Criminal That I Am

by Jennifer Ridha

  I push the iPad back into my purse and happen upon Hello Kitty’s backside. I had thrown her in with my other belongings as I was packing. When I turn her over, I see that her marshmallow face has been punched in through the plastic.

  I roll my eyes and observe the damage. Her smooshed face expresses bewilderment, and she looks like a crossed-eyed baseball mitt. Once a beautiful delicacy, her fall from grace has been swift and complete.

  I look her over and decide there is nothing to salvage. I unwrap her plastic covering and take a large, satisfying bite out of her head. I throw her remains into my purse. Then I drive home.

  Cameron stays at a transit facility for a full week. He is transferred to MCC two days before I appear in court.

  I know that when Cameron arrives at MCC, he will be placed in the SHU until he is assigned to a unit. He is thus sitting in the SHU when I arrive at the U.S. Marshals Service for processing. He has also very likely encountered the newly incarcerated defendants who are being processed at the same time as me.

  I watch the defendant ahead of me in line, the Russian guy charged with a drug crime, as he is being processed. His young face makes me think he is close to Cameron in age. He will almost certainly see Cameron later in the day. For a moment, I think to myself, If you want to relay a message to Cameron to ask about the Escaleras’ trial, this is your opportunity.

  But I have no message for Cameron. There is no information he can provide that will improve this situation. And though it’s only been a few months since we’ve seen each other, and I’ve essentially thought of him in one way or another every day since, to communicate with him now somehow seems socially out of bounds. The thought crosses my mind as the Marshal presses my hands onto the fingerprinting machine: it did not take long for him to become someone I once knew.

  Once my court date is over, the countdown to the Escalera trial begins.

  I am in regular contact with my attorney. Each time we speak, he tells me what I wouldn’t like to hear.

  “Looks like it’s still happening,” he says.

  “You don’t think they’re going to plead?” I am stubbornly holding on to hope.

  He always says the only thing there is to say. “I would think if the government is still offering them a plea deal, it’s possible they would plead.”

  “They’d be crazy not to plead, right? And I can’t imagine the government is thrilled about taking this case to trial. Maybe the brothers are just posturing?”

  My attorney has infinite patience, but I can tell that all of my speculative questions are wearing on him.

  The days of January quickly pass, and there is no news of a plea. Just to be safe, I have resurrected my Google Alert for Cameron so that if there is any update, I’m among the first to have it.

  By the start of February, with no new updates, I have resolved myself to the reality that this trial will happen. I sink into despondency, unable to reconcile how I have managed to escape my own court date unscathed, only to be undone mere weeks later. My career is standing on its last legs. Sleeplessness returns. I spend long hours in front of the television set and my computer. I wish I could simply abscond to a distant country. Unfortunately, I am hemmed in by the terms of my deferred prosecution agreement, and so I must eke out an existence during one of the coldest winters ever in New York.

  I’m fiddling on my computer late one Monday night when an e-mail comes through. It’s a Google Alert for Cameron that links to an article in the New York Post.

  The Escalera trial has been postponed.

  The reason for the adjournment is so odd that for a moment I wonder if the article is a spoof. Eduardo Escalera’s attorney has asked the court for a psychological evaluation of his client based on the fact that his “decision making is irrational.” According to his attorney, Eduardo Escalera “does not understand the nature and consequences of the current proceedings against him.”

  The article explains: the government has offered to drop the drug charges against both Escaleras and only bring charges for illegal reentry, an immigration crime that carries a sentence that is a mere fraction of that for the drug crimes. In taking the plea, the brothers would serve a sentence approximately half as long as Cameron’s.

  But Eduardo Escalera doesn’t want to take the deal. And, just as I had posited earlier, his lawyer believes he would be crazy not to.

  The trial judge orders a psychological evaluation and postpones the trial until early summer.

  I am so happy with this development that I jump for joy.

  But the best news of all, the news that makes me hope again that all of this might go away forever, arrives a couple of weeks later. I’m curious as to whether the government has determined to keep Cameron at MCC until the summer or if they’ve allowed him to return to his facility in Pennsylvania in the belief that a trial is unlikely. I pull up the Bureau of Prisons’ website and enter his name into inmate locator.

  Cameron is listed as being “In Transit.”

  The Escaleras’ insanity has granted me reprieve. But I do not celebrate for long. Instead, I soon begin to feel as though what I dread is simply delayed.

  The situation on its own does not lend itself to this conclusion. After all, the person who carries my fate, Cameron, has left New York City. He is the only one who can reveal my crimes to the public and will only do so if he is forced by the brunt of the law.

  My problems could be far away. But I hold them close.

  I fixate on the progress of the Escaleras’ case. I regularly check their court dockets to see if there is any movement toward trial. I scan the Internet for any news articles. I obsess so frequently about whether or not they will opt for their attractive plea deals that I believe I can picture them in their respective prison cells, going through the possibilities in their mind.

  “Let’s take the plea,” Imaginary David Escalera says.

  “But we’ll get deported,” Imaginary Eduardo Escalera replies.

