INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice

by David Feige

  “Right. And make sure that the lawyer doing her arraignment tomorrow gets the letter that I’m going to give her.”

  “Okay, Counselor, you got it. Gimee your address and I’ll send a team over.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant. I appreciate it.”

  “Be about twenty minutes.”

  “Perfect. Thanks.”

  Hanging up the phone, I turned back to Cassandra. “What medications do you need and in what dosages do you need them?”

  “Ah . . . I’m not on my medication, David.”

  “I know, Cassandra . . . but when you get to the jail, they are going to put you back on them. That’s the point.”

  “Ooooh . . . okay,” Cassandra said slowly, then listed the particular drugs and specific dosages she should have been taking. After jotting all of it down, I headed upstairs and typed out a quick letter to accompany Cassandra on her journey through the system --a letter I hoped would ensure that at the very least she’d get her medications and that I’d be notified before she saw a judge. I printed three copies --two for Cassandra (in case she lost one) and one for the detectives.

  The Warrant Squad arrived as promised. There were three of them --one African American man and two white guys --all big and muscular with cold gazes. I led them to the courtyard and introduced them to Cassandra. I explained that we’d decided that she needed to spend a few weeks in jail and that I’d hoped that they’d help me out by making sure that when she got to court her attorney got the letter I’d prepared. The African American cop offered to take the letter. “It has a list of the medications she needs, my home and cell numbers, and a specific request that the judge set five hundred dollars’ bail and adjourn the case for two weeks,” I told him.

  “Counselor,” one of the white detectives said, “your client . . . ah . . . she knows we’re gonna have to cuff her, right?”

  I told him we knew.

  Just before the white guy reached for his cuffs, the African American detective interrupted. Turning slightly away from his colleagues, he leaned close. “You know they’re gonna search her when we get to the precinct --are we okay or do you need a minute to, ahh, talk to her?”

  I smiled up at him, grateful for his decency. “We’re okay,” I told him. “Already took care of it --we’re good to go.”

  “Okay, Counselor,” he said, nodding to the others. “Thanks.”

  “Ms. Stallings, could you turn around please?”

  Cassandra stood up, put her hands behind her back, palms out, thumbs touching, and waited to be handcuffed.

  “B-Bye, David,” she said, and then, seeing the look on my face, she added, “it’s okay, I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you, David.” And with that she was gone.

  Today, I realize as I sip my coffee, is the day Cassandra comes out.

  - - - -

  Every morning it’s the same --up the West Side Highway past the procession of cars stuck in traffic streaming toward midtown, across Harlem, along the ridge at the top of Sugar Hill, and eventually down a long viaduct and across the Macomb’s Dam Bridge into the Bronx.

  Three clients and three murders are going to start my day. One of them is certain to be my next trial. I just don’t know which one. A hint would be nice.

  All three homicides are pending before the same judge, and having them together allows me to get a sense of which prosecutors are pushing for a trial, how the judge sees each one, what I can expect. All of this will help me prioritize. Having all three on the same day also means that I can spend some time in the pens with each client. And so, as the 155th Street cemetery glides by, surrounded by an army of trucks crammed with movie equipment, I make mental notes on each case to be sure I won’t forget anything later.

  Just past the cemetery, from the top of Sugar Hill, the Bronx spreads out below me. Yankee Stadium, abandoned for the winter, dominates the landscape. Above it, perched on the Grand Concourse, its golden windows shimmering in the winter light, I can make out the Supreme Court building, home to all three of this morning’s murders.

