Unreasonable Doubts

by Reyna Marder Gentin

  Unreasonable Doubts

  Copyright © 2018, Reyna Marder Gentin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-413-4

  978-1-63152-414-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937318

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Interior design Tabitha Lahr

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Pierre, Ariella, and Micah, who had no doubts and gave me courage.

  “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

  —Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859)

  CHAPTER 1

  “Liana, you have Randy Napoli from the New York Law Journal on line one. Want me to ask him what it’s about?”

  “No, thanks, Tony. You can put him through,” Liana said. She and Randy had the kind of friendship that sometimes flourishes when both parties know that it exists only in cyberspace and they’ll never actually have to meet. When Randy needed an angle or had a legal question, Liana would provide background information, off the record. In turn, he had written a number of articles on Liana’s cases, and even when she lost, she came out looking good. It was a win-win situation.

  “What’s up, Randy?” Liana asked.

  “One of your clients got rearrested. I’m working on a story.” Randy didn’t make much small talk.

  “Which one?” Liana asked.

  Could be any of them.

  “Jeremiah Clark,” Randy said, remaining quiet and letting the name sink in.

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, I figured you’d remember him. Your first fifteen minutes of fame in the legal world,” Randy said. “Getting that kid’s murder conviction tossed—that was one hell of a win.”

  Clark’s case was the first serious felony appeal Liana had handled after joining the New York City Public Defender’s Office. He was sixteen years old and got caught up with the wrong group of friends. One day they forced him to prove himself by shoplifting some expensive gaming equipment from a Best Buy in Queens. Clark had managed to stuff over $1,000 worth of merchandise into a backpack when a shot rang out. One of the other boys had brought a gun, and when the cashier resisted, the boy pulled the trigger. The jury convicted the whole crew of murder, and the judge threw the book at them all.

  Liana had successfully argued that because Clark hadn’t known the other boy had a gun, the jury’s verdict couldn’t stand. He wasn’t exactly innocent but close enough, and the judge had reduced his sentence from twenty years for murder to a year for the larceny.

  “What’d he get arrested for, Randy?” Liana asked.

  “Murder. Again. After he did his time on your case, he tried to get his act together—went back to high school, got a job bagging groceries. Didn’t last long. A few months ago, he started selling drugs. This time, he was the one with the gun. He fired at a rival dealer, but he hit some old lady getting off a bus instead.”

  Liana sensed that Randy was enjoying taking her down a peg—like she had gotten Clark off with some fancy legal footwork, and now look.

  And who can blame him for reaching that conclusion? Isn’t that exactly what happened?

  The color drained from Liana’s face, and her hands were shaking slightly. She could hear Deb to her left typing away furiously on her computer, not pausing to see what was happening. Liana swiveled in her chair to look out the window. Her office was just two short blocks from where the Twin Towers had stood. Liana had left home for college a few days after the attack in 2001. Now, a little over a decade later, she had a view of the nearly completed Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, a symbol that, somehow, good would prevail over evil. Sometimes, it didn’t seem likely.

  “Liana, you still there?” Randy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it can’t be a revelation that there are victims of the crimes these guys commit, right? I mean, this is a rough crowd for a nice girl like you to be mixing with.” Liana could hear Randy cracking his knuckles, and she pictured him looking out at the newsroom, grateful to be surrounded by reporters and editors and not her clientele.

  “Thanks for letting me know, Randy,” she said, putting the receiver down. Liana closed her eyes and practiced her yoga breathing. Deb had still not looked up from her screen.

  This day is not starting out well.

  When the cold shoulder became unbearable, Liana gave up. “Are you still mad at me for not babysitting Max on Saturday night?”

  Liana’s polite but firm refusal to watch two-year-old Max while Deb went on a blind date had not gone over well. When Deb finally relented and turned to Liana, her eyes were bleary and she looked exhausted.

  “What happened to you?” Liana asked, a little afraid of what the answer would be.

  “I’m trying to transition Max from his crib,” she said. “I was up all night—the little bugger kept getting out of the new bed every hour and running into my room. I finally just locked his bedroom door so he couldn’t come out,” Deb confessed. “Could I be reported to Child Protective Services for that?”

  Liana was stunned. Having no children herself, she didn’t understand the sleep-deprived desperation that might drive such behavior. She had a vision of a raging fire and Max trapped in his bedroom.

  “I’m not sure. Is that safe?” But Deb had pulled up Face-book on her computer and was busy perusing photographs from a high school friend’s bachelorette party—she was a whirling dervish of energy, and the niceties of a conversation never held her long.

  “What was that phone call about?” Deb asked. Her maternal instincts, such as they were, had kicked in when she’d seen Liana wilt. Before Liana could explain, Tony poked his head in their doorway, his eyeglasses sliding down his nose.

  “Office meeting, ladies!” he rang out. “Don’t be late! You know how the Boss hates tardiness!”

