"Armed robbery."
"How does someone who's deaf commit an armed robbery?"
"I've got a hard time picturing it myself," Zach admitted. "But maybe that's just the soft bigotry of low expectations."
"So how about you, Shelly?" Michael asked. "How's it been going so far?"
"Okay, I guess," Shelly said. "It's a lot to take in right away."
"Is it what you expected it would be?" Max asked.
"Sure," Shelly said. "It's really the number of cases more than anything else. It's hard to even keep track."
"So," Michael said to Shelly. "Now that you actually work here, as compared to an interview when everybody on both sides of the desk is lying about everything, what can we tell you about the job?"
"I don't know," Shelly said. "I guess I just wonder, with the pressure and everything, how people deal with it."
"Same as people deal with anything else," Zach said. "Sex and alcohol."
AFTER LUNCH I was to spend a half day covering arraignments, picking up additional cases. I walked over to the courthouse, took my familiar place in the glum meeting room across from the basement holding cells. My first client was a drug case, looked to be a street dealer rousted in a sweep of Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. Even by the standards of the streets he was fairly young, just nineteen. But Shawne Flynt's face as he sat across from me belied his age; I didn't detect even a glimmer of fear in his eyes. I could tell without asking that this wasn't his first time in the system.
"So," I said to Shawne after doing my introductory spiel, "why don't you tell me what happened?"
"This ain't nothing but some shit, yo," Shawne said. He was tall and lanky, an athletic looseness about him. His face was narrow and angular, his eyes the stillest thing about him. "All they got on me was I was parked up on the street. Wasn't no product on me, wasn't even no cheddar. They just swoop me up when they clear the corner."
"They're charging you with possession with intent," I said.
"I just got done telling you I ain't possessed a goddamn thing when they took me. All they got on me is I was there."
"Did they sweep up a lot of people?"
"They took in everybody who be standing on Grand Avenue," Shawne said.
"Did they get anybody who was actually holding?"
"You arrest enough niggers on the corner, somebody's going to be holding, know what I'm saying? But that ain't got nothing to do with me."
"You know the guys who were caught?" I asked. The vibe I was getting that Shawne ran the corner, and that he'd been clean when picked up because he no longer had to take the direct risk.
"You ain't gotta worry about none of them," Shawne said dismissively. "They soldiers. None of that is gonna come back on me."
"Soldiers have been known to flip," I said.
"Not on Grand Avenue they ain't," Shawne said. "You got no call to worry about my crew."
"Your crew," I repeated.
Shawne smiled and offered a little shrug. If it'd been a slip it wasn't one that bothered him. "True that," he said. "They my crew. But they ain't gonna come back on me. You don't got to do nothing here, yo, else I'd get me a real lawyer to take care of it."
I ignored the offhand insult, which I'd gotten used to. "Why'd they pick you up at all then?" I asked.
"Politics as usual," Shawne said. "They trying to clear out the corner, fancy up the hood. They trying to do to the Hill what they done to Fort Greene, get shit all safe for the white folks to move in. The five-oh already shut the hotel where all the hos be trickin'; now they move on to the corners. They already snatched me up once before; didn't nothing come of it."
"When was this?"
"When this nonsense all started, two months back maybe."
"What happened to those charges?"
"The fuck you think happened? Ain't you been listening? They don't got shit on me."
"Have they actually been dropped?"
"Hell, yeah. Once they realized nobody was going to be snitchin' they backed up off of that shit."
"Okay," I said. "We're probably going to have to wait them out a little, but hopefully that same thing will happen here."
ONCE WE were out before the judge, Shawne slouched beside me, flanked by court officers, a vacant look on his face. It never ceased to amaze me how many defendants had to make a point of showing their indifference or hostility to the judge, despite the fact that a defendant's demeanor could be the single most important factor in the judge's snap judgment regarding bail: pissing him off was often the difference between going home and being carted off to Rikers.
