Authors: Stephen Solomita
As I taped the new list to my desk, a single question began to pound like a woodpecker against the side of a rotting oak. If I, as prosecutor, judge, and sole juror, should find that Priscilla Sweet caused the deaths of Caleb Talbot and Julie Gill, what, if anything, was I prepared to do about it?
C
ARLO AND I WENT
head to head over the following two weeks in a series of bitter pre-trial conferences, Carlo proving himself as tenacious as ever. Arguing that any evidence of Byron’s abuse would be inflammatory, he fought to limit testimony to the incident that immediately preceded the killing, presenting written motions in support of his verbal arguments. Delaney shot Carlo down, point by point, as he was bound to do, but Carlo, unfazed, merely shifted his line of attack.
“If there’s to be no limit to the defendant’s ‘abuse excuse,’” he told Delaney, “then there should be no limit to the state’s right to present evidence of the defendant’s real motive. What we have here, Judge, is a falling out between drug dealers.”
As he went on, it became clear that Carlo not only wanted to present the jury with Priscilla’s felonious past, he wanted to present witnesses to whom Byron had complained about Priscilla’s skimming of the profits. I argued that these conversations were both hearsay and irrelevant. Priscilla Sweet, after all, hadn’t been charged with stealing her husband’s money. She’d been charged with killing him.
I don’t know if Carlo thought he could prevail on any of these points, but what struck me, as we argued, was that despite everything I still wanted to win. I wanted to crush Carlo Buscetta and the State of New York, and nothing could change that, not even the loss of the two people I loved most in the world. The fact, even stated baldly, didn’t mean that I’d forgotten Caleb and Julie in the intervening month. Or even that I was trying to forget. I still hadn’t returned to the apartment we’d shared and I didn’t intend to return. I still missed them terribly, still heard Julie’s voice from time to time, still glimpsed Caleb in the subway, on the streets, in crowded restaurants. Nevertheless, without doubt, I wanted to win.
Carlo waited until the last day to make his final move, his goal, undoubtedly, to give me as little time to prepare as possible. “While incarcerated,” he told Judge Delaney, “at the Rose Singer Jail on Rikers Island, the defendant made certain damaging admissions relating to her motive for committing this crime. We intend to present this witness in our case in chief.”
“Great,” I responded, “the defense employs medical and police reports to show motive, the prosecution employs felons and snitches.”
Delaney nodded once, then shrugged. He could not prevent the jailhouse rat from testifying. If he tried to exclude her, the credibility of witnesses being a problem for the jury, Buscetta would simply take the ruling to the Appellate Court and obtain a reversal.
“Any more business?” he asked, glaring at each of us in turn. “Are we ready at last?”
It was Friday, March 29. The trial was scheduled to begin on Monday, April 1, with a Mapp Hearing on my own motion to exclude evidence seized at Priscilla’s apartment.
“The state is ready,” Carlo replied.
I nodded agreement. “Yes, your Honor, the defense is ready.”
“You won on every point,” Priscilla told me that afternoon in Delaney’s chambers. “You were simply amazing.”
I’d asked for and gotten permission to confer with my client for ten minutes before she was taken back to Rikers Island. Ten minutes of freedom that had apparently gone to her head.
“The only victory here is the glimpse Carlo gave us of his case.” I didn’t bother to explain. We both knew I was talking about the snitch testimony. “By the way, do you know a woman named Margo Robertson?”
Beyond lighting a cigarette, Priscilla showed no reaction to the sudden change of subject. “Sure, I know her.”
“She’s a friend of yours, right? Not Byron’s. And she was also a customer?”
Priscilla stared at the match in her hand for a moment, then tossed it next to a well-chewed cigar butt in Judge Delaney’s ashtray. “Why don’t you just cut to the bottom line, Sid.”
“Margo’s gonna testify against you. That’s what I hear on the Lower East Side. She took a bad bust a couple of weeks ago and she wants somebody else to do her time.”
“Do you know what she’s going to say?”
“What I think she’ll say is that you were stealing from Byron and he knew it and you killed him so you wouldn’t have to give the money back.”
“Mutt versus mutt? Is that the way of it, Sid?”
“That’s right. A swearing contest between villains. Except that we have all the physical evidence on our side.”