  The Bronx is a world unto itself. Known, like Watts or Cabrini Green, as much for its crime rate, violence, and poverty as anything else, the Bronx is amazingly diverse: from the palaces of Riverdale to the working-class neighborhoods near the Whitestone Bridge, there are parts of the borough that utterly defy the stereotypes. Take a drive through the very northern edge of the Bronx, where it fades seamlessly into Yonkers, and you’d think you had stumbled into Dublin --you’ll find pubs filled with rowdy locals watching soccer, stores filled with Irish delicacies, and accents so thick they are almost incomprehensible. Similar enclaves exist in other areas too. The fabled Italian restaurants of Arthur Avenue, in the heart of Belmont, are surrounded by the kind of small butchers, fishmongers, and fruit stands you might find in Tuscany or Palermo. And it’s not just the ethnically ghettoized enclaves that persist. City Island, a small strip of land connected to the rest of the Bronx by a long, narrow bridge, sports marinas and clam shacks that could fool you into believing you were in a New England fishing village. In huge swaths of the Bronx, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Italians, Irish, and African Americans live side by side in comfortable, stable neighborhoods.

  But not down south. From Mott Haven to Hunts Point, from Morrisania to Castle Hill, there is much of the Bronx that really does reek of the violence, pestilence, and poverty of stereotypical urban decay.

  As you drive south on the Bruckner Expressway, away from Westchester and the ever-greener neighborhoods and suburbs above, toward the heart of the industrial South Bronx, on your left, just before the Colgate Scaffold yard, you’ll see the hulking cement-frame towers of the Soundview Houses. Built a halfcentury ago, Soundview is one of the most violent housing projects in the Bronx. Cut off from the main bulk of the Bronx by the highway, Soundview is a study in contrasts: neat single-family houses occupied by solidly middle-class folks push up against the rat-infested projects of the immobile underclass. It’s a place where the successful people are drug dealers or sanitation workers rather than corporate tycoons or investment bankers, and it sits just ten miles from the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, a place many residents have never even visited.

  I know the projects pretty well, and since one of the crimes I’m dealing with today took place there, I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I’ve represented some local celebrities, and walking around the hulking buildings, I’m likely to be recognized. “Yo, you was my lawyer!” is a common refrain, and “Hey, you Bemo’s lawyer, right?” is a close second. Kevin Bethea, known around the neighborhood as “Bemo,” was a Soundview legend. He had a rap sheet that ran to thirty pages and a crack addiction to which he had completely surrendered. He was bald, with the thin, resilient frame of a man who has spent many homeless nights seeking shelter in out-of-the-way places. A scar covered half his forehead --either the result of a gunshot or a close encounter with a jar full of lye.

  Bemo was a notorious gangster in his youth, but crack turned him into a charming but perennially petty criminal. He was single-handedly responsible for most of the neighborhood’s car break-ins, and, as with so much in the projects, everyone knew it. But there was something compelling about him. A detective I know told me that he once saw Bemo walking down the street with a few car radios that still had the wires hanging out of them. Bemo walked over to the detective’s car, carefully put the radios down, and put up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of surrender: “Okay, Garcia, you got me again.” He was so funny about it the detective couldn’t bring himself to arrest him.

  “Go, Bemo,” he ordered, “and get rid of that shit before someone you can’t charm comes along.”

  Bemo was gunned down two weeks after I got him out of jail for the fifth time. A citizen with a rifle, uncharmed by his antics, shot him in the head as he broke into yet another car, trying to steal yet another radio. Unlike the other times he’d been shot, this one was fatal.

  When I’d first heard about the shooting, I was terrified that Bemo would be buried
in Potter’s Field --the massive paupers’ grave often tended by inmates from Rikers Island. He had, so far as I know, no relatives in New York. But for the anonymity, such a lonesome cemetery might have been a fitting place for Bemo --surrounded by so many others from the neighborhood who had no one to claim them, no one even to identify their remains, his unmarked grave watched over by the guarded gardeners of Rikers Island.

