by Paul Levine
“Even if he did, I told him to answer truthfully.”
Bolden gave the jurors a wry smile, a smile that said, I hear this bullcrap every day.
“Your entire testimony hinges on your diagnosis of the defendant having N.L.D., correct?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘entire testimony,’” Melissa replied.
“Well, isn’t the house of cards propping up the defense simply that N.L.D. caused—”
“Objection, argumentative!” I got to my feet and stayed there.
“Sustained.” Judge Speidel gave Margaret Bolden a sideways look, which was probably as peeved as he ever got with her.
“I’ll rephrase,” Bolden said, as if she had a choice. “Doctor, if I understand your testimony, it’s a three-step process. First, you conclude that the defendant has a learning disorder that made him susceptible to gaming addiction as a young teen, correct?”
“Yes.”
“The same disorder made him susceptible to believing Max Ringle’s false statements, correct?”
“Yes, there’s a direct connection.”
“And it also caused him to substitute the illegal test taking for his gaming addiction?”
“Clearly, it was a contributing factor.”
“My, but that N.L.D. is a powerful force to cause all that, isn’t it?”
“Objection, argumentative. Also, overly sarcastic.”
Judge Speidel shot me a scolding look. “Overruled. The witness may answer.”
“The disorder is related to everything you mentioned,” Melissa said.
“Therefore, if you’re wrong about what you claim is his Nonverbal Learning Disorder, aren’t you wrong about everything else?”
Saying “what you claim . . .” in such a dismissive tone. Nasty, Margaret Bolden.
“I wouldn’t characterize it that way, but yes, the N.L.D. is the building block of my conclusions.” She paused a quick beat and continued, “And it’s the stumbling block of Kip’s life.”
Bolden leveled a sharp look at Melissa, as if to say, “You just couldn’t resist, could you?”
Bolden gathered her notes from the podium and headed back toward the prosecution table. Maybe it was a pause for effect, before she ended with a flourish, perhaps a roll of drums and blare of trumpets. Or was she finished?
Hey, don’t sit down yet! We need you to pitch the big fat hanging curveball you think is a wicked slider.
Still on the move and facing the gallery, Bolden said, “Concerning your diagnosis of N.L.D., isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?”
Getting closer . . . C’mon now.
Melissa shrugged. “Meaning?”
Like an actor on a stage, Bolden whirled ninety degrees to face Melissa. She raised her voice just a notch, added a bit of spice to the tone and said, “Meaning that your findings of N.L.D. are based solely on the defendant’s self-reporting and your own observations, all of which are subjective?”
Yeah, baby! Oh, yeah!
“Not solely,” Melissa said.
“What then . . .?” Bolden stopped, mouth agape. If she were a cartoon lizard, her tongue would have flicked into the air and retrieved those two fleeting words.
“There is the abnormal brain scan,” Melissa said. “That is quite objective.”
Oh, God, how I love this woman!
For a moment, Bolden stood paralyzed, like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt. “You . . . you didn’t mention any brain scan on direct.”
“Mr. Lassiter must have forgotten to ask. He’s been having memory issues.”
Bolden shot a look at me that could have left third-degree burns. She had two choices, neither one appealing. If we were on one of those cattle ranches Judge Speidel used to visit, she could stroll into the corral blindfolded and hope she didn’t step in anything squishy. That is, she could continue asking questions to which she did not know the answers. Or, she could belatedly lock the barn door—that is, sit down and hope the judge would keep me from letting out all the horses, chickens, and traveling salesmen.
“Nothing further.” Bolden took her seat with dignity and a rigid backbone. No way the jury could feel the fire that had to be burning inside her. She was a pro, and I did admire that.
“I assume the defense has re-direct,” Judge Speidel said.
“Indeed,” I declared, a word I seldom use.