  Gerry, “the Boss,” was legendary in the criminal defense bar. He had been fighting the good fight for over thirty years, and he ran a tight ship. Liana could hear Tony as he stopped at each office in turn, cajoling the staff attorneys into the conference room.

  “Damn. I totally forgot we have that meeting today,” Deb groaned. “How does Gerry expect us to crank out these briefs and also sit through these ridiculous office meetings for hours?”

  There was a brief filing quota—nicknamed “the brief of the month” club—which ran from July 1 to June 30. Many of the attorneys found the requirement onerous, but Liana worked at a steady pace, and she had met her quota with the brief she had filed the previous week. She was indulging in a silent moment of self-congratulation when Gerry interrupted her thoughts. He had a total disdain for exercise, and even this short journey down the corridor had him breathing just a bit too hard and trying to cover it up by speaking a bit too loudly in the enc
losed space of Liana and Deb’s office.

  “Good morning, ladies! Liana, started working on your next case yet?” he said in his fingernails-on-a-chalkboard cheery voice.

  “Not yet, Gerry,” Liana lied. In fact, she had flipped through the file, discovering that her new client had a rap sheet a mile long and had now been convicted of selling crack cocaine to an undercover cop. Within five hundred feet of an elementary school. A dead loser.

  “I just filed brief number twelve. Is there some reason you ask?” Liana ventured.

  “No, not really. I just get so jazzed at the beginning of a new fiscal year—it’s hard to contain myself!” If his enthusiasm hadn’t been so undeniably genuine, it would have been comical.

  Liana suppressed an eye-roll. “Gerry, I’ll turn to the new case ASAP, and I’ll have a real jumpstart on the quota for next year,” she deadpanned. Deb sniggered quietly, facing her computer with her back to Gerry and clearly hoping that he would leave her alone.

  “What a Goody Two-shoes,” Liana said when Gerry was out of earshot.

  “Only you still use expressions like ‘Goody Two-shoes’ when you’re trying to hurl an insult,” Deb said. “You’re so feeble.”

  “I’ll try to work harder on my epithets so they meet your approval,” Liana said, relieved that she seemed to be back in Deb’s good graces. “Let’s go. We’ll grab seats by the door so we can leave as soon as it’s over.”

  The Public Defender’s Office had been an obvious career path for an idealist like Liana. She’d fervently believed that most of the time the criminal justice system worked—the guilty would be punished, and the innocent would be set free. Nor had there been any question in Liana’s mind which role she would occupy in the drama—that of Atticus Finch, fighting the uphill battle for the accused, losing most of the time but still feeling good about herself and her choices. It had all seemed so simple.

  The two women made their way down the long, cheaply carpeted hallway, chatting with their colleagues as they joined the procession to the sterile and utilitarian conference room, where they took their places in thirty or so uncomfortable plastic chairs that surrounded a large rectangular table. No artwork adorned the stark white walls, only a few framed posters of the Twin Towers that no one had the heart to remove.

  Liana felt immediately cheered as she looked around the room. The staff attorneys had a “we’re in the trenches together” mentality that still spoke to her. As easy as the camaraderie was among the rank and file, Liana was increasingly out of sync with Gerry and the other supervisors. She looked at them now, sitting stiffly side by side on the far end of the conference table, and was reminded, albeit oddly for a Jewish girl, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each had a slightly different way of spreading the Word, but they preached essentially the same gospel to the choir of staff attorneys: “Remember, we are entrusted with the task of doing God’s work, representing the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, the wronged.”

  Initially, Liana had enthusiastically drunk the Kool-Aid that Gerry dispensed, driven by the belief that the next client could be the innocent one she alone was destined to save from a life behind bars. But now, with several years of practice under her belt, something had changed. After representing repeat offenders and defendants found guilty at trial of crimes too ghastly to imagine, she was having a crisis of faith.

  When the staff attorneys had settled into their seats, Gerry stood and began to speak, his voice reverberating in the crowded space.

  “Thank you, everyone, for coming and for being punctual. I know that the end of the fiscal year is tomorrow, and some of you are scrambling to finish up your briefs for quota. I didn’t want to cancel today’s meeting, but we’ll try to keep it short. Who has a case they’d like to discuss?”

  It was always the same. Gerry would invite participation, and the attorneys would sit stonily, some staring down at the table, others doodling on their legal pads, all looking anywhere but at the front of the room where the supervisors sat. For a group of articulate, opinionated people, they acted like small children; no one wanted to go first or be called upon by the teacher. Eventually, someone would clear his or her throat and break the awkward silence.

  “I have a case I could use some guidance on,” Franny volunteered. She was younger than Liana—had just passed her one-year probationary period in the office and graduated to representing clients convicted of the most serious crimes. Liana had taken a shine to her; she was a sweet girl, round-faced and rosy-cheeked, earnest and serious.

  She reminds me of myself when I was a newbie.

