I was lost in thought, somewhere in the events of my life in the last four months, smiling in acknowledgment and responding to greetings as I passed other assistants on their way to courtrooms for hearings and trials.
“Did this case keep you up all night?” I snapped out of my reverie at the sound of Ellen Goldman’s voice when she approached me at the elevator bank.
“No, no—not this. Sorry, I just didn’t see you there. I’m a bit preoccupied.” I tried to force a smile, but I had forgotten that she would be back today and the last thing I needed to deal with was a reporter.
“Forgive me for saying this, but—you look so pale. Do you feel okay?”
“Oh yes, thanks. I’m, well, it’s just personal. It hasn’t been a very good week.”
I pressed the button for the seventh floor, and the crush of other litigants filled the car completely, so we were able to ride up in the crowd without my having to make small talk with Ellen.
“Judge Hadleigh’s courtroom is around this way to the left,” I said as I led her to the small setting in which the trial of the People of the State of New York against Ernesto Cerone had been conducted.
“Was anything reported about this case, anything in the press?”
“No, actually, not a word—fortunately for the victim.”
“Can you tell me something about it, so I know what’s going to happen today?”
I took Ellen through the facts of the case as we entered the room and sat on the front bench to await the arrival of both the judge and my adversary. The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who lived in an apartment building in Harlem. She was mentally handicapped and had the developmental level of a seven-year-old child. A carpenter who was doing construction work in a unit in the building lured her into the empty room one afternoon last spring, trapped her in the bathroom, and anally sodomized her and raped her. Her screams were heard by a neighbor who rushed into the apartment and actually pulled the rapist off the body of the terrified woman.
Since the identity of the attacker—Ernesto Cerone—was not an issue, the defense turned the matter around and claimed that there had been no forced assault, but instead, that the victim had consented to the intercourse. Then, she started to scream only when Cerone refused to pay her for the pleasure of her company. The severe mental handicap of the woman made her a scapegoat for a vicious cross-examination at the trial, and the conviction was possible only because of the compelling testimony of the neighbor who had intervened to save her.
“This shouldn’t be very complicated. I’m going to ask for the max, the defense attorney’ll jump up and down about it, and this judge is likely to end up somewhere in the middle.”
“Doesn’t sound like there’s much of a middle to me. Oh, by the way, I was talking to my editor last night, Alex, and he’d really like me to flesh out some more detail, if you understand me. He thinks the story will be too dry if we don’t get sort of a ‘behind the scenes’ view of what makes you do this. He’d like some more personal information about you.”
I let out a very soft groan. “Like what?”
“Like how do you spend your free time, what do you do on weekends, who do you see when you go out?”
“Look, Ellen, I don’t mind talking to you about my work when the press office directs me to, but I’ve just got to separate my private life from this business.”
“That’s just the point. Most people can’t understand how you do that. Don’t you take this work home with you every night? I don’t mean the papers and documents, I mean the emotional baggage. Doesn’t this job just make you hate men?”
I laughed at that one. Maybe Goldman wasn’t as smart as I had initially thought, to ask such a hackneyed question. “No, of course not. The people who commit these crimes are deviants, Ellen. This is really extreme, aberrant behavior. Most of the men I’ve ever met in my life are incapable of this kind of conduct. I am not one of the women who believe that all men are potential rapists. That’s one of the main reasons I can deal with these cases. And it really doesn’t carry over into my relationships with men—not for a moment.” But if you want to know what makes me hate men, I thought to myself, this is the right day to ask me.
“Are you seriously involved with someone now, Alex? This investment banker you were out with last night?”
“Did I tell you who I was going out with yesterday?” I shot back at her. “I wasn’t aware I mentioned—”
“I told you I’ve done my homework. I’ve already interviewed a lot of your colleagues.”
“What branch of the Israeli military did you serve in—Intelligence?”
“Not so lucky. I was in a special patrol force on the West Bank. Actually an elite antiterrorist unit. Not a cushy desk job doing background checks.”
I was impressed. “Listen, Ellen. Can we go off the record for a few minutes?”
“Sure. Off the record.”
“Whatever you heard about the investment banker and whoever’s been talking about it, you need to know it’s over. I’ll give you other stuff—personal stuff if you have to have it—but I beg you to leave the romance angle out of it. He’s not a part of my life anymore and I don’t want to see anything about us in print. Please.”
“Yeah, sure, I’m really sorry. People had been telling me you were very happy together. Picture-perfect couple and all that kind of thing. Of course I won’t write about it if it’s not true. Is this all very recent?”
It was a Catch-22. I couldn’t get her off the subject without going on to explain why it didn’t make sense for her to stay on the subject.
“Recent? Let’s just say if you had asked me the same question before you left me in my office yesterday afternoon, you would have had a different answer. History, Ellen, it’s over.”
I was relieved to see Cerone’s court-appointed attorney come out of the door which led from the holding pen behind the courtroom. The clerk stepped back and knocked on the judge’s robing room and I couldn’t hear what Ellen murmured to me as the court officer announced “all rise,” when Hadleigh mounted the three steps to his seat at the bench.
