day of his confinement, the day before he was scheduled to go to court on his criminal case, he received a letter. It was the first piece of mail he’d gotten since he’d been in. It was a square white envelope, handed to him through the bars, and he took it to the back of his cell, where he sat down on his cot and turned it over and over again in his hands, as though it were some priceless piece of history. For he recognized the handwriting, even as he saw that the writer had tried to disguise it. It had no stamp or return address, and from the somewhat limited information provided on the front of it, he considered it nothing short of a miracle that it had found him.

  MISTER STEPHEN BARROW WHOSE IN THE JAIL THEY SEND YOU TOO WHEN YOU LIVE IN EAST CHATHAM

  He opened it up. Inside was a single lined sheet of composition paper. On it was a drawing, depicting the face of a child, its mouth a downward crescent, huge tears dripping from both eyes.

  I LOVE YOU, DADDY is all it said.

  He cried for three hours.

  Judge to Rule Friday on Sex Offender’s Motion to Dismiss

  By Tom Grady

  Special to the Hudson Valley Herald

  Lawyers for Stephen Barrow, the East Chatham man accused of using his own six-year-old daughter to star in pornographic photos, will go into Columbia County Supreme Court this Friday, March 3rd, and ask that the case against their client be dismissed on various technicalities, sources close to the investigation have advised the Herald.

  Barrow, who is being held in the Hudson detention facility in lieu of $50,000 bail, faces fifteen years in prison if convicted on the most serious of the charges. He will appear before Supreme Court Justice T. Everett Wainwright, a judge long known for being tough on sex offenders and protective of child victims. Justice Wainwright was originally appointed by Governor Cuomo and has been on the bench for nine and a half years. He is running for reelection this fall, and faces a primary challenge.

  District Attorney Jim Hall, who is personally prosecuting Barrow, expressed confidence that all of the charges would withstand scrutiny. “This guy did what he did,” he told this reporter, “and all you have to do to know that is to look at the evidence. The people of Columbia County deserve an opportunity to bring him to trial, and I have confidence that Judge Wainwright understands that.”

  This reporter took the very unusual step of visiting Barrow personally, in jail. Presented with an opportunity to tell his side of the story in full, Barrow refused to comment.

  The first thing that Everett Wainwright noticed, as he read the article in chambers that Friday morning, was that they’d gotten the story wrong, as they almost always did. The case wasn’t on today for him to decide the defense’s motion to dismiss; it was only on for the defense to submit its motion. Once they did that, the case would be adjourned to give the district attorney an opportunity to answer it, by putting in papers of its own. And when that had happened, say a couple of weeks from now, there’d be another adjournment, while the court considered the issues and wrote a decision. So right now, they were a good month away from an actual ruling. Sure, all of those things could have been accomplished over the span of one long adjournment. But in criminal cases, especially where the defendant was incarcerated, Justice Wainwright liked to put the case on his calendar every two weeks or so - even if nothing much was going to happen in court - just so the defendant would be brought up into the courtroom, and the poor slob would know they hadn’t forgotten about him.

  The public didn’t understand that, of course. And the reporters, even though they knew better, would write that all these court appearances were nothing but a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.

  Still, the misstatement that there’d be a decision today was hardly what bothered Everett Wainwright. No, what bothered him was the thinly veiled threat contained in the article, the reference to him as a Cuomo appointee. That was a backhanded way of pointing out that he was a holdover liberal Democrat in a predominantly conservative Republican county. Then there was the reminder that he was not only up for reelection in the fall, but first faced a primary challenge from within his own party. And although the comment that he was known as tough on sex offenders and protective of children was accurate enough, to label a man accused of taking a couple of photos of his daughter a “sex offender” was a reach, and Tom Grady was smart enough to know that. So what the Herald was doing was setting Wainwright up, in a way. If he ruled in favor of the defendant and dismissed the case on the law (which was anything but a “technicality” to Justice Wainwright), the voters could conclude that he’d suddenly come out in favor of sex offenders and tu
rned his back on children. Add to that Jim Hall’s comment that a dismissal would have the effect of depriving the citizens of Columbia County an opportunity to try the defendant, and it was pretty easy to see how the Herald was doing its best to paint Wainwright into a corner.