I had dinner in the office that night, a working dinner with Rebecca and my paralegal, Janet Boroda, during which we studied elaborate questionnaires filled out by a pool of two hundred prospective jurors. Janet Boroda was very young, very intelligent, and eager to a fault. She and Rebecca debated the minutiae while I, apart from answering direct questions, observed in silence. Aside from eliminating obviously prejudiced jurors (which Delaney would do in any event), my only goal was to put genuine New Yorkers on the panel. I wanted individuals who’d grown up in the city and I didn’t give a damn for their religion, race, or gender. I’d treated hundreds of jurors to post-trial dinners, questioning them closely, and what I’d discovered (and later used to my advantage) was a general anger at the disruption to their lives caused by a long trial. They resented any delay, from overlong opening and closing statements to nitpicking technical objections and frequent bench conferences. Many of them had attempted to avoid jury duty altogether and wanted only to put it behind them; others had walked naively into the pit. In either case, they were looking for someone to blame, the judge, the prosecution, the defense, anybody.
Carlo Buscetta was a perfect candidate for that blame. Though I knew he’d be compulsively thorough in his tight-ass way, and absolutely ruthless, I didn’t believe he could disguise his ugly personality for the length of a major trial. Especially if I, while appearing to move the case forward, provoked him by asking questions to which he could make technical objections.
I slept well that night, dropping off almost as soon as my head found the pillow, and by six the following morning, as the sun rose over the projects along the East River, I was up and working. Now that the public end of the battle was about to begin, I experienced a familiar mix of rising tension and narrowed concentration. The courtroom was the arena, the boxing ring; the outside world existed only to witness the combat.
The phone calls started before seven, continued one every ten minutes until my secretary, Wendy Houseman, showed up at eight and I stopped keeping track. By then, I’d managed to take a shower and don my armor, a conservatively cut blue suit over a white shirt and a muted red tie. I’d even found time, between phone calls, to clip the hair in my nose and ears, tuck a white handkerchief into my breast pocket.
“You look beautiful, Sid,” Wendy decided after a careful inspection. “A lawyer looks that good, he can’t lose.”
“Yeah, well we always have that edge on the prosecutors. They don’t get paid enough to afford a decent wardrobe.”
I left her with instructions to call every defense witness on a list compiled by Rebecca, let them know it was time to get ready, that they’d be called upon to testify in a week or so. “Anybody you can’t locate,” I said as I shrugged into my coat, “I wanna know about it. Ditto for anybody who seems reluctant.”
It was still a few minutes short of nine o’clock when I arrived at the Criminal Court Building, but long lines had already formed outside both Centre Street entrances. Searches were mandatory for all visitors, including the press. Pockets had to be emptied, bags and briefcases examined; every individual walked through a metal detector. The process was slow and demeaning, as it was undoubtedly meant to be.
As an officer of the court, I, on the other hand, was entitled to stroll through a side door and go my way unmolested. Or, I would have been if a bank of reporters hadn’t had the doorway blocked. They shouted questions, thrust microphones and video cameras in my face. In another time, with another client, I would have made a carefully prepared speech. As it was, I limited myself to a terse declaration of my client’s innocence as I forced my way through.
Inside, I was met by two burly court officers. Though court officers, like most other cops, have little use for defense attorneys, this pair greeted me respectfully.
“We’re your escort,” the older of the two, Sergeant Mason according to his name tag, explained. “In case you want to avoid the reporters.” When I looked over my shoulder at the mob outside the building, he continued. “There’s more upstairs, but we’ve established a press area on the south side of the building, so if you take the north elevators you could get to the courtroom without speaking to them.”
I nodded my thanks, followed the pair up to Trial Part 31 on the eleventh floor. The case had been moved there from Part 71, Delaney’s turf, ostensibly because Part 31 was the largest courtroom in the building. By happy coincidence, it had also been renovated within living memory and wouldn’t disgrace the city in the eyes of out-of-town reporters.
The move was extremely unusual, but it wasn’t the only accommodation made in the name of public scrutiny. Ordinarily, I would have had to confer with my client in the holding pens. For the duration of this trial, however, the small hearing room adjoining Part 31 would serve as my private office. A court officer would be stationed outside the locked hallway entrance, not only to make sure Priscilla didn’t try to escape, but to guarantee our privacy.
My client was already present when Sergeant Mason unlocked the door to let me in, along with Janet Boroda and Rebecca Barthelme. Priscilla was wearing a white dress with a flowing skirt; the collar was so high it might have been a choker. A small pin, constructed with bits of colored glass in the shape of a butterfly, gleamed above her right breast.