The clerk called the case from the calendar, directed both counsel to state our appearances for the record, and arraigned the defendant for sentence. He went on to ask, “Does the assistant district attorney wish to be heard?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” I recalled for the judge the facts of the case, referring to actual pieces of testimony about the victim’s ordeal which I had pulled from the transcript. In greater detail, I described her mental condition and the vulnerability that handicap also endowed her with. Her legal guardian had called to tell me that even to this day, the young woman awakened with nightmares, screaming the name of the defendant and pleading for help. I closed by urging the Court to impose the maximum sentence, a range of eight and one-third to twenty-five years in state prison.
Cerone’s lawyer spoke next. He still disputed the verdict of the jury, arguing that his client would be vindicated by an appellate review of the facts. He assailed the descriptions that had been given about the woman’s mental capacity, saying that there really wasn’t anything wrong with her at all: she was just slow. “There is nothing in the trial record to indicate that this was a violent, brutal attack, like the People claim.
“Your Honor,” he continued, “I must also call your attention to the history of this complaining witness. Ms. Cooper mentioned the victim’s guardian, who reports her nightmares to the district attorney. May I remind you that the reason she lives with a guardian is that she had to be removed from her natural home because she had been the victim of years of sexual abuse by her father and her brothers. All of those events, Judge Hadleigh, have had some kind of impact on this witness—and all of those abuses occurred before the events she testified about in this court.
“They don’t excuse my client, Your Honor, but surely the impact of Mr. Cerone’s actions on her is lessened by her past experience.”
Did I hear this guy right? Is he about to te
ll the judge that it’s okay to victimize someone who has been abused before?
Now Hadleigh was awake to the issue, too. “Well, certainly, the impact of this crime is less severe because of her incest experience. She’s not inured to it, I’m sure, but it had to be less serious than the first or second time she’d been through this, I have to agree with you.”
I was on my feet in a flash. “I’m going to object—”
“Just a minute, Miss Cooper. You’ve had your chance. Sit down. I’ll hear counsel out on this, he’s entitled to his position.”
“My client still denies his guilt, Your Honor. And I just want to close by asking you to take all these things into consideration in sentencing my client, who has no prior criminal history, and by—”
“Objection. Judge Hadleigh, Mr. Cerone has no felony convictions but he certainly has a criminal history…”
“Miss Cooper, that’s all before me, as you know, in the pre-sentence report. Let’s keep some order here, please. There’s no jury to perform for—I know the record, too.”
“So on my client’s behalf, Judge, I’d ask for the minimum in this case—two to six years.”
The Honorable Horace Hadleigh—we all called him Horrid, on the prosecution side, which was either the result of or the causal factor in why for the more than thirty-eight years he had been on the bench he generally handed members of the defense bar exactly what they wanted—was about to deliver his view of the Cerone case.
He hadn’t bothered to write out any comments about the case in advance, so he began by rambling on a bit about the trial and the pathetic young woman who had testified in his courtroom.
By the end of five minutes it was clear that he had bought the defense position lock, stock, and barrel. “And quite frankly, I don’t see what the People gain by describing this rape as brutal and violent.”
There was no point in my sitting down at the table. If I could manage to get a word in edgewise, this was going to be lively. “Your Honor, the Penal Law of this state defines rape as a ‘violent felony.’ Of course this situation was violent—it was a forced physical assault by a man who overpowered an unwilling participant.”
“Miss Cooper, don’t stand here and lecture me on the Penal Law. There are rapes and there are rapes. He didn’t chop her up in little pieces, did he? He didn’t cause any other injuries, did he?”
“Thank God he didn’t, Your Honor. The law doesn’t require that either. That’s a separate crime, as you know. Rape occurs without any external physical injury in the overwhelming percentage of cases. She didn’t have to sustain any injury. She was raped and anally sodomized—that’s trauma enough.”
“You’re losing your sense of discretion, young lady, as well as your temper. You can’t differentiate between one case and another, and that’s fatal for a prosecutor.”
I took a deep breath and modulated my tone. “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I must disagree with you. I see three, four hundred rape cases a year—supervise several hundred others—that’s more than any other prosecutor in the country, Judge Hadleigh. I am very well aware of the factual distinctions, the nuances, the differences in kinds of threats—all of the minuscule features that make each of these cases so distinct to each victim—woman, man, or child—despite the fact that several Penal Law definitions cover the entire spectrum. I think I know, as well as anyone in the world, how to differentiate among every single one of the cases that cross my desk.”
“Well, then, you’ll have to agree, Miss Cooper, that this girl is so retarded that she really can’t understand what happened to her, isn’t that so? It’s not like if it happened to you or to my daughter? You’d know what it was all about now, wouldn’t you? She can’t absorb what happened to her, she can’t even explain it to us.”