"What do we got?" Judge Robinson asked ADA Narducci once Shawne's case was called, the bailiff reading a laundry list of charges—possession with intent, conspiracy to distribute, loitering, disorderly conduct. It sounded as though they'd rounded up a drug kingpin, rather than a teenager on a corner.
ADA Narducci went into a spiel about the numerous arrests that'd been made in the raid on Grand and Putnam, stressing that the police had discovered drugs with a street value of several hundred dollars along with several thousand dollars in cash. The numbers suggesting that the cops had only found the small street stash, not the major cache where the bulk of the drugs were kept. When Narducci was finished the judge turned to me.
"My client pleads not guilty to all charges, Your Honor. I didn't hear anything whatsoever linking my client to any drugs. No drugs were found on his person; he had roughly forty dollars in his pocket. The fact that someone else somewhere on the block might have been holding drugs has nothing whatsoever to do with my client."
"The police made a sweep in which they picked up an entire drug crew," Narducci said.
"By 'drug crew,' you mean every black person who happened to be standing within fifty feet of the guy who actually had the drugs?" I replied.
"We're not trying the case now, gentlemen," Judge Robinson interrupted. "Bail's set at ten thousand dollars. Who's next?"
I huddled with Shawne for a moment before he was led away. "That bail number's ridiculous," I said apologetically. "It's just because of the number of charges they've thrown at you."
Shawne shrugged. "Not going to be no problem. I got a bondsman who know me. Me and mine be out of here later today."
I wasn't surprised; making bail was part of the price of doing business for the drug trade, just another form of overhead, like taxes for a regular business. "I'll make a discovery request of the DA, set up a meeting to see what they think they've got. I'll give you a call when I know where things stand."
"Just let me know when they're done with this nonsense," Shawne said, as the court officers led him away.
11
MYRA HAD assigned me the task of trying to speak with Seth Lipton's former roommate, Amin Saberi. We had Amin's name and address in Midwood from the police reports that had been turned over; they'd taken a statement from him. I noticed that Seth Lipton was still listed on the directory at the building's front door. I pressed the buzzer, waited, pressed again. I was getting ready to give up and walk away when a scratchy, unintelligible voice came blaring through the intercom.
"Mr. Saberi?" I said. "I'm a lawyer working on the Lipton case. Can I come up and speak with you, please?"
There was a silence that began to drag before Amin finally spoke. "I guess," he said.
I took the elevator up to the fifth floor, then walked the halls until I found Amin's apartment number. Amin opened the door in response to my knock, his brow furrowing slightly when he saw me. "I thought you were that guy Mr. O'Bannon again," he said. O'Bannon was the lead prosecutor on the case—Amin clearly thinking I was from the DA's office. I shook my head, following Amin into the living room of his apartment, deciding to hold off on admitting I was a defense attorney until I was inside.
The apartment was typical student-shabby, a futon instead of a couch, empty beer bottles lying on the floor. Amin was short, somewhat preppy in a polo shirt and khakis. His voice had the faintest wisp of an accent, but nothing I could place. I guessed he was o
f South Asian descent, but he seemed pretty thoroughly Americanized.
"No classes today?" I asked, not sure how to work my way into this.
Amin didn't look up at me. "I've got one at two," he said. "Why?"
I shrugged awkwardly. "No reason," I said. "I wanted to ask you some questions about Seth Lipton."
"Haven't I gone over this enough?" Amin said. "I've talked to the cops twice, plus that other guy from your office already—"
"I'm not from the DA's office," I interrupted, not wanting to let this misunderstanding go too far. "I represent Lorenzo Tate."
Amin took a step back, nearly stumbling over the futon that lined one wall across from the TV. "Are you allowed to come talk to me like this?" Amin asked.
"Of course I am," I said. "In fact, I'm allowed to subpoena you and force you to testify. But I don't see any reason for that to be necessary. I'm just trying to get a sense of who Seth Lipton was, and how he came to be in the wrong place that night."
"That part's easy," Amin said. "Seth was studying sociology, and for his senior thesis he was doing this thing on the, like, structure of drug dealers."
