False Convictions

by Tim Green

  “You think that’s what I’m about?”

  Jake shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it, really. Everybody’s about the publicity to a certain extent. You learn little tidbits like that after a decade in television.”

  “I’m about tomorrow,” Casey said. “A judge’s chambers, an opposing counsel, and a legal strategy to kick their ass.”

  “Wish I could be there,” Jake said, “but I’ll be on my way to Rochester to interview your boy Graham.”

  “I’ll give you a play-by-play,” Casey said. “You better take me to Marty’s law office. I’ve got work to do. And Jake?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Graham isn’t my boy.”

  Jake smiled.

  14

  THE ONLY BREAK Casey took from her research was dinner with Jake. He showed up at the law offices at six and insisted he wasn’t leaving her alone until she accompanied him to Elderberry Pond, an organic restaurant just outside of town. The rest of the thirteen hours from two in the afternoon until three in the morning she’d spent holed up in the mammoth law library at Barrone & Barrone with Marty hovering over her and pestering her with questions for most of it.

  When she woke the next morning, she dressed for the run she’d promised herself as penance for ordering a fresh raspberry tart à la mode the night before. Jake Carlson sat waiting for her in the lobby, dressed in sneakers, shorts, and an Under Armour T-shirt that revealed a muscular frame she hadn’t expected from a man his age.

  “Want company?” Jake asked with a boyish grin.

  “If you weren’t a Pulitzer Prize winner, I might think you were stalking me,” Casey said, returning the smile. “Sure. I’d love the company.”

  “A good TV reporter is part stalker, anyway,” he said. “So you Googled me? That’s a good sign.”

  Off they went together, passing through a cloud of Ralph’s cigarette smoke just outside the lobby doors. They ran the side streets, passing the prison and the bus station before leaving town and turning down a country road. For the first mile, Casey checked over her shoulder for Ralph but never saw the Lexus and forgot about him.

  Five miles later, they ended back at the hotel. Sweaty and winded, Casey passed on Jake’s invitation to breakfast and wished him luck with his interview.

  “I’m supposed to fly out after I finish with Graham,” Jake said, still breathing hard, “but I was thinking maybe I’d hang around and see how things shake out. Would that be okay with you?”

  “It’s a free country,” Casey said.

  “All you have to do is say the word and I’m as good as back on Long Island,” Jake said.

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, wiping the sweat from her face with her bare hands. “The whole hospital idea was yours. You’re in on this with me as much as you want to be.”

  “Good,” Jake said, clearing his throat. “Look, I’ve been around. This could be something or nothing. But maybe we could do another dinner?”

  “Only if you throw in another run,” she said, patting her stomach.

  Jake touched her shoulder lightly, wished her luck of her own, and said good-bye. Casey watched him walk away before she headed upstairs. After a shower and some coffee, she went over her notes again before allowing Ralph to drive her to the courthouse.

  “The problem is narrowing it down,” Ralph said without taking his eyes from the road. “I got a person to do it, but they came up with over seven thousand white BMWs on the road in 1989. It’s a matter of pulling the ones from this area and they have to go through the list one at a time. We’ll get it eventually, but this guy’s been in the can, what? Twenty years?”

  “Be nice if it didn’t get to twenty-one, though, right?” Casey said.

  Ralph’s eyebrows lifted for a second and he gave a slight nod.

  “You found Cassandra Thornton’s people pretty fast, I’ll tell you that,” Casey said, tapping the folder Ralph had delivered to her at the law offices around nine the previous evening. “Nice work.”

  He pulled over in front of the old limestone courthouse. “I’ll be in that spot across the street.”

  As she made her way up the steps, Casey looked back at Ralph, who sat watching her with a blank face from the pewter Lexus.

  The judge’s chambers had high ceilings. The dark-stained oak had faded under years of neglect. It smelled of aging books and moldy paper, but the high window behind Kollar’s desk shone across the room onto a wall busy with a framed collection of butterflies, brilliant with color. Casey stared for a minute, then turned toward Kollar, trying to reconcile the collection with the granite-faced judge.