  “My client’s name is Derwin Jackson. He was convicted of second-degree manslaughter for recklessly killing his infant son, Tyrone—the medical examiner testified that the cause of death was shaken baby syndrome. At trial, Jackson tried to shift the blame, saying that the mother had been the one caring for the child at the time he was killed, but the jury didn’t buy it.” Franny was now speaking in such hushed tones that Liana could barely hear her from just a few seats away, and her eyes had welled up with tears.

  Maybe she isn’t cut out for this.

  But Franny soldiered on. “I’m trying to find a sympathetic angle—a way to humanize Mr. Jackson in the brief for the court, and for myself. I guess I’m just having a little trouble, given the circumstances.” She took a deep breath and looked beseechingly around the room.

  “Okay, we can help with that,” Gerry said in a soothing tone. “It’s important for your effectiveness as Mr. Jackson’s attorney to dig a little deeper—stand in the shoes of the defendant and try to understand him—and to look for the good in him.” Liana noticed a number of the attorneys nodding vigorously in agreement, and she let out an involuntary but audible sigh.

  Gerry shot Liana a warning look from across the room and then continued.

  “First of all, is Mr. Jackson the child’s natural father?” he asked.

  “No, actually, he’s the mother’s boyfriend,” Franny said. “Does that matter?”

  “Well, yes,” Gerry said. “I mean, no, it doesn’t matter in a strictly legal sense, but it’s just different—less viscerally horrifying—if this isn’t his biological child. Taking care of someone else’s child—that’s a big responsibility to saddle someone with.” Liana kicked Deb under the table, as if to say, “See? You don’t want me taking care of Max,” but Deb refused to take the bait and kept her focus on Franny.

  Gerry stood up and paced back and forth as he thought out loud about ways to explain away the defendant’s heinous behavior. “Maybe Mr. Jackson had conflicting feelings about watching this child—I mean, if he isn’t the baby’s father, then his girlfriend pretty recently had been having sex with some other man. Maybe there’s a way to explore that aspect of the story—the jealousy angle.”

  Liana shifted in her seat, staring at Gerry and trying to figure out if there could be any validity to what he was saying. She could discern none.

  Gerry continued. “What’s Mr. Jackson’s educational level? Perhaps you could argue that he was like a child himself and lacked the understanding to appreciate that he could hurt the baby, or thought that he was comforting the baby with the physical contact.” As he picked up speed, Gerry’s face turned a shade of pink and small beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.

  If he doesn’t explode, it will be a miracle.

  Then, to Liana’s dismay, Deb got in on the act. “As a mother who never gets frustrated by the behavior of her small child”—there were a few knowing chuckles, and Deb winked at Liana, who tried to smile but found that she couldn’t—“maybe you could paint Mr. Jackson as a caring stepfather who was trying to teach the boy good behavior, when something went terribly awry?”

  Liana couldn’t stand it anymore. She passed her legal pad to Deb. This is nonsense! Why is Gerry trying to dress this guy up as the maligned babysitter instead of finding something Franny can raise in her brief? she scrawled across the top of the page. Deb passed the pad back after scribbling, cool down. But Lian
a felt as if her head would burst. Before she knew it, she had turned her whole body toward Franny. She took a moment to modulate her voice, but her frustration was apparent nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry, but can we stop this love fest for Mr. Jackson for just a moment? Franny, do you have an actual legal issue to argue on Mr. Jackson’s behalf on his appeal?”

  After a moment, Franny answered.

  “Well, yes, I think I do. In the middle of the trial, a juror disclosed that a number of years earlier her daughter had died of SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome—a purely accidental death. The juror said she still suffered from that trauma, and she felt she might be biased against the defendant even though she understood he had nothing to do with her daughter’s death. Despite this showing of potential prejudice, the court denied defense counsel’s motion to remove that juror from the panel and substitute an alternate juror.”

  Liana was triumphant. “That’s a great issue, Franny—a slam dunk winning issue! All this other stuff about believing in your client and trying to find his inner worth is—pardon my French—bullshit!”

  “I think what Liana is trying to say,” Deb interrupted, putting a calming hand on Liana’s arm as if Deb were afraid Liana might quite literally self-destruct, “is that the most critical part of every appeal is identifying the legal issue that stands the best chance of helping our client, whether you believe your client is innocent or guilty. But we also have to remember that the defendant is a human being. It helps you do a better job if you can emotionally invest in the defendant and relate to his situation.”

  Liana could feel the pressure of Deb’s touch, silently urging her to let the matter drop. But she was too far gone.

  “Actually, that’s not at all what I meant. What I mean is that in this job, ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, your client is guilty. That’s why he lost at trial, and that’s why he’s your client now on appeal. Forget about compassion. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad for your client or if you understand your client or if you believe in your client’s underlying goodness or even in his innocence—you’re not your client’s girlfriend or his mother or his shrink or his priest. Just do your job—be his lawyer and try to figure out a way to win his case.”