The One-Eyed Judge

by Ponsor, Michael;

  To his right, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Campanella was accompanied at his table by FBI agent Mike Patterson. The courtroom was nearly empty except for the Republican reporter in the rear right and a very pretty young woman, probably some college student doing an assignment, who was sitting in the front row of the gallery on the end nearest the door. She held a wire-rim notebook on her lap and a pen in one hand.

  As the judge took in the attorneys’ facial expressions and body language, he noted with pleasure that this was going to be a hearing with some gristle. Linda Ames looked ready to punch somebody, and Campanella looked like he hoped she might try. They were both wearing red. Ames was sporting a scarlet blouse under her charcoal jacket, and Campanella was wearing a blazing Chinese-red tie. Classic battle dress.

  All this was fine with Norcross. A nice criminal case with a little melodrama felt like heaven after the incredibly dull patent trial.

  In contrast to the lawyers, Patterson looked like he couldn’t care less about what happened in United States v. Cranmer. Nothing in his face sought to remind the judge of their encounter at the airport. It might as well never have happened. His elegant Lincoln-green suit made him better dressed than either of the attorneys. His tie was brown.

  Norcross opened his file and began. “Okay. We are here today to take up some preliminary matters and get squared away for trial. The first item on the agenda is the psychologist’s report, which I assume you have reviewed.” This element of the case had been slowing things down. It had taken ages to locate a properly qualified forensic clinician and to give Cranmer enough time to recover from his brutal thumping to allow a consultation.

  In response to the judge’s words, Ames and Campanella both nodded and then glanced sideways, checking each other out. The two-second exchange revealed that the lawyers hadn’t conferred before coming into court, which meant that they would be feeling out each other’s positions for the first time now. This was not good. If Ames and Campanella couldn’t talk informally outside the courtroom, it would make in-court proceedings snarlier than necessary. A slugfest over something meaningful was fun; foolish arguments over nothing were a waste of time.

  “I’ll begin with you, Ms. Ames. Frankly, I find the report ambiguous and confusing. Will you be seeking funds to hire your own psychologist?”

  Ames stood, shaking her head. “No need. My client has instructed me not to raise the issue of his competency. We’re not arguing that he committed the crime but was crazy when he did it. We’re saying that he never committed any crime, period—at least not any crime the government can prove.”

  “Well, I’m reading from Dr. Katzenbach’s findings here, where she refers to ‘significant memory loss due to severe depression and anxiety extending over several months.’ Later on, she refers to ‘profound grief, complicated by alcohol dependence and insomnia.’”

  “Right. I’ve gone over the report with Professor Cranmer.”

  Campanella hopped to his feet. “I would just note that in her conclusion, the doctor also finds, quote, ‘scant evidence’ of any disability sufficient to render Professor Cranmer incompetent to commit the crime or assist in his own defense at trial.”

  Norcross broke in. “Sounds to me like she’s saying he was off his rocker, but he probably more or less knew what he was doing—sort of, kind of.”

  “That’s it.” Campanella shrugged. “In a nutshell.”

  “That doesn’t help me a whole lot.” Norcross flipped a page of the report. “She also says that for about three critical months, he can’t remember much of anything.”

  “Well,” Campanella began. “She also says—”

  Ames waved a hand at Campanella, riding over him. “This is a nonissue, Judge. My client is adamant. He was going through a very difficult stretch, but he was competent, and he committed no provable offense.”

  “How can he assist you when he can’t remember most of what he was doing when he supposedly committed the crime he’s charged with here?”

  “We’re working on that, Judge.”

  Norcross pulled his robe up over his knees and resettled himself. “And how about the risk that Professor Cranmer might do himself harm? However bad this all might be, it’s not a death-penalty case.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Judge Norcross saw the young woman in the front row stiffen and stop jotting notes. She uncrossed her legs and set the notebook to one side, her eyes widening. Was she a relative of the defendant? A grown-up child from one of the videos?