"The structure of drug dealers."
"In terms of as a business, basically, but not just that. As a sort of corporate culture too."
I couldn't resist repeating again. "As a sort of corporate culture," I said. "I have to admit, I understand every word you're saying, but I've got no idea what you're talking about."
"It's not that complicated," Amin said dismissively, at last flopping down on the futon he'd just almost fallen onto. I followed suit, sitting in the room's lone chair and taking out a yellow legal pad and a pen. "The idea was just, like, to do a comparison, the culture of drug dealers and the culture of, you know, like, a more conventional business. But the other thing Seth was doing was, he wasn't just comparing the business models, like you would do in an econ thing, but he was also looking at the culture, the sort of, you know, code by which the business was run."
Amin looked at me expectantly, but my look in response was self-consciously skeptical. I found the whole notion trite, fundamentally collegiate.
"Whatever," Amin said dismissively, having picked up that I was not a convert. "All of his professors thought Seth was brilliant."
"It never occurred to any of his professors that what he was doing might be dangerous?"
"Seth had the crew he was studying's cooperation," Amin said vehemently. "He was supposed to be protected."
"Was Devin Wallace part of the crew he was studying?"
"The other guy who got shot?" Amin said. "I think so. I'd heard Seth talk about a dude named Devin down there. He was sort of the boss, far as I understood it."
"Did you ever hear Seth talk about Lorenzo Tate?"
Amin shook his head. "But Seth never gave me, like, the whole play-by-play," he said. "He told me more about the big picture. Truth is, I'm not sure I wanted to know the whole play-by-play."
"Why not?"
Amin looked away, the kid looking like he thought he'd said too much. "I don't know," Amin said finally. "I guess I'm just not as fearless as Seth was."
"So this thesis he was doing," I said. "Had he actually written it?"
"He was working on it, yeah," Amin said. "But he hadn't started putting together the final product."
"Did he have a rough draft or notes or anything?"
Amin looked back at me, clearly hesitating, trying to gauge the extent to which he could refuse to cooperate with me. I let the silence grow, knowing it would only increase Amin's uncertainty.
"Sure," Amin said. "I mean, he was working on it. Why?"
"I'd like to have a copy of whatever he'd done," I replied.
"Are you allowed to just do that?"
"What do you mean?" I said, smiling. "I'm a lawyer."
12
YOU READY for your field trip?" Myra said when she picked me up outside my building on Saturday morning. A Common CD played on the car stereo—a good deal more mellow than the feminist punk rock that had greeted me the last time I'd been in her car. Myra was drinking take-out deli coffee and smoking a cigarette. I failed to understand how anyone could smoke so much first thing in the morning.
"Sorry if I'm cramping your style," I said. "When Michael suggested it I didn't really feel like I could say no. But I do realize this isn't a field trip."
"It sort of is, actually," Myra said. "I mean, there's no real point to this visit from a legal perspective. It's really just reminding Terrell that I'm still working for him, trying to make sure he doesn't check out on us."
"I don't imagine Sing Sing will let him check out."
"I mean punch his own ticket," Myra said. "Which Sing Sing certainly has let people do."
"Are you really worried that Terrell is suicidal?"
"Of course I am," Myra said sharply. "He's a borderline-retarded twenty-two-year-old who still lived with his mother on the day he was arrested and now finds himself in the big house for a murder he didn't commit. Being suicidal would be a pretty rational reaction to his circumstances."
"I hear you," I said.
Myra didn't reply, and we drove in silence for a full minute.
"You're really convinced he's innocent?" I asked, wanting to break the tension.
"Tell you what," Myra said. "After we meet with him, I'll ask you."
PEOPLE V. GIBBONS had been the biggest trial anyone on my team had handled in the time I'd been in the office, so I'd picked up a fair amount about it over the past few months. The case came out of a robbery of By Design, a jewelry store in the Fulton Street Mall, three masked men entering with guns drawn, leaving with money and jewelry, and leaving behind a dead store owner.