  “We’ll get deported no matter what,” Imaginary David points out. “Even if we’re found not guilty.”

  “I don’t want to cave,” Imaginary Eduardo says.

  “But it will be far worse if we don’t,” Imaginary David says.

  “But the worse it is, the more that Cameron owes us,” Imaginary Eduardo says.

  This last line, based on pure conjecture and uttered only in my mind, always gives me chills. It’s a preposterous proposition, that someone would purposely take a more arduous path simply because they believed they could later leverage it into something lucrative. And yet, when Imaginary Eduardo says it, there is something about it that seems to ring true.

  I’m otherwise finding it difficult to move forward. I’m experiencing an odd paradox: while I do want to avoid the repercussions of my case becoming public, in personal interactions I feel uncomfortable holding it in. This might be because with the Escalera trial looming in the distance, my secret stands on shaky ground. But it might also be that the secret is too significant not to share, that what I’ve done is now a part of who I am, and to allow others to presume that I am an upstanding member of society is possibly dishonest, and certainly incomplete.

  I limit my interactions to those that are absolutely necessary. I spin a cocoon of familiarity around myself, spending my time only with those who are acquainted with my case, and thus really know me, or by myself.

  And so, when winter turns into spring, when actual cocoons are opened and butterflies emerge, I remain right where I am. I complain to anyone who will listen that I wish the Escalera saga would just be over already, that they would just decide. But deep down I know there is a comfort to being ensconced in this familiar fear. That beyond this purgatory, there is something much more formidable to confront. That by obsessing about the decisions of others, I do not yet have to think about my own.

  CHAPTER 8

  To Baghdad, with Angst

&nbs
p; As spring yields to summer, my obsessive search for updates in the Escaleras’ case does not yield very much. In May, Eduardo Escalera is declared as being of sound mind. He requests and is granted yet another new attorney—his third since his arrest, if anyone is keeping track—though the trial judge tells him this is the very last time and schedules a trial date for early October 2011.

  There is thus more waiting. I’m given little choice but to try to proceed with my life.

  Early July marks the time when the period of my deferred prosecution comes to an end. On July 7, six months to the day after my court date, the charges are dismissed. I expect to wake up the next day feeling different, but find I’m the exact same person I was the day before. It turns out that the dropping of charges does not, as I’d hoped, result in the erasing of history.

  I begrudgingly turn my attention to work. I am required to produce a piece of groundbreaking scholarship for presentation to the faculty in the fall. I am to use this piece of research to dazzle law schools at the annual job fair, held one week after this faculty presentation, in the hopes of securing a tenure-track teaching position.

  Most candidates spend anywhere between twelve to eighteen months preparing their piece. Because I decide my time is better spent fixating on my case, I end up according myself exactly four.

  In order to write this academic article, I must first complete my research. With the deadline looming and my travel restrictions lifted, I cannot waste time. I am going to Baghdad.

  Baghdad’s earliest inhabitants can be traced back to a time in history when the rest of the globe consisted of little more than tectonic plates. Fifty thousand years later, the area comprising Baghdad and its environs was known as Mesopotamia. Four thousand years after that, for reasons both geographical and political, the region became known as the Republic of Iraq.

  One of the oldest places on earth, Baghdad is in many ways where society was born. Here is where man first decided to read, to write, to do math. Here is where he first decided he ought to keep track of time. Put on shoes. Sit in a chair. Sleep in a bed. Eat from a bowl. Chop with an axe. Plant crops. Irrigate land. Construct homes. Create schools. Make cities. Enact laws.

  Baghdad is where the world begins.

  It is axiomatic that in a place of abundant creation, destruction is never far behind. As the region’s earliest peoples grew into villages and those villages into communities and those communities into civilizations and those civilizations into empires, each considered Baghdad a crown jewel, an eyed prize.

  And so, almost as soon as Baghdad was civilized, it was invaded and occupied. Gilgamesh had his turn in 2700 BC, and a thousand years later Hammurabi followed. The Akkadians, the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Persians all laid claim as well. Baghdad was later considered a grand conquest among the Islamic caliphates, and so both the Umayyad and Abbasid empires included it among their holdings.

  The Abbasids, their empire stretching from modern-day Morocco to Iran, were so enamored of Baghdad that they made it their capital. But even this came to an end several hundred years later, when the Mongols—led by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis—came to conquer. In addition to the standard slaughter, Khan took the extra step of destroying Baghdad’s most precious possession, its four-hundred-year-old grand library, at that time one of the foremost in existence. Tens of thousands of manuscripts of science and mathematics and literature were unceremoniously chucked into the Tigris, notoriously turning its waters black with ink.

  And so on and so forth. Even now. The only constant in Baghdad is Baghdad itself, which despite millennia of external invasion still stands. Thus, there is only one rule in Baghdad, containing two interrelated parts. First, that there will always be empire. And second, that notwithstanding the first, Baghdad will always be.