“Very nice,” I said. “But I’m not sure white is what we want to emphasize here.”
“Tomorrow I’ll wear
kente
cloth,” Priscilla answered. “Over a Malcolm X t-shirt.”
Her response was amusing enough to have drawn a smile in happier times. As it was, I simply nodded, then said, “We’re going with a warts-and-all defense, Priscilla. Fairy princess just won’t cut it.”
Before she could reply, Isaiah Hazelton came through the side door leading to Delaney’s courtroom. He nodded to Rebecca, then handed me the prosecution’s witness list.
“Right off the press, Sid. Get ’em while they’re hot.”
I led him to the door, shook his hand, fired a parting shot. “I got a pair of Ben Franklins says Carlo doesn’t let you cross-examine my client.”
Carlo’s witness list, as I’d predicted, was short; Carlo was going with a bare-bones prosecution. On the murder charge, he would prove that Byron was seated, that he was extremely drunk, that Priscilla pulled the trigger; he would infer that she’d loaded the gun in advance, that Byron couldn’t defend himself, much less attack her. For the drug charge, he would need only to demonstrate that the cocaine was actually cocaine and not powdered milk.
Of course, that wouldn’t be the end of it. After Rebecca presented our defense, Carlo would have an opportunity to call rebuttal witnesses, witnesses already chosen, already coached. What he didn’t have to do is reveal the names of those rebuttal witnesses to the defense. He could hold them back, arrange any number of painful surprises.
“You recognize this name?” Rebecca asked Priscilla. “Kaisha Norton?”
“No. I’ve never heard of her, but she must be the snitch Buscetta mentioned on Friday.” Priscilla leaned back against the bench. We were sitting in the gallery of a very small courtroom, just a few rows of benches in front of a tiny well. The room was used exclusively for motion hearings.
“And you never met her?” Rebecca asked. “Never spoke to her?” The implication, apparent in Rebecca’s skeptical tone, was that Carlo wouldn’t be putting Ms. Norton on the stand unless at some point she and Priscilla had shared the same cell.
Priscilla lit a cigarette, brushed a few strands of dark hair away from her face. “Before I went into protective custody,” she explained, “I was held in an open housing area. Imagine a room with fifty bunks, two rows of twenty-five set three feet apart and lined up head-to-head.” She paused for a moment, then smiled. “Now imagine fifty felons sleeping in those beds at night, walking around the housing area during the day. What do you think the chances are that I’d tell one of those assholes I had money hidden on the outside? Or, if I did, somebody wouldn’t put a shank to my throat, convince me to give it up?” She held the cigarette aloft, blew at the tip, then turned to look at me. “I couldn’t have told Kaisha Norton or anybody else that I killed Byron over money because there wasn’t any money. Not then, not before, not now, not ever.”
E
VERYTHING STOPPED WHEN THE
four of us, Priscilla, Janet, Rebecca, and myself, entered Judge Delaney’s packed courtroom a few minutes later. We walked through the hush as through a still photograph, forming a solemn procession, our heads slightly bowed. I remember glancing at Priscilla as I held out a chair. She was smiling her familiar smile, one corner of her mouth pulled slightly upward, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips. Whatever else might be at stake, this was her moment, a fact everybody present, even her enemies, even her lawyer, was forced to acknowledge. Priscilla Sweet was the only necessary player in this drama.
Ten minutes later, Carlo called Alfonso Rodriguez to the stand and Priscilla Sweet’s day in court began with a preliminary hearing on our motions to suppress the gun and the cocaine, a hearing at which Delaney would serve as judge and jury. Formal jury selection would follow immediately afterward.
Guided firmly by Carlo, Rodriguez testified that while on routine patrol he’d been instructed by his dispatcher to investigate a 911 report of shots fired inside the Sweet apartment. Eight minutes later, Priscilla had opened the door in response to his knock and uttered a single word after he explained his reason for being there and requested permission to enter the premises: “Okay.” Upon discovering Byron, Rodriguez had left Priscilla with his partner, then checked Byron for any sign of life. Finding none, he’d noted a revolver lying on a table near the body, but hadn’t touched it. Instead, he’d gone quickly through the apartment in a fruitless search for another victim or a perpetrator, then withdrawn into the hallway, called for help, and established a perimeter for the crime scene outside the only entrance to the premises.