  The judge’s concern about Cranmer had made Campanella impatient. “He’s home, Judge. Agent Patterson tells me he has cats. He’s doing fine.”

  Ames gave Campanella a scornful look and turned to Norcross. “The doctor you appointed has agreed to keep seeing Professor Cranmer. We’re monitoring his condition.”

  Judge Norcross poured himself a cup of water and set it to the side, using the time to think. He didn’t want to be sandbagged down the line for not pushing the competency issue. If Cranmer got convicted, which he probably would, he might get a new attorney for his appeal, and then it would be open season on all his rulings.

  Norcross leaned forward and spoke with deliberate clarity, being extra sure the stenographer got every word. “If I don’t hear something further from you, Ms. Ames—unless you raise the issue explicitly—I’m going to assume that you have waived any claim regarding competency, either at the time of the alleged crime or at the time of trial. Those issues will be out of the case. Do we agree on that?”

  “We agree. They’re waived.”

  This exchange—Norcross and Ames both knew—was a message to the court of appeals. Campanella knew this as well. He gave a satisfied nod, sat down, and made a check mark on his yellow pad. With this exchange in the transcript, no appeal would be possible based on any insufficient consideration of Cranmer’s psychological condition, past or present.

  Norcross’s mind touched once more on the strange nature of his world. It was a universe like the land beyond Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, with its own independent past, present, and future. Facts found on the record defined the judicial past, no matter what had occurred in the actual world. The tappity-tap of the stenographer’s fingers created the present, in the form of a transcript, no matter what was actually being said or intended. And the court’s legal rulings, relying on the absence of objections or tossing them aside, outlined the landscape of the future. If the record were not properly preserved, things would simply vanish from the reality of the case forever. It no longer mattered now whether the professor was, in fact, mentally impaired. That possibility had disappeared from the world of the courtroom, like the Cheshire cat, without leaving even a smile behind.

  “Okay, what else have we got?”

  Ames put her hands on her hips. “Big problems is what we’ve got, Judge.”

  “Let’s hear.”

  The reference to big problems made the judge think of Claire, and he quickly jotted Pick up wine on his yellow pad. It had taken him most of a week to recover from the collapse of his surprise welcome-home party. In several phone exchanges, Claire insisted that the cozy scene with Darren Mattoon had been no more than a simple act of courtesy to a colleague who’d given her a lift.

  This might be what Claire actually thought, but in Norcross’s eyes, it was nonsense. He could see clearly that Mattoon had plenty more than collegiality in mind. The situation reminded him of his college hockey days. He wanted to smear Darren Mattoon into the boards. At the dinner Claire was preparing for him that evening, they would talk more about this. On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t need to talk. It had been a very long time.

  Ames was going on. “There’s a pig pile of little stuff that’s accumulated, but the basic issues come down to two.”

  Campanella leaned back and tossed his pencil on the table. He and Patterson exchanged looks.

  “First of all, Mr. Campane
lla wants to put some remarks my client supposedly made during the raid into evidence before the jury. He can’t deny that these statements were elicited before any Miranda warnings were given. I’m going to ask you to keep all those statements out of the trial, and I need an evidentiary hearing to build a record to support your ruling. My brother here”—she pointed over at Campanella, who was staring straight forward, refusing to look at her—“thinks we don’t need one—no witnesses, no testimony—which makes no sense. I need you to hear from a number of people, including at least Special Agent Patterson and a young undergraduate intern named Elizabeth Spencer, who happened to be present at the time of the raid. Possibly Professor Cranmer himself, too. I also may call some of the three or four hundred law enforcement personnel who invaded Professor Cranmer’s home that day. So, we need to set that up.”

  At the mention of Elizabeth Spencer, Agent Patterson turned slowly around and nodded at the pretty college student. She stiffened, not responding, and Patterson turned back.