  “These are beautiful,” Casey said, turning back to the specimens. “This blue is electric.”

  “A lot of people use ethyl acetate in their kill jars,” Kollar said. “Cyanide makes them squeamish-the way the little suckers thrash around a bit-but it’s the best way to keep the colors bright.”

  Casey looked at the judge for a deeper meaning before she shook hands with the hospital’s lawyer, William Flynn, a tall, angular man in a tan suit with thinning brown hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She handed both the lawyer and the judge copies of the brief she had prepared, then sat in the other leather-upholstered wooden chair facing Kollar’s desk. The big judge folded his hands and used them as a resting place for his chin. The judge asked Flynn to present his argument first, flipping open the hospital lawyer’s brief.

  “Judge, as much as we’d like to help Ms. Jordan, giving out these samples would be an egregious invasion of privacy, plain and simple,” Flynn said in an even voice so full of confidence that it bordered on condescension.

  Kollar looked at him and nodded.

  “State law is very clear that outside a subpoena in a criminal proceeding, the medical information of a patient is sacrosanct,” Flynn said, pointing to his brief. “The case law supporting patient privacy laws is extant, but the court of appeals decision in Marley v. New York is the most commonly accepted authority.”

  The judge compressed his lips as if this were common knowledge.

  Flynn held up a hand, looked at Casey, and said, “I’m sure Ms. Jordan will argue that this is a form of criminal proceeding, but I have to point out that case law is clear on that as well. Her client has already been tried and convicted. He has exhausted all avenues of appeal provided for by the state, so his standing isn’t one of the accused. He’s guilty. He’s a prisoner of the state serving a life sentence. The only rights he has are the recent rulings that compel the state to provide any evidence used in the case against him. What Ms. Jordan is asking for is simply and obviously not state’s evidence. It is the private property of a hospital patient. I’m afraid the law is cut and dry.”

  15

  JAKE ATE BREAKFAST alone and allowed his sweat from the run to dry. His phone chirped and he read the text message from his son, Sam. Sam wanted to know if he could go right from camp to visit with a friend in the Hamptons for a few days. Jake answered with a text of his own, giving him permission and resisting the temptation to ask Sam why in the world he couldn’t come home for a few days first, but didn’t because Sam had a tough time making friends. He also wanted to ask why Sam didn’t give him more notice, because he already knew the answer. Sam didn’t like to plan things and, he claimed, neither did his friends. Sam being away would allow Jake to return from his Rochester interview with Graham and take Casey up on dinner. He wasn’t sure, but he had the feeling-if he didn’t rush it-something might be there between them.

  Jake changed into a suit and headed out. Robert Graham kept his Rochester offices outside the city in a nondescript two-story office building just down the main road from the big shopping mall in Palmyra. A savings bank occupied the ground floor of the white building surrounded by parking lots and locust trees. Jake parked in the shade next to the rented van belonging to Dora and her crew and bypassed the glass doors of the bank to enter a side door marked Graham Funding by a modest black-and-white sign
. In the small entryway, as he waited for a private elevator, Jake spied the surveillance camera in the corner. He tried the fire door to the stairs, but it was locked, so he waited for the elevator. Inside the car, Jake stared into a second camera until the door rumbled open and he stepped into a small lobby. Behind a panel of glass sat a pretty young receptionist with bright red lipstick and short dark hair. When she got up, her black tailored pantsuit gave away her excellent shape.

  She smiled at Jake, obviously expecting him. Jake heard a hum and the muffled clank of a heavy metal bolt before the receptionist swung open the door, greeting him with a sultry look and a thin cool hand.

  “I’ve seen your show,” she said. “This is all very exciting. Can I get you something?”

  Jake cleared his throat and said, “Just my crew. Thank you, though.”