  Well, fuck ‘em. Everett Wainwright was sixty-eight years old and nearing retirement age as it was. He’d be damned if he was going to knuckle under to the likes of a lush like Tom Grady. When the motion to dismiss and the DA’s papers opposing it finally got to him, he’d decide it fair and square, just like he always did. As far as he was concerned, they could like it or lump it. And if it ended up costing him his seat on the bench, well, fuck ‘em all, they could have that, too.

  Stephen Barrow’s court appearance lasted less than four minutes. Flynt Adams handed one copy of his motion papers to the DA, and another copy to the clerk. Jim Hall asked for two weeks to respond to them, and the judge adjourned the case to March 17.

  “That’s St. Patrick’s Day,” the clerk said.

  “So?” said the judge. “You the grand marshal of some parade I don’t know about?”

  “No, sir,” said the clerk.

  “Then it’s March 17,” the judge repeated. And that was that.

  Justice Wainwright wasn’t the only one who saw Tom Grady’s article that morning. Theresa Mulholland read it over coffee, and couldn’t believe her eyes. To begin with, the headline itself - and that had to be Neil Witt’s touch - was totally uncalled for. Stephen Barrow was no sex offender, all he was accused of doing was taking a photo of his daughter, a photograph that might or might not turn out to be “lewd” under the law. And to characterize that as using her to star in pornographic photos - what had they done, taken the Herald and turned it overnight into the New York Post, or the National Enquirer?

  She dialed the paper’s number and tried to speak with Grady, but he wasn’t in. Of course, he wasn’t; it wasn’t eleven yet. She asked for Neil Witt and launched into him as soon as he picked up.

  “What are you doing with this story?” she demanded to know. “All of a sudden, the guy’s a convicted sex offender?”

  “Calm down, Terry. It doesn’t say anything about convicted.”

  “How about using her to star in pornographic photos? Where do you get that shit from?”

  “That’s precisely the allegation,” said Witt. “And that’s exactly how we’ve portrayed it. The East Chatham man ‘accused of using his own six-year-old daughter-’”

  “I know what it says, Neil. I’ve got it right in front of me. And it stinks, every last word of it. And you know it.”

  “I know nothing of the sort.”

  “Will you let me write an editorial on the case, to at least provide some balance?”

  “No.”

  “How about a letter to the editor?”

  “From one of our own staff reporters?”

  “I’ll sign it ‘Anonymous.’“

  “Remember when I said you had a conflict on this case, Terry?”

  Theresa remembered.

  “Well, it’s showing. You’re off the case. Stay off the case. And while I’ve got you on the phone, I’d like you to do a piece on the animal shelter over in-”

  “Fuck the animal shelter!” Theresa shouted and slammed down the phone as hard as she could.

  Another week went by, more or less. It became increasingly difficult for Stephen to keep track of the days. With no window in his cell, he was never quite certain if it was day or night. The lightbulb in his ceiling was no help - it stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Something about suicide prevention, one of the deputies had explained to him. Although it was hard to see how he could kill himself: They’d taken away his belt and his shoelaces, and except for court appearances, he was required to wear his orange jumpsuit and paper slippers at all times. Then again, maybe they were afraid he’d fashion an orange noose out of his jumpsuit, or stuff his slippers down his throat until he suffocated.

  On the seventeenth day of his confinement (then again, it might have been the sixteenth or the eighteenth; he couldn’t be sure), one of the deputies, a decent man whose name-plate had Reynolds printed on it, pushed a newspaper through the bars and said, “Check it out, Barrow. Page twenty-one.”

  He took the paper. It was an issue of the Columbia County Advertiser. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think that was the one Terry worked for, or Tom Grady, either. It didn’t seem to be much of a paper. The big news on page one was the unseasonably warm weather. Page twenty-one was way at the end, the inside of the back page.

  It took him a while to find the article, and when he found it, he realized it wasn’t an article at all that the deputy named Reynolds had meant to point out to him, but one of those letters people were always writing to newspapers or magazines.

  Dear Advertiser:

  I am a reporter for the Hudson Valley Herald, or perhaps I should say a former reporter, in the event you decide to print this letter. I’m writing to protest the Herald’s unfair treatment of Stephen Barrow, the East Chatham man accused of taking several nude photos of his daughter.