  Norcross took a closer look at the young woman who must be Elizabeth Spencer. What was she doing here? Potential witnesses normally didn’t bother attending status conferences. After a moment’s speculation, he focused back on Ames. “Three or four hundred?”

  “Slight exaggeration.”

  Campanella stood. “May I be heard?”

  “Not yet.” Norcross waved, and Campanella sat. “Okay, a suppression hearing. What else?”

  How nice it was to be able just to tell people to shut up when you didn’t feel like hearing from them.

  “The ‘what else’ is that the government is refusing to provide essential discovery. I keep asking for it, and I keep getting stonewalled. We have the supposed chat-room transcripts that my brother thinks are in some way admissible. I don’t know why he thinks that. Saying something vomit-worthy is not a crime. We also have the still photos and videos the government says constitute child pornography downloaded and stored on my client’s computer by somebody. But we don’t have the metadata regarding any of this Internet traffic. We just have the material itself, and the absence of the metadata is handcuffing my expert.”

  “Metadata?”

  “This is not my field, but my expert tells me that metadata is data that describes other data.” Ames immediately picked up on the judge’s confused frown. “I know, it sounds like gobbledygook, but it isn’t. Metadata tells you things like the author of a file, the date it was created, the date it was modified, the file size, things like that. I’ve told Mr. Campanella like fifty times now that my expert can’t do his job without this disclosure. And once we have the metadata, we’re going to need time to work through it. There’s some interesting law on this out of the Second Circuit, and I’m prepared to submit a formal memo if we can’t work this out.”

  It was the usual collision of opposing agendas, the routine exchange of kidney punches. As he jotted a few notes on his yellow pad, Judge Norcross enjoyed knowing that a few sensible directives from him would tidy all this up. He wasn’t sure what these directives would be yet, but he knew they would come to him shortly.

  When Campanella got his turn, he complained, as Ames had predicted, that an evidentiary hearing on the Miranda issue was a waste of time. In a sense, he was right. If Norcross denied Ames’s motion, there was an 80 percent chance that his ruling would be upheld on appeal with or without a hearing. In a more important sense, however, Campanella was wrong. Norcross had acquired enough experience to know that the record needed to be protected, and that squeezing Ames on this point was dumb. If he erred by refusing to hear testimony, and Cranmer was eventually convicted, there was a one in five chance that the court of appeals would send the case back for a retrial. If he erred in the opposite direction, by hearing the testimony of Ames’s witnesses, all he lost was a couple days in court listening to what they had to say. If he denied the motion after a full hearing, and made findings based on the testimony, his chance of being affirmed was close to 100 percent.

  Besides, Norcross was intrigued by the prospect of hearing from Elizabeth Spencer. She looked smart, and she might give him a helpful perspective on what had really happened during the raid. Her decision to come to court and check things out was interesting. Exactly who was this young lady?

  As for the metadata, it eventually emerged that Campanella’s real problem was that he’d put in many hours getting the documentary material onto CDs that did not include the level of detail Ames wanted. It would be still more work for Campanella and his investigators to go back to the original records and dig up the additional data. Boo hoo. When Norcross was practicing, he’d had many a weekend wiped out by some judge’s unexpected demands. You had to accept this kind of turbulence if you wanted to play in the big leagues. Norcross gave Campanella thirty days to turn the metadata over, and he instructed Ruby Johnson to set up the suppression hearing for some time in October, as soon as he had a big enough opening in his calendar to fit it in.

  He wrapped up with what was, for him, the most important point.

  “Now.” He nodded, pausing to make eye contact with each of the lawyers. “I want the two of you to get together and start working constructively to get yourselves on track. I’m blessed in this case with two excellent lawyers.” This was mostly true. “I know Ms. Ames will not play games, and I know Mr. Campanella is aware of the government’s obligations. Set up a time to discuss the case and go over the documents, face-to-face. When I see you for the suppression hearing, I’ll be looking for a progress report. That’s enough for today.”