  “They’re in Mr. Graham’s office. Right this way,” she said, leading him around a corner and down a brightly lit hallway to a very large corner office looking out into the trees.

  A big cherry desk sat in the corner facing the leather furniture, stained-glass lamps, and Oriental rugs. Books and Remington sculptures lined the shelves that framed the spaces taken up by richly painted seascapes blazing with three-masted battleships. Jake looked but saw not a single photograph of loved ones, their absence making the space feel sterile.

  Dora smiled up at him from her monitor and motioned impatiently for him to come see.

  “No water? Nothing at all?” the receptionist asked him, barely whispering and toying with her gold hoop earring.

  Jake looked at her a moment, his eyes distracted by the red smudges across the face of her pearl-white teeth. “No, I’m good, but thanks.”

  “Maybe something later,” she said.

  Jake waited until she’d gone before he said hello to the crew, then looked at the shot before asking Dora directions to the bathroom.

  “Get made up, too,” Dora said, directing him around the corner, down a hallway, then around another corner. “The makeup girl is AWOL, so it’s a good thing you’re multitalented. I’d like to start this thing.”

  “Is he here?” Jake asked, looking around.

  “Flew in from Philly at six this morning,” Dora said. “The legend lives on. He’s on some call in the conference room, supposedly until twelve-thirty, but let’s be ready in case it ends early.”

  “It never does with these guys,” Jake said. “You can set your watch depending on how much money they have. They keep you waiting a half hour for every billion they’ve got.”

  “Good,” Dora said, looking at her watch, “I should still make my flight back.”

  Jake followed Dora’s directions to the bathroom, walking slowly through the hallways and wondering at the quiet and the well-heeled offices without a sign of workers past or present, no cups of coffee, no framed pictures of loved ones on either a desk or a wall anywhere. When he came to a short hallway ending in a broad mahogany door, Jake realized he must have misunderstood Dora. He turned to go but froze when he heard someone shouting from the other side of the heavy door. Jake looked around without seeing any security cameras in the corners of the ceiling and eased himself toward the door, placing his ear gently against its cool smooth grain so that he could smell the hint of varnish.

  He heard voices talking and strained to decipher the words, his instincts telling him that, if he could, he’d quickly have something to turn the puff piece on Robert Graham into something juicy. But no matter how hard he listened, he couldn’t understand a single word. Jake moved away from the door, turned, and was startled by someone at the other end of the hall.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked.

  16

  FLYNN, THE HOSPITAL’S lawyer, let his hands come to rest in his lap. His eyes glittered and his lips tugged ineffectively at his smile. The judge turned his attention to Casey.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I agree with Mr. Flynn completely on his findings in regards to New York State law, Your Honor.”

  Both men gave her affirmative nods, their faces grim.

  “I’d like to ask the court to find some loophole here,” Casey said with a sigh, “to use its discretion and compassion to apply some common sense to the fact that the privacy we’re talking about is for a woman who’s been dead for twenty years.”

  “I don’t think that’s for you to say,” Flynn said, clearly affronted and looking at her over the rims of his glasses. “There’s a family involved here, too.”

  “I know,” Casey said, reaching into her briefcase, taking out the report Ralph had given her the night before, and holding it up to emphasize her point. “While her father is dead, the victim has a mother in a nursing home in Oregon suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. There’s a sister whose last known address, as of April 2006, was Sydney, Australia. That’s her family. Those are the people whose privacy we’re trying to protect. I know because I took the time to try to find them, hoping I could get their permission and save the court the trouble.”

  The two men looked at each other, then at her.

  “Given the mother’s state and the complexity of her own competence to sign a release and given the sister’s inaccessibility,” Casey said, “a waiver isn’t possible. But given the same circumstances, I think it’s reasonable to suggest that neither one would know or care about the privacy issue involved here.”

  “The presumption-” Flynn began before Casey cut him off.