  In a February 22 story, run under the misleading (not to mention factually incorrect) headline, “JUDGE TO RULE FRIDAY ON SEX OFFENDER’S MOTION TO DISMISS,” the Herald accuses Mr. Barrow of having used his own daughter “to star in pornographic photos.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

  As a staff reporter for the Herald who was originally assigned to the story, I had occasion to interview Stephen Barrow at great length. I came away convinced that he is a law-abiding citizen who is guilty, at very most, of having exercised bad judgment in photographing his child undressed. More important, I found him to be a wonderful father who is absolutely devoted to his daughter in only the healthiest way imaginable.

  The people of this county owe it to Mr. Barrow to refrain from labeling him and prejudging his case. He is entitled to the same presumption of innocence you or I would be, were one of us accused of wrongdoing. The Herald does a grave disservice not only to Mr. Barrow, but to its readers, and to our system of justice as well.

  Theresa Mulholland Canaan, New York

  He read the letter a dozen times before returning the paper to Reynolds.

  “Nice letter,” said the deputy. “Wonder what the Herald’ll have to say about it.”

  Stephen could only nod. There was a lump in his throat at the moment, and he was afraid if he said anything, his voice might break and give him away. You weren’t supposed to cry in jail, he knew. You were supposed to be tough, like you could handle whatever came your way - good, bad, or indifferent.

  But the letter was something else.

  The letter was special.

  Over the next four days, Stephen became more friendly with the deputy named Reynolds. That is, if you could call exchanging twenty words a day with someone friendly. But it was a lot more of a relationship than he had with any of the other deputies, who uniformly eyed him with that special measure of distaste reserved for the lowest of the low, the pedophile. Still, none of them actually mistreated him in any way. They didn’t beat him, spit at him, cite him for imagined infractions of the rules, or poison his food.

  In jail, Stephen had come to realize, you became grateful when people didn’t beat you or poison you. And if somebody actually went out of his way to have a conversation with you, however brief or insignificant, you found yourself almost overwhelmed with gratitude. Which was pretty much how Stephen responded when, on the fifth day after reading Theresa’s letter, Reynolds handed him the latest edition of the Herald.

  “Thank you so much,” said Stephen.

  “You won’t be thanking me after you’ve read it,” the deputy warned him.

  And he was right, of course.

  Herald Reporter Terminated Over Bias in Sex Case By Tom Grady Special to the Hudson Valley Herald

  The Herald has terminated the employment of Theresa Mulholland, a staff reporter for the past four years, following an internal investigation into alleged impropri
eties committed by Ms. Mulholland while she was covering the story of Stephen Barrow, the East Chatham man accused of sexually abusing his six-year-old daughter by forcing her to pose naked so he could take pornographic photographs of her.

  The investigation was touched off when Ms. Mulholland took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to the Columbia County Advertiser, in which she protested the Herald’s coverage of the case as being biased against Barrow.

  Although the tone of Ms. Mulholland’s letter portrayed her as someone whose only concern was for the defendant’s right to receive a fair trial (a right the Herald certainly endorses), an internal investigation spearheaded by Neil Witt, the managing editor of the Herald, revealed that Ms. Mulholland herself was a witness to certain aspects of the case, and had been removed from covering the story solely for that reason.

  Even more significantly, it has been learned that shortly after Barrow’s arrest in South Chatham on February 12, Ms. Mulholland, without the knowledge or permission of her supervisors, drove to Barrow’s home on Hilltop Drive and spent the night with him.

  “We have a reputation to uphold,” said Witt, “and a duty to report the news to our readers, free from bias. While I regret having to terminate the employment of any staff member, this sort of behavior cannot be tolerated.”

  Barrow, who is currently incarcerated awaiting trial, next appears in Columbia County Supreme Court on March 17. He faces fifteen years in prison if convicted.

  Stephen was stunned.

  Not only had he screwed up his own life, and that of his daughter; now he’d gone and gotten Terry fired as well. To say nothing of what he’d done to her reputation, by allowing her to spend the night with him.

  What was he supposed to have done? Thrown her out into the blizzard, so she could freeze to death? The paper didn’t bother to mention the foot and a half of snow, or the fact that her car was stuck in the ditch alongside his driveway, did it? Or the fact that she’d slept fully clothed on a sofa in the living room, while he was behind a closed door in his bedroom. No, they didn’t care about that. All they cared about was that she’d spent the night with him.