  His last thought as Ruby called out, “All rise,” and he stepped off the bench was that it was beginning to look as though he and Claire might be in limbo for longer than he’d thought.

  17

  2Kool: u left so fast last time it made me sad :(

  LS: i had a pir

  2Kool: ? u had to p?

  LS: u r so funny!!! :) u dont know pir???

  2Kool: i told u i was weird and nerdy

  LS: its parent alert like pir is parent in room mos is mom over shoulder kpc is keep parents clueless dont yr mom and dad bug u about chatting??

  2Kool: u r so kool u know everything no my parents kind of dont pay that much attention now that im a senior its like so what

  LS: my mom loves me i guess but she can be such a b**** about chatting

  2Kool : same 4 me when i was yr age now its different i may get my own place this fall maybe u cld come visit???

  LS: omg that wld make me sooooo happy and hot!!!!

  2Kool: u cld send me some pics if u felt comfterble u don’t have 2 but it wld mean everything 2 me.

  He waited. Come on, sweetheart. …

  LS: i cld send a pic now but what do u wanna see?

  2Kool: whatever u want me 2 see but i wld luv to see a full nude one :):):)

  LS: im kinda shy to do a full nude cuz im kinda big :(

  2Kool: come on for me pleez or u cld send me just certain parts i bet u no what i wanna see

  He waited. Maybe he was pushing too hard. As the minutes passed, he imagined her in her room, in shorts and a T-shirt. Did she wear a bra yet? He was breathing hard and rubbing himself. This was better than meth. Three or four minutes passed. The night was warm. It was hard to be patient.

  LS: there! did u get it? i did a selfie of my u-no-what. did u get it? Am I pretty do u still like me?

  2Kool: No!!!! Nothing came thru! im dying!!!!! :(:(:(:(

  LS: shitshitshitshit im such a klutz do u hate me???

  The little twat. She was doing this on purpose to play him.

  2Kool: no i don’t hate u i luv u!! do u have skype? we cld skype.

  LS: fuckfuckfuckfuck P911!! Stay there!!!

  He waited. Time to pull the line in. If she was hooked, fine. If not, there were others. School would be starting soon, and everything would get tougher. He was sick of this shit. He picked up the clicke
r and switched on the television.

  LS: its ok now.

  He waited. Fuck her.

  LS: r u there?

  He waited, breathed, and switched off the TV. Here goes.

  2Kool: i dont know how to say this but i think u dont like me.

  LS: nonononono i like u so much!!!

  2Kool: why cant u send me a pic then i want 2 c u.

  LS: i tried but it didn’t work

  2Kool: yur not telling me the truth i thought we were being honest

  Longer pause.

  LS: yur right im just shy cuz i think u wont like me cuz im a tub :(:( :( dont hate me pleeze!!!

  2Kool: i need u to show me how much u luv me chats r easy i want 2 see all of u.

  LS: im too shy for pics or skype i have an idea but u might think im a slut

  2Kool: i wld never think that but i do think its easy to talk and not really mean it

  LS: ok here goes my 14th is in five weeks do u want to meet irl to celebrate?

  He tipped up the rod, lifted her right out of the water, wet and slippery, and dropped her in the net. Li’l Sis’s parents, it turned out, were going up to Maine for the Columbus Day weekend, and she’d be staying at her aunt’s house. That Saturday, she’d learned, her aunt would be going out with friends and leaving her by herself with Chinese and a video. There was a Howard Johnson’s motel walking distance from her aunt’s house. If he could get a room and text her the number …

  They took turns talking about all the things they wanted to do, would do, when they were alone in that room. He could not remember the last time he felt this alive. He’d get his nephew to join the fun again. The kid was screwed up in a lot of ways, but he liked to party, and he’d help if Li’l Sis got too frisky. Afterward, they’d take her for a little swim.

  Columbus Day. It wasn’t so far off. Open the Happy Meal, dip your head down, and breathe in the salty smell.