The store owner had gotten a shot off from his own gun before being killed, hitting one of the thieves. That turned out to be Kawame Jones, who'd been smart enough to travel to Newark before going to a hospital and claiming he'd just been shot in a drive-by. But it hadn't been far enough—the police had quickly connected him to the By Design robbery and placed him under arrest.
Once the police had linked the bullet in Kawame's shoulder to the gun in the store owner's lifeless hand, Kawame had sensibly decided to offer up information in exchange for a plea bargain on felony murder. Kawame had named one supposed accomplice, claiming that he'd never known the names of the other person who'd gone in or the getaway driver. He'd named Terrell Gibbons.
Based on Kawame's statement the police had picked Terrell up for questioning. After fourteen hours in police custody Terrell had confessed not just to being involved in the robbery, but also to being the shooter. The police had never been able to come up with any other direct evidence linking Terrell to the crime: their case had rested entirely on Kawame Jones's pointing the finger at Terrell and Terrell's having pointed the finger at himself.
Ever since his initial confession, Terrell had insisted he'd had no involvement with the murder at By Design, and that he'd confessed only after the detective lied about finding his fingerprints at the scene and told him that he would never go home or see his mother again unless he confessed. Terrell had an IQ located somewhere in the low seventies. This wasn't a characteristic you would look for in a prospective accomplice to an armed robbery. It was, however, exactly what you might look for in picking out a fall guy. And that was what Myra believed Kawame Jones had done.
Myra had tried to present at trial the testimony of a psychology professor at Cornell who had extensively studied false confessions. The judge hadn't allowed it, leaving Myra with no way to challenge the confession except by putting Terrell Gibbons himself on the stand. Terrell had done decently, but unsurprisingly he'd struggled on cross.
Despite Myra's passionate beliefs, it had always seemed obvious to me that she faced an extremely difficult task trying to persuade a jury to acquit. Convincing a jury that someone had confessed to a crime they weren't guilty of was virtually impossible. However hard a defense lawyer worked to put the jury in the shoes of the defendant, few people could im
agine themselves admitting to a murder that they hadn't committed. Indeed, even while I understood that false confessions happened, my own understanding was at a certain level of abstraction. It certainly wasn't like I could imagine myself doing such a thing.
The jury had taken less than a day to convict Terrell of murder.
SING SING was on the edge of town in Ossining, near the Hudson River. It was New York's second-largest prison, one of its oldest, and certainly its most gothic. The prison held over two thousand inmates, more than half of them black. The overwhelming majority were in for violent felonies. About one out of every five was in for murder.
There was a residential street not far from the prison, although a turreted observation post occupied by armed guards made sure that the distance wouldn't be easily breached. The prison was dark brick, grim and foreboding, matching exactly my expectations of what a maximum-security prison should look like.
Myra and I arrived at the front desk in an open but stuffy room that was hardly an improvement over the sticky, humid weather outside, with a series of benches and a small scattering of people. The CO at the desk told us they were conducting count inside, making sure all prisoners were accounted for; it meant that nobody could go into or out of the prison.
"This the real reason you agreed to bring me along?" I asked once we were seated on a bench. "Keep you company in the waiting room?"
"Actually I brought my cell phone and some case files for that," Myra said.
Because it was an attorney-client visit, we were given a private interview room within the open visiting area, with a glass door we could close for privacy. The main visiting room was expansive, a television set in the corner showing Jerry Springer, not exactly the fare I expected in a maximum-security prison. The air was thick and stale. We waited another ten minutes before Terrell was brought in, dressed in a loose prison jumpsuit that emphasized his frailty.
Myra gave Terrell a hug in greeting before introducing me. I was surprised by the gesture: she hadn't exactly struck me as the hugging type. Terrell was pudgy, with a round teddy-bear baby face that made him appear younger than his years. Even in a prison uniform he looked soft and unthreatening—a hard trick to pull off. "You holding up okay, Terrell?" she asked, keeping a hand on his shoulder while looking closely at him.
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