In My Dark Dreams

by JF Freedman

  I walk back to the podium. Behind me, I hear them stirring—I’ve touched a nerve.

  “At least the officer who arrested Mr. Salazar was doing his duty by the book, more or less,” I say. “But their other key witness, the jailhouse informant, is a different story. He had no legitimate reason to come forward with his story—none whatsoever. You think he did it because he’s a good citizen? To make that claim would be an insult to your intelligence, ladies and gentlemen. The man is a career criminal, he’s never walked a straight line in his life. He testified for one reason, and one reason only: to get a break on his sentence.”

  I shake my head in anger. I can really get worked up over a case—sometimes too much. You have to be in control. But a little righteous indignation, properly channeled, can be an asset. In their guts, jurors can tell honest passion from manufactured baloney, and they respond to it.

  “That’s all that we have here. A convicted felon’s word that Mr. Salazar confessed his crimes to him. No corroboration, no other witnesses, nothing. Well, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t believe him, not for a second. And the fact that the prosecution brought him on at the last possible moment makes me even more suspicious. The man was in the county jail, right under their noses, and it took them more than sixty days to find him? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t smell good to me. In fact, it stinks.

  “Jailhouse informants—let’s call them what they call themselves, snitches—used to be used by prosecutors much more than they are today. There is a very strong reason that they aren’t. It’s because they have been proven, time and time again, to be unreliable. Part of the reason the Los Angeles Police Department is currently under federal supervision is because they used jailhouse informants who they knew were lying. Dozens of convictions have been overturned because of an unholy alliance between the police, the prosecutors, and these jailhouse liars.

  “This case should never have been brought to trial. Anyone looking at this objectively would see that this man sitting before you …” I turn and sweep my arm toward Salazar “… is not a criminal. He is a good man who made a bad mistake. He has suffered for that. But he did not steal those television sets, and he didn’t know they were stolen. He was being a Good Samaritan, trying to help a friend. And because he’s a good man—better than most of us, frankly—he has gone through pain, suffering, humiliation. Even if you find him not guilty, which I believe you will and should, what has happened to him during the past three months has scarred him for life. He is never going to be as trusting of authority as he was before. He is never going to be as open to helping others as he was before. He is going to retreat from fully engaging, and all of his friends and neighbors and parishioners and others are going to be the worse for it.”

  I fire my parting shot. “There is a difference between committing a crime and making a mistake. You do not send someone to jail for making a mistake. You teach him a lesson, so he won’t make that mistake again. Well, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Salazar has learned his lesson, and then some. There is justice in this world, and there is injustice. You all know the difference. And you know, in your hearts, that sending Mr. Salazar to prison for making a mistake would be a terrible injustice. I trust you will not do that. You will find him not guilty, and will send him home to again be with his wife, his children, and all of the people in his community he so lovingly and selflessly serves.”

  Wayne Dixant doesn’t waste any time buttering up his audience. “Do you people remember Kenneth Lay, the CEO of Enron, who swindled thousands of people out of hundreds of millions of dollars? Some of you may have lost money out of your bank accounts or retirement funds because of him. The citizens of the state of California—you and me—lost billions of dollars, not millions but billions, because of his shady, illegal, and immoral manipulations.” A quick break, then: “I see your heads nodding. You all remember that scandal. But here’s something you may not know about it. At Ken Lay’s trial, scores of people, many of them well-known, famous men and women, including several clergymen, swore to his good character. What a good father he was, good citizen, Eagle Scout, benefactor of the downtrodden, all things good and true. A saint on earth to rival Saint Augustine himself, the way some of his character witnesses laid it on. But he was convicted anyway, because he broke the law, and the jury who decided his fate was able to separate the facts from the emotional appeals that were made to them.