  But Bemo wasn’t destined for Potter’s Field at all. Within the tiny world circumscribed by the sweep of the Soundview Oval, a U-shaped drive flanked by drably identical project buildings, Bemo was a kind of hero. For days after he was shot, kids --for some reason it was mostly kids --swarmed through the tall project buildings with buckets, collecting dollar bills and spare change to cover the funeral home bill. And within hours of his body being carted away for evidence, a shrine went up at the corner of Randall and Rosedale, across the street from the little ghetto grocery store --a favored hangout of hustlers and drunks.

  The shrine was a cardboard box cut in two, with Polaroid pictures of Bemo taped to or propped next to it. One could see Bemo when he was young, mean, and gangstery, or when he was older, the small, scarred bald head cocked slightly to the side, his bright, dancing eyes sizing up the camera. There were flowers too, huge stacks of cheap deli flowers, their dyed blooms fading in the afternoon sun. And candles, of course --nearly two dozen of the colored votive candles the Dominicans love, lit for peace or serenity or safe travels --faded decals of second-tier saints curling off the glass as they flickered down to nothingness.

  The Oritz Funeral Home on Soundview Avenue is a dingy building crammed amid the jumble and decay of the neighborhood. Ortiz does a brisk and unusually young business --ODs and murder victims, slain gangsters and kids caught in the cross fire. The expertise helped: I’d never seen Bemo looking so peaceful as he did lying in the casket in his prom-style tux, his small, twitchy face smoothed to a consistent, if waxy, pallor, his hands crossed demurely over his chest. The brutal fury of the bullets --their entry into and exit from his body --was nowhere in sight.

  I spoke at Bemo’s funeral, as I had so many times in court, my brief remarks sandwiched amid the testimonials of family and friends, former drug addicts, and recent crime partners, all celebrating a life --regularly violent, certainly criminal, and often tragic --led entirely within the confines of the projects.

  The cops, keeping a respectful distance, watched the comings and goings closely, shooting me a quizzical look when I stopped near the shrine for a moment of reflection. Two reporters were circling, looking to understand the strange phenomenon of a beloved neighborhood thief. Their questions betrayed an elemental confusion, the same one that pervades the criminal justice system --how can a criminal actually be good? This is a question that surfaces almost every time I talk about my work.

  “He’s a thief!” my friend Diana said to me once, her blond curls bouncing slightly. “Doesn’t that creep you out just a little bit?” We were standing in a crowded SoHo bar in the middle of an otherwise restrained birthday celebration. I was about halfway through my third glass of overpriced, mediocre Cabernet when I’d mentioned Bemo.

  “I mean, how can you actually like them?” she persisted. “They’re people, Di,” I replied, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time why being a lawyer for the poor somehow anointed me ambassador for the despised. “They have lives and wives and loves just as poignant and real and compelling as yours.”

  “Well, I don’t go around robbing people,” she sniffed as I managed a wan smile and changed the subject.

  For some reason when it comes to my indigent ghetto clients, it becomes easy to forget that people, including those who break the law, are complicated and often charming. That they too contain multitudes. Oddly, no one has trouble understanding the humanity of white crooks. We mythologize them all the time --Bonnie and Clyde, John Gotti, Carolyn Warmus --all are complex people we find ways to relate to and even admire. At the movies we cheer for Butch and Sundance, Scarface, or the Ocean’s Eleven crew. The fact that John Gotti was a ruthless killer who wreaked havoc on far more lives than any of my clients ever touched never eclipses the public memory of him as big, handsome, and defiant. People loved Gotti’s resistance to governmental authority. But put a black face on Gotti and no matter how dapper a don he is, the press, the prosecutors, and the public only read menace. I’ve often represented people as “big,” “handsome,” and “defiant” as John Gotti, yet when I invoke the humanity of these faceless robbers and killers, it sends most listeners from the land of mere confusion to that of utter incomprehension. To this day, I wrestle with where this understanding goes off the rails. Fundamentalist Christians constantly speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is heard as liberal gibberish.

  - - - -

  As I pull up to the office, pondering Bemo and Soundview and today’s murder cases, I glide past boarded-up buildings and carefully tended community gardens: a world of cracks in the wall.