  I am headed to Iraq to examine its criminal justice system. For the past several years, long before my criminal exploits, I became interested in how criminal justice has developed in a new democratic Iraq. When I decided upon this research, I was aware that changes to Iraq’s criminal justice system had been promulgated by the United States through a $300 million initiative. I knew that this initiative was supported by the expertise and manpower of a federal agency that typically concerns itself with the workings of criminal justice in the United States.

  I did not know, however, that agents affiliated with this entity, the Department of Justice, would one day show up at my door in an unrelated matter.

  The focus of this research project is the use of secret evidence. Under Baathist rule, secret evidence was critical in the regime’s ability to control dissent. Men and women would be rounded up on the street without apparent reason. Once detained and tortured, they would be brought before a judge, where charges would be read and a verdict announced based on evidence that the defendants were not permitted to see. Guilt was a foregone conclusion, a sentence of death an assured eventuality.

  In my research, I discover that secret evidence has been banned in legal traditions dating back thousands of years. Even the ancients saw the injustice in convicting someone without allowing him to confront the evidence against him. The use of secret evidence violates Talmudic law; it violates Islamic law; it violates the law of the Canon. And though the Romans would happily throw a defendant to the lions, they agreed that he had the right to cross-examine his accuser first.

  But with its multimillion-dollar makeover, the U.S. government does not see fit to change Iraq’s laws allowing secret evidence. And in the years that follow the U.S. construction of a new criminal court, several human rights organizations report that its use is common and accepted.

  The deliberate denial of the right to confront is an interesting decision in creating a new democracy, especially given that this same right is part of America’s legal foundation. The right to confrontation was among the first rights demanded of England by the First Continental Congress; the denial of the right was among the reasons cited for going to war against the Crown. When independence was won, the right became one of the very first enshrined in our Constitution.

  The right to confront is what requires the government to present evidence in open court, what establishes a defendant’s ability to cross-­examine witnesses. It can be said to be one of several rights underlying the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Giglio v. United States.

  It is the right that the Escalera brothers will exercise should they decide to go to trial.

  And so this is how I find myself here, examining a criminal justice system that is devoid of a right I suspect might be necessary to the proper administration of justice, a right that in my own life could be the very cause of my downfall.

  I first traveled to Baghdad in 2004, a year after the U.S. invasion began. At that time, Baghdad was an active war zone, replete with tanks in constant prowl, helicopters overhead, and ubiquitous gunfire. On the way to the hair salon, I walked past a small park. On the way back, the whole park was on fire.

  Now, seven years later, here is the aftermath. Entering Baghdad’s city limits feels like walking into a hospital room moments after the patient has died. The air is dense with loss. Baghdad’s landscape is littered with bombed-out buildings and rubble. Her sidewalks are blanketed in refuse. Her streets are clogged with traffic, the perpetual honking of horns providing a dreary melody. People seem to move at a slower pace, as though every exertion must be made with considerable effort.

  On the way from the airport to my aunt’s home, the heat smothers my cousin’s car, presses on my throat. Although the air-conditioning is on full blast, each time I inhale I feel my lungs become warm. We seem to be perpetually stopped at government checkpoints, which while established for public safety seem only to construct an ideal civilian target. Each checkpoint is crowded with cars, crowded with passengers, crowded with the desire for forward momentum. And yet, every encounter with these is eerily calm. It is as though the entire city holds its brea
th in anticipation of what might happen next.

  At one such checkpoint, I look into the car next to ours. There is a woman sitting in the backseat on the driver’s side, her head wrapped in a scarf, a baby in her lap. I politely smile. Her baby boy, his fat face a perfect circle, smiles so wide that his cheeks obscure his eyes. His mother looks down at him, then back at me. He doesn’t know any better, her expression seems to say. And then she looks away.

  There is an Iraqi saying, reserved for the giving of condolences in the wake of tragedy, that roughly translates to I cover myself in black for you. As my cousin drives over the Tigris, I look down at its blue-brown waters. I imagine them as they were in the time of Hulagu Khan, brimming with blackness in mourning for what life in Baghdad has come to be.

  I can smell my aunt’s cooking from the driveway. She emerges from the house with flushed face, her arms extended. When she hugs me, I note that her pink sweat suit smells of cardamom and lemon. I squeeze her five-foot frame and tell her that she herself is an Iraqi delicacy.

  My aunt is a slightly older, substantially saner version of my mother. The eldest daughter, she is invariably the voice of reason, always expressed diplomatically, usually with a loving smile.

  But while she is warm and nurturing, my aunt is very much a woman with whom one should not trifle. I once saw her dress down a man on the street who gratuitously admonished me for wearing a skirt that exposed the bottom half of my calves. The look of terror in his eyes as she gave him the what-for was so intense that I actually felt bad for him.

  Inside the house I greet my uncle, one of the funniest men I know. His smile is broad as he directs me to the dining table, which is so stuffed with platters that it looks as though it might break. At the table are place settings for me, my aunt and uncle, my cousin and his wife, and their two young sons, whose cheeks I can’t help but squeeze with delight.

  As I look over the table, I see that one place setting is different from the others. Placed to the right of six plates are spoons. Placed to the right of the seventh is a fork.