I was thunderstruck. This was a triple-header: Cerone’s attack was forcible but not violent; other people had abused this victim in her past, so she was fair game for Ernesto Cerone this time; and because she was handicapped—the very reason she had been preyed upon, in all likelihood—it didn’t matter as much as it would to a fully abled woman.
“Judge Hadleigh,” I began, unable to let his comments stand unaddressed on the record. “Most respectfully, sir,” you complete fucking moron, “I must take exception to the views you have expressed here today. I think it’s fair to say that not since the case opinions generated by the medieval English courts have I heard observations like these about rape victims from the bench.”
“What did you say?”
“The three statements you made about this trial, Judge, they really reflect antiquated attitudes.”
“Did you say something to me about the Dark Ages, Miss Cooper? Are you making fun of me, young lady?”
“Not at all, sir. But surely you remember the legislative history of these statutes when the laws changed, just two decades ago? Sir Matthew Hale, 1671—all those archaic writings about women being the property of their husbands and rape not being a crime unless the victim had been virginal before the assault. Those views went out—”
“Miss Cooper. I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to put off this sentence today and let you walk out of my courtroom without holding you in contempt. I’m going to let you reflect upon this for a bit and come back next week with an apology for me and a more reasonable view of the facts of this case.” Ernesto Cerone was grinning as if he had just been paid a million dollars to do a commercial for Fixodent. He wasn’t going to get out of jail free, but every time I opened my mouth, his sentence time came down a notch.
“Thank you for that opportunity, Judge, but I am ready to go ahead with Mr. Cerone’s sentence today.” I’d like nothing better than to see this whole thing written up in Ellen Goldman’s article and expose Hadleigh for what he is.
“You’re flirting with contempt, miss.”
What the hell, Judge, I’m giving up flirting with men. And I do so love flirting.
My adversary played right into the judge’s hand. “I’d like the matter adjourned for a week, too.”
“Thank you. At defendant’s request, this case will be put over until next Wednesday, 2 P.M., for sentence. I expect you to come back a bit more courteously, Miss Cooper. I don’t want to have to report this as a complaint to the Disciplinary Committee. Has that ever happened to you before?”
“No, sir.” But I would wear it as a badge of honor if you did it with this record you’ve just made today.
Hadleigh strode off the bench and back to his robing room as I gathered my papers and stepped out of the well to join up with Ellen Goldman.
“I can’t believe I heard the things the judge said, but I did.”
“Can you just imagine, if those are the views of an educated jurist, what victims encounter all over this country from people who are uninformed about issues like this? It’s unthinkable. Hadleigh’s the exception around here, I should add—most of our judges in New York are terrific on these cases. He just reminds me that there are still a lot more Neanderthals around than I like to admit to myself.”
“Do you mind if I trail you back to your office and talk a bit more today?”
“Look, Ellen, I’d like to do it, but I’m really pinched for time. Can we push it back a few days?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a good start from the two hours you gave me yesterday, as well as my research. I’ll call you tomorrow. If you see me around, it’s just for background and interviewing other people about you.”
“Thanks, Ellen.” Yeah, great. Poke around—let me know if you find out anything I should have known weeks ago. We shook hands on the corner of Centre Street and I went back into the building to see what awaited me in the office.
Sarah Brenner was standing at my desk, using the phone. I closed the door and sat until she finished her conversation.
“How did Cerone go?” she asked. “What did Horrid hit him with?”
“Not as much as he wanted to hit me with, I’ll tell you that. Adjourned for a week. Anything come in while I was ov
er there?”
“That was Bruno. He just called from the airport, with Antonio Partigas.” Detective Bruno and his partner had come in from Miami on the first flight. They had gone on a rendition, to bring Partigas back to New York to stand trial here for a series of rapes he had committed before fleeing to Florida two months ago. “Class act, Partigas, all the way. You know why Bruno called? Just to tell us that while Antonio was sitting on the plane, cuffed and seated between two of New York’s Finest and under arrest for six counts of rape in the first degree, he exposed himself to the stewardess. Fly the friendly skies. I tell you, it’s never dull here.”
“Sarah, be honest with me. How do I look? I mean, I feel like I’m losing it—do I look as crazed as I feel?”
“You look fine. Fishing for compliments today, are we?”
“Listen, Jed and I broke up last night—you need to know why, although I’d like you to keep it between us for a while. I’m really running on empty, though, and I’m afraid you’re the one who’ll get stuck with all the overload.”
“Keep it coming, Alex. Whatever I do here is easier than being home with a six-month-old kid. We’ll manage. The only other call while you were with Hadleigh was from a uniformed cop in the two-six. He wanted to know if it was sex abuse for a man to fondle the breasts of an eleven-year-old girl, even if she really didn’t have developed breasts yet. Can you believe it? Rocket scientist. And if she’s a forty-year-old woman who just happens to be flat-chested, I guess we should give him a pass, too.”
“Let me fill you in on what happened last night. I’d rather have you hear it all from me.”
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 20