  There used to be plenty of street parking on the block around our office, but as we’ve grown, parking has become more and more scarce. The real problem is that there is only one marginally safe block to park on if you want to have any assurance that your windows will be intact when it’s time to go home. Our building sits on Courtlandt Avenue between 160th and 161st Street, and while our block of Courtlandt is well traveled, the rear of the building --the one that abuts 160th --is a strip of vacant lots, burned-out buildings, and community gardening projects. It’s not often used and, as a result, is an invitation to the crackheads who often wander down it looking for cans to recycle or, not infrequently, an easy radio to poach.

  As usual, I’m late, so I’ll have to trust my car to the gods or demons of 160th Street. With a bad parking spot, I figure my chances of being broken into are about one in forty. Over the years, I’ve had my windows smashed, my radio stolen, and my side-view mirrors swiped. For a while, Robin Steinberg, my boss and friend, had the turn signals from her Volvo stolen almost weekly. (It turns out that you can just pop the blinkers out of a Volvo and resell them to a parts place for $30 each. They’re $170 new, and the places that buy them hot resell them for $50 or $60, often to the victims of the theft.)

  I finally make it through the door and into our cheery reception area at about three minutes after ten. When clients walked into my old office at the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn they were greeted by a thick grease-smeared sheet of bulletproof Plexiglas --and if they were lucky, a frustrated receptionist behind it. The clients, of course, are used to this; everywhere they go --welfare, housing, parole, SSI --they get crappy injection-molded chairs, bulletproof Plexi, and the kind of service that wouldn’t be tolerated at a ghetto McDonald’s. At the Bronx Defenders, by contrast, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. clients are greeted by our receptionists Lorraine and Jennifer --and, consistent with the philosophy of the office, not from behind Plexiglas. Instead, one of them is sitting at a curved modern desk in a cool waiting room strewn with children’s toys and comfortable couches. Both women are bilingual and unceasingly chipper, professional, and cool.

  Unlike the Legal Aid Society, the Bronx Defenders is a relatively small public defender office. With about thirty-five lawyers and a few dozen social workers, investigators, support staff, and interns, the office is responsible for handling about 12,500 criminal cases a year. Most of the staff are divided into interdisciplinary teams presided over by a senior lawyer known as a “team leader.” Other than Robin, the founder and executive director, there are only two lawyers who aren’t officially on a specific team --the legal director and the trial chief. Florian Miedel, a former appeals lawyer whose Teutonic good looks often prompt “golden boy” jokes, is the legal director. Miedel is responsible for the technical, legal side of the work --motions, legal briefs, and legal arguments. I’m the trial chief, providing guid
ance on handling complex cases and help with trial tactics and techniques. I’m about the facts; Florian is about the law. Florian helps the lawyers win before judges; I help them win before juries.

  Heading past the reception area and through the lunchroom on the way to my office, I run into Branford.

  “Wassup, Feige?” he says, giving me a street handshake and a warm hug. He’s decked out in shiny black shoes, a perfectly pressed white shirt, and nicely tailored slacks. The only hint of his past is the thick gold chain around his finely sculpted neck.

  Branford was fourteen when he swallowed the bullets, .22-caliber rifle shells --live, long, and lethal. Branford was running with an older crew then, selling drugs, robbing people, and running the streets. The shells matched a sawed-off that the crew had ditched just after a shooting not far from one of the most violent spots in Soundview --a blood-bathed strip of pavement perched at the top of the Oval at the intersection of Randall and Rosedale Avenues, and referred to by the neighborhood kids as Kozy Korner.

  When the cops had rolled up, Branford had the bullets in his jacket pocket. So as the cops worked their way down the long line of kids, tossing one after the next, Branford, with a furtive look to his left, slid the bullets from his inside pocket and started downing them. It worked: they pinched another kid for the gun. Branford walked.