  “That is the choice we have here: facts versus emotion. Fact: the accused, Roberto Salazar, was caught red-handed with a shipment of stolen goods. That is not in dispute, even by him. Fact: he had no legal documents for them. He couldn’t, because they had been stolen less than six hours before he was caught with them. In the back of his truck. Which was locked. Which he frantically tried to stop the police from searching, only yielding when they threatened to arrest him.”

  Dixant sighs. It’s a very theatrical sigh, too heavy-handed for my taste, but that’s his style. The jury, which I felt was leaning in my direction, now seems to be on his wavelength, a cause for concern to me. The guy is a scumbag and bullshit artist extraordinaire, but he’s putting on a good summation.

  “That was a great performance my esteemed opponent just put on,” he says, without a trace of sneer. “She should take her act across the street to the Mark Taper Theater, I hear they’re auditioning actors for their next show. A comedy, I’m told.” He is dripping in earnest sarcasm now, it’s puddling at his feet. What really fries my butt is that the jury is buying this lame’s bullshit. Some of them are even smiling at his crappy jokes. I force myself not to slump in my seat as I listen to him rip me. “In Ms. Thompson’s view of how our legal system works, facts don’t matter; the testimony of the policemen of this city who dedicate their lives to protect and serve you doesn’t matter; the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether or not the accused is a nice guy. Well, ladies and gentlemen, facts do matter, because they are indisputable truths. Everything else is subjective. Which is why, when we decide whether a defendant is innocent or guilty, we examine the facts and put our emotions aside.”

  He looks over at Salazar and me again, but this time, his look is one of distilled venom, which he takes no pains to conceal from the jury. “If ever a summation was a textbook example of grasping at straws, you just witnessed it. Ms. Thompson had no facts on her side—none. Let me give you one glaring example. If, in fact, the accused was making a legitimate delivery, why didn’t the defense bring as a witness whomever those television sets were supposed to be delivered to? If that delivery was on the up and up, whoever was supposed to receive them would have said so. He would have provided documents to show it was, in fact, a legal transaction. In fact, if the accused’s lawyer had taken that simple and obvious step before this trial began, the people might not have prosecuted Mr. Salazar, because there would be proof—facts, again—that at least part of the transaction was legitimate, and given the accused’s prior good record, we might have given him the benefit of the doubt. But that person was never called to the stand.

  “That omission could have been a case of brain lock on Ms. Thompson’s part. We all drop the ball sometimes. In this situation, though, I don’t think so. It’s too obvious, and Ms. Thompson is too smart not to have followed that up. The real reason, which is apparent to all of us, is that whomever these stolen television sets were being delivered to was not legitimate, either. He was part of the overall crime picture. There is no other logical explanation.”

  Dixant got me on that one. I was hoping he wouldn’t connect those dots, but he has. He’s an asshole, but he’s not stupid. Of course I didn’t try to find out who was on the receiving end of those television sets, because I knew from the get-go they had been stolen, even if Salazar didn’t. If I had contacted the man he was supposed to deliver them to and asked him to come forward on our behalf he would have told me to shove it and five minutes later he would have shut down his operation and joined Gonzalez in deep hiding. And without any paperwork from Salazar t
o back me up, I would have had no way to force him to help us. So I never tried.

  “Let’s review the timetable,” Dixant says, as he walks to an easel his assistant has set up next to the jury box. There is a large artist’s pad on it, upon which a simple map and time line have been drawn. Picking up a pointer, he starts to trace the sequence of events.

  “We know the television sets were stolen from San Pedro a few hours before the accused was arrested,” he says, pointing to the first set of figures. He traces the pointer down the line. “The accused was arrested in West Los Angeles, which is twenty miles away on the freeways, at three in the morning.” The pointer moves again. “According to the accused, he left his home in East Los Angeles …” The pointer skips across the drawing to the opposite side. “… At approximately one o’clock in the morning. We only have his word for that. No one else has corroborated that, not even his wife. If she had, it might be easier for us to believe him. But she didn’t testify for her husband, so we only have his word for that.”