I got to my feet and floated on air to the prosecution table, where I handed Bolden copies of the brain scan and the related radiologist’s report. Had I done this on direct, Bolden would have found a different avenue of attack, rather than lash herself to the mast of a sinking ship, the S.S. Subjectivity.
I spent four or five minutes with foundational questions to establish that the scan was done yesterday morning at the University of Miami Hospital. Bolden objected, but Judge Speidel admitted the documents into evidence. And hurrah, we were off to the races.
“Dr. Gold, what were the results of the brain scan?” I asked.
“Kip has a significantly smaller splenium than would be considered normal,” Melissa began. “That’s the part of the corpus callosum that facilitates communication between the left and right sides of the brain. Also, the nerve fibers of the mesolimbic reward pathway are abnormally thin, and there are signs of weaker connections there among brain cells.”
“What’s the significance of those findings?”
“The smaller splenium is a hallmark of Nonverbal Learning Disorder. The mesolimbic reward pathway is a deep brain circuit that assists in socializing skills. Deficiencies there are consistent with both autism and N.L.D.”
“Are these findings subjective or objective?”
“Nothing could be more objective. You can see the abnormalities.”
Melissa then walked the jury through Kip’s brain images projected on a screen, comparing them with the scan of a young person without his abnormalities. She wielded the laser pointer expertly, highlighting pathways and callosi, reminding me of Joe Paterno diagraming football plays with X’s and O’s.
When we were finished with the show-and-tell, I inquired, “And your ultimate conclusion, Dr. Gold?”
“Kip Lassiter suffers from Nonverbal Learning Disorder, which made him susceptible to the dopamine rush of both gaming and the improper test taking and also susceptible to being easily misled by Max Ringle.”
I told the judge I had nothing further, and Bolden did the same. Then, having fired every arrow in my quiver and praying that a few had crossed the moat and landed inside the government castle, I concluded, “The defense rests.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
The Night of All Nights
Melissa Gold . . .
Boys will be boys, Melissa thought, and Jake was the biggest boy of all.
Sitting on the back porch, flimsy clouds scurrying across a full moon, Jake and Kip were whooping it up over pizzas and beer. She thought Jake should be preparing his closing argument, but the boys kept praising her testimony, recounting the day’s events at such an excessive decibel level that at any moment, the City of Miami police might rappel down from cop choppers.
“Miller vs. Alabama!” Kip yelled.
“Oh, that look on Bolden’s face!” Jake exclaimed.
“And my poor, immature, impetuous brain,” Kip moaned.
“Subjective, my ass!” Jake harrumphed.
“Okay, guys,” she said. “All I did was tell the truth.”
“And we love you for it,” Jake declared.
Melissa had thought Jake’s trial strategy had been too risky. But hiding the ball had baited Bolden into banging “subjectivity” like a steel drum. Then, certain she knew the answer, asking the ultimate question—it’s all subjective, right?—and getting gobsmacked.
But really, just how much had been gained?
Melissa didn’t know, and Jake wasn’t saying. The government still had overwhelming evidence of guilt. Maybe that alone had justified Jake’s risky maneuver, but to Melissa, it had felt desperate. To use one of
Jake’s football analogies, a Hail Mary.
“You gotta be fearless in court without being reckless,” Jake had told her one night earlier.
But these days, did he know one from the other?
So, she chose her words carefully and spoke them gently. “Shouldn’t you be preparing your summation?”
“Darlin’, I’ve been preparing since voir dire. In fact, I’ve been preparing all my life.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
He pointed at his right temple. “It’s all up here.”
“Are you planning something for the three Trekkies on the jury? Will Dr. Spock make a cameo appearance?”
“No spoilers. And, I don’t want to over prepare. Bolden goes first. I have to be flexible enough to respond.”
“Okay, then.”
She held eye contact with him, and after a moment, he asked, “What?”
“Ray Pincher called. He said he’s been leaving you messages, but you haven’t responded.”
“Did George Washington return Benedict Arnold’s calls? Did Jesus reply to Judas’s emails?”