  “I understand the presumption of privacy,” she said, “and I’m not going to ask for the court’s compassion or commonsense application. The judge said he’d make his decision based on the law, and that’s the only standard. I agree.”

  “Good,” the judge said, placing a hand flat on his desk and starting to rise.

  “Because I’m not going to ask you to apply state law,” Casey said.

  The judge froze, then lowered himself into his chair, narrowing his eyes at Casey.

  “Fortunately,” Casey said, angling her nose at the brief she’d given the judge, “if you look at the second, third, and fourth pages of my brief, you’ll see that I’m relying entirely on federal law to compel you to give me those samples.”

  “This is a state court,” the judge said.

  “But the court’s actions in this case-if you deny my request,” Casey said, trying not to sound too pleased with herself, “will give me standing in the federal system based on the minority status of my client and the racial composition of the jury that convicted him. If you take a look at Ashland v. Curtiss and maybe even more important, Knickerbocker v. Pennsylvania, you’ll see the authority is clear.”

  “It’ll take years to fight that,” the judge said, smirking.

  Casey nodded her head and sighed, “And I’ve got years. So does the Project. So does Dwayne Hubbard; he’s done twenty already. In the meantime, given the current political sentiment of the American public, and given that you’ll be ripped up one side and down the other in every newspaper and law journal across this country for the racism you’ll be accused of harboring from your bench, I’m guessing your replacement will act quickly. You are up for election the year after next, right, Your Honor? I thought that’s what they said at the Rotary lunch.”

  Kollar bunched his hands into white-knuckled fists and his jaw tightened. When he spoke, his voice rumbled like low thunder. “This is that TV guy, isn’t it?”

  Casey shook her head. “I’m a lawyer, judge. I haven’t even figured the TV part of it into the equation. That’s a network decision, but if they did, it would make it all the more interesting, wouldn’t it? Like cyanide? A bit of thrashing around?”

  “If you think you can threaten me with politics,” Kollar said, hunching his wide shoulders and leaning forward, “you’re in the wrong place, doll. And I’ve got a few contacts of my own. My wife’s brother is an editor at the New York Post.”

  “So, I should file my complaint in the federal court?” Casey said, as pleasant as if they were playing a friendly
game of checkers.

  She began to rise.

  “You sit down,” Kollar said, stabbing a finger at her, keeping his voice soft. “I’ve heard what you both have to say and I will look at your briefs and consider the validity of the arguments.”

  Flynn’s smile faltered. “Judge. I thought we-”

  “I will consider the law,” Kollar said, turning his finger on the hospital’s lawyer to silence him.

  Casey studied them both, then smiled and asked, “Do you have an idea when you might be able to reach a decision, Your Honor?”

  The judge’s lower lip disappeared beneath his upper teeth.

  “Because I’d like to know tomorrow,” Casey said. “I think you’ll find the precedent is quite clear. I’d hate to have word get out and someone cause a big stir and then you come to the right decision, anyway. Why go through that?”

  Kollar looked at her with hatred, but nodded his head. “Tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, snapping her briefcase shut, rising from her chair, and turning to the butterflies. “Really, just stunning.”

  17

  JAKE TASTED BILE seeping up from the back of his throat.

  “I was looking for the bathroom,” he said, swallowing, stepping forward, and extending his hand to the man in the olive green suit. “I’m here to interview Mr. Graham for American Sunday. We’re set up in his office.”

  The man, thin with toffee-colored skin and a dark wiry mustache, shook Jake’s hand with an iron grip, never allowing his eyes to waver from Jake’s.

  “Down there,” the man said, pointing to the hallway Jake had come out of. “I’ll let Mr. Graham know you’re waiting for him.”

  “I know the receptionist said he’d be on some call until twelve-thirty,” Jake said, retreating. “We’re fine waiting, so you don’t have to bother him.”

  “That’s okay,” the man said, still holding Jake in his eyes, “he’ll want to know you’re waiting.”