  Hoisted on another petard. Salazar’s wife might have confirmed the time frame if she was awake at the time Salazar got the call. But she would also have fallen apart, and might have hurt her husband more than she could help him. I couldn’t take that chance; and I couldn’t, out of basic decency, put her on the stand to be ripped to shreds. Now, of course, it looks as if we have something else to hide.

  “He drove clear across the entire city and met the aforementioned Gonzalez in Wilmington, at about two in the morning.” Dixant traces a line from where Salazar lives to Wilmington. It’s a long distance, even on paper. “Gets out of bed, drives all the way across a huge city. To help a friend. And we know, because the defense has driven this down our throats with all their character witnesses, that the accused is a wonderful human being, the salt of the earth.

  “And what does he find when he gets there, thirty miles away from his warm bed and the comfort of his wife at two o’clock in the morning? A truck with a faulty generator.” Dixant turns away from the easel and faces the jury. “Let me ask you something, ladies and gentlemen. With all due respect to the accused’s goodness of heart, does this make sense to you? That a man whose truck broke down in Wilmington …” He taps his pointer on the Wilmington spot on the map. “… Would call for help from someone who lives all the way over in East L.A.?” The pointer moves across his diagram again. “I’ll grant that Mr. Salazar is a fine man, who helps his friends when they are in trouble. But still, think about it. Does that make sense? It doesn’t to me. Especially if you’re sitting on a truck full of hot television sets, right off a freeway exit, where any police officer driving by is going to stop and ask you what the problem is, then offer to help, which is the last thing you want: a cop’s interference, no matter how well intentioned. You’re going to want to get your vehicle to a safer, more secluded place. Wouldn’t it make more sense to think that Mr. Gonzalez, assuming he actually exists, would have called a tow truck? In the amount of time it took the accused to drive halfway across the county and load those television sets from one truck to the other, Gonzalez could have gotten his truck fixed at an all-night garage and gone on his way.”

  Dixant walks back to the podium, flips through his notes, and extracts a sheet of paper. Holding it up, he declares, “There is a twenty-four-hour garage less than three miles from where this alleged transfer took place. Wilmington is a heavily industrialized area. It gets a lot of truck traffic, and this station has to make repairs around the clock. Any tow company would have known that. They would have taken Gonzalez’s truck there and a new generator would have been installed in less than half an hour, it’s a simple repair to make. I know, because I checked that myself.”

  A cardinal rule in preparing a case is to analyze it from the other side. I didn’t do that thoroughly enough, and my lack of anticipating the prosecution’s moves is biting me on the butt.

  Too late now for regrets, unfortunately. You make choices and live with them. Or die with them. The more convincingly Dixant lays out his case, the deeper I’m sinking. I steal a glance at my client. He is listening attentively, but he doesn’t seem overly worried. From the very beginning he has trusted me to pull his fat out of the fire. I hope he’ll still believe in me when this is over.

  “Salazar and Gonzalez transfer the television sets from one truck to the other,” Dixant continues. “In plain sight, where anyone could drive by and see them. But luckily for them, these two men make the transfer without any trouble. They finish by two-thirty.” He taps his time line again. “Salazar leaves, and Gonzalez waits for a tow truck to come get him. Now he waits for the tow truck, after he’s off-loaded his hot goods. If anything bad happens after this, he’s in the clear.”

  Dixant’s pointer moves up the 405 freeway, tracing Salazar’s route. “The time is three o’clock in the morning. The accused pulls off the freeway. According to him, to go to the bathroom. I’ll accept that. When you gotta go, you gotta go,” he cracks.

  A few of the jurors smile at his dumb joke, more to relieve the tension than because it’s funny, since it isn’t. Dixant doesn’t care; he’s rolling, and he knows it.

  “Anyway, he figures he’s home free, right? The transfer of the stolen television sets was made, they’re locked up tight in his truck, all he has to do is drive over the pass, deliver them, and go back to his warm bed.”