She rolled her eyes. “Ray said he had some information for you.”
Jake grunted his disinterest.
“So, what now?” she asked.
“I’m gonna watch some TV.”
“Really?”
Melissa pictured Margaret Bolden and her team of young lawyers and paralegals hunkered down in their conference room deep into the night. Pitching ideas, choosing vicious verbs and pithy adjectives that could be shoveled onto Kip until he was buried under a pile of calumny. Gravediggers!
So why wasn’t Jake working? Shouldn’t he at least be scribbling notes on a legal pad?
“I just want to relax,” Jake said. “Trust me. I have a method.”
Ten minutes later, Jake and Kip were sprawled out in the den, watching a documentary about stand-up comics. From the kitchen, she heard George Carlin’s voice: “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Both her boys laughed uproariously.
How could Jake be so loose and lackadaisical on this of all nights!
Closing arguments were tomorrow morning. Then she realized what was happening, what Jake was thinking, and she felt tears welling. This could be the last night for years that uncle and nephew could drink beer, eat pizza, and watch television together. Given Jake’s condition, perhaps forever. Jake wasn’t going to spend this night scribbling notes on a legal pad. He was going to spend it enjoying life with the boy he’d raised as his own son.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Play it Again, Bolden
Margaret Bolden spent a few minutes thanking the jurors for leaving their jobs, their families, their pets, and their hobbies to fight Miami’s abysmal traffic and do their civic duty as responsible citizens. Smiling warmly, Bolden conveyed the impression that they were the best gosh-darned folks in town and stopped just short of inviting them all home for dinner.
Bolden told the jury that this was the most important of all the cases stemming from a “nationwide criminal conspiracy that wreaked havoc on our system of higher education.”
I thought that was a bit overstated, there being roughly fifty cheaters out of sixteen million college students.
“This is a story about two men,” she explained. “One, Max Ringle, is the sorcerer. The other, the defendant Chester ‘Kip’ Lassiter, is the sorcerer’s apprentice. The sorcerer has already pled guilty to his crimes. Today, his apprentice must be held to account for his criminal conduct.”
Then, for what seemed like an eternity but was actually twenty-three minutes, she replayed highlights of the government’s most damning surreptitious recordings. Oh, how the government loves recordings. FBI agents are born eavesdroppers and federal prosecutors are born tattletales. There was Ringle on tape saying that Kip was the “brains of the operation, the mastermind,” and Kip not denying it. There was Kip, going on about the different ways he took exams as an imposter. And there were parents telling Kip just what score they needed for young Chad or Brandi, afflicted with their fabricated diagnoses of ADHD.
Listening to Kip—in the prime of his unrepentant, arrogant, smartass, cashmere hoodie phase—was just as brutal this time around. A punch in the gut for me, and the most damning evidence against Kip. If you include opening statement, this was the third time the jury had heard the recordings. Bolden apparently believed the old saw about trial practice: Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you’ve told them.
She summarized Agent Wisniewski’s testimony, the parents’ testimony, and the Stanford admissions director’s testimony. She spent twenty minutes hitting the high points of Ringle’s testimony, including his insidious statement that Kip had “the nerves of a lion tamer and the heart of a cat burglar.”
Bolden then took a detour to avoid the sinkhole of her star witness’s character. “You’re going to hear defense counsel attack Max Ringle. Sure, I wish we could have brought a priest or a rabbi or the Nobel Peace Prize–winner to testify. But that’s not how criminal cases are made. I could recite hundreds of major trials involving organized crime, or terrorism, or the Ku Klux Klan that were won only through the testimony of coconspirators.”
Then she focused her sights on our defenses. “What do you do,” Bolden asked, looking toward me, “when your client admits committing each and every act alleged in the indictment? You say, ‘Yes, but.'"