  He turns and looks at Salazar and me, which draws the jury’s attention to us. Their stares at Salazar aren’t friendly, as they were earlier. Dixant waits for them to get a good look, then says, “But he never gets home, because he carelessly runs a stop sign, an officer is passing by, he is lawfully stopped, the officer notices a faulty tail-light, he inspects the truck, finds the stolen television sets, and arrests him. What terrible luck. I mean, who would ever think an officer would be driving by at that precise moment, so late at night? Obviously, not the accused. Which was a bad mistake to make. Because the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff’s Department is always out there. To protect and serve the honest citizens of our community. You and me.”

  Having finished his physical presentation, Dixant leaves his display and walks back to the podium. “I want to take a moment to talk about the prosecution’s witness, Mr. Calderon,” he says. “Ms. Thompson was very aggressive in denouncing this man and attacking his story and his credibility. She had to be, because if it’s true, there can be no doubt that her client is guilty. So she has to tear Mr. Calderon down, and convince you that he was lying. If I were her, I would do the same thing. And she was right to denounce the abuses of the past that came from using jailhouse informants as witnesses. As a public official, I am ashamed and embarrassed about those abuses. Everyone in law enforcement in Los Angeles County, policemen and prosecutors alike, is ashamed of this record. Which is why we are much, much more careful now about using these informants, because we know, from painful experience, that there have been grievous abuses. We are very careful not to let that happen anymore. If there is any question about such witnesses today, we don’t use them. That is official departmental policy, and it is strictly enforced.

  “You may not believe that this corrupt behavior is over. I can understand your being suspicious. We lost your trust, and we’re trying our best to earn it back. But let’s take a step back and examine these particular circumstances logically. Mr. Calderon was in the jail when the accused was also in the jail. That’s in the record. Calderon testified that they were in close proximity. The accused said they weren’t. One of them is telling the truth, one is lying. We don’t know which one. Calderon told you that the accused confessed to him. The accused said he didn’t. Again, one is lying and one isn’t. Which one, we don’t know.

  “But there is one thing we do know. The details that Calderon talked about are true. That is not debatable. Everyone, including my esteemed opponent, agrees about that. Calderon could only have known about those details in one of two ways. Either the accused told him, or I told him. I, meaning me, one of my associ
ates, or a police officer. Because no one else knew.”

  He’s thrown down the gauntlet now. All the chips are on the table.

  “If you think this witness was coached by me or anyone associated with this case, you should find the accused not guilty. You would be derelict in your duty, not only legally but morally, if you didn’t. But if you don’t think we did, then you have to believe my witness, because there would have been no other way for him to know what he told you, other than finding it out from the accused.”

  The courtroom is as quiet as a tomb. Not even the air is moving. Some of the jurors might not even be breathing. I can barely catch my own breath.

  Dixant squares up his notes into a neat stack. The finish line is in sight, and he races toward it. “Do you believe his story? Can you believe his story? I can’t. I don’t see how anyone, thinking logically, can believe his story. He was caught with a shipment of stolen goods. That is a fact. Everything else is conjecture.

  “My opponent claims that people don’t change. We are who we are. Basically, I agree with her. That’s human nature. But circumstances change. An opportunity presents itself, and you take it. That is human nature, too. Even good people do bad things. No one is a criminal until he commits a crime, regardless of whether he’s twelve, eighteen, thirty-five, ninety. There is no statute of limitations on becoming a criminal, no age ceiling that says once you are this old, you will never commit a crime. Kenneth Lay was in his fifties before he committed his crimes.

  “When you go into the jury room to decide your verdict, you will have two choices: guilty, or not guilty. You will be instructed by Judge Rosen to make your decision based on the facts that have been presented to you. Facts, ladies and gentlemen, not emotions. Please do not let your emotions cloud the facts in this case. If you do, you will be doing our system of justice a great disservice. We are a nation of laws, not men. And thank God for that.”