She waited a beat, then continued. “Yes, but he had a rough childhood. Yes, but he got addicted to video games. Yes, but he fell under the influence of Max Ringle. Yes, but he’s really the victim here.”
Another pause to let the jurors consider the weakness of our excuses.
“What defense counsel is saying is, ‘Yes, he did all these crimes, but feel sorry for him.’ But the court will instruct you that you must not let your feelings interfere with your judgment. In my opening statement, I told you that you cannot let your verdict be based on sympathy, and I remind you of that now.
“Defense counsel has done little more than appeal to your kind natures. The defendant had no father and a lousy mother. I’m sorry, but so have a lot of young men who didn’t become criminals. And you know what? The defendant caught a lucky break the day his mother left him with Jake Lassiter. I asked the defendant if Mr. Lassiter was a good father, and he said, ‘The best.’ And do you remember what else he said? ‘One of the reasons I feel so bad is that I let Uncle Jake down.’ That’s an acknowledgment of guilt. He told you he was guilty!”
Kip squirmed in his seat, almost imperceptibly. I silently clamped a hand on his forearm.
“The defendant had the good fortune to be raised by defense counsel,” Bolden went on. “He had the good fortune to attend the prestigious and expensive Biscayne-Tuttle school. Maybe you’ve seen their sailing team boats in the bay. The defendant lived a life of privilege in a stable home with love and support and was given every chance in the world.
“He had the good fortune to be blessed with a special mind, and with that comes a special obligation. Do something positive with your God-given gifts. He was admitted to an Ivy League university, all expenses paid. But the defendant blew that opportunity. He got in trouble, got expelled. The defendant is not a victim, but rather a very fortunate young man who has no one but himself to blame for the trouble he is in today.”
Bolden turned to face Kip at the defense table. That brought the jurors’ eyes along, too. Kip sat impassively but had one involuntary motion, his jaw muscles clenching. Well, who could blame him?
“Now, I don’t know if the defendant has some obscure learning disorder,” Bolden continued. “But I do know that he’s way too smart to have been tricked into criminal conduct. Would a reasonable person, a person of even average intellect, have believed Max Ringle when he said that bribery and fraud were lawful? And shouldn’t we hold this brilliant young man to, at the very least, the standard of a reasonable person? Would such a per
son believe that defrauding universities of their admissions slots was just fine with law enforcement? Of course not.
“Then there’s the excuse that the defendant craved that dopamine rush. Well, that doesn’t justify a drug addict robbing the corner grocery and it doesn’t excuse the defendant in this case. Dopamine rush? Oh, please! How about a cash rush? That’s what the defendant was all about.
“Millions of kids play billions of hours of video games and don’t end up as conspirators in a crime ring. Fortnite and Red Dead Redemption are not the villains here. Video games did not commit these crimes. The defendant did.
“Kip Lassiter became a criminal freely and knowingly, and, judging from the recordings, quite happily. You heard him boasting about his illegal actions, as if he were playing a trick on the world. Yes, Max Ringle was the sorcerer, but Kip Lassiter was the sorcerer’s apprentice.”
That being the government’s theme, in case we’d forgotten.
Bolden ran through a few of the instructions the jury would hear from the judge and closed with a salute to the flag, amber waves of grain, and bombs bursting in air.
“Under the laws of this nation,” she said, solemnly, “this defendant was entitled to have his day in court. He got that. He was entitled to have a fair trial by an impartial jury. He got that, too. That’s all he’s entitled to. And since the government has proven his guilt beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt, the United States of America is entitled to guilty verdicts on each and every count. Thank you.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Rewrite, Get Me Obit
With fifteen minutes left in the lunch recess, I paced the corridor, gathering stray thoughts for closing argument when I heard my name called. I turned to find a young man in an ill-fitting brown plaid sport coat over a green T-shirt, faded jeans, and dirty sneakers. He had a pen over one ear and held a small notepad in one hand. “Mr. Lassiter, I’m from the Miami Herald.”