A Perfect World
I approached the intersection of
Calle Ocho
and Twelfth Avenue in Little Havana, intending to turn left and head north. But the city
padres
had changed the street signs again and, momentarily confused, I missed the turn to the bridge on my way to the sadly misnamed Justice Building.
Oh, we
seek
justice in the building, just as we seek holiness in a house of worship. Both goals are difficult to achieve and seldom witnessed by mortals. Which is not to say that the building doesn't dispense "law" by the bucketful. Law is the product that spews out of the building's courtrooms, hundreds of times each day. Guilt, innocence, suspended sentences, pretrial intervention,
nolle prosequi
, time served, mistrials, adjudication withheld. The product comes in a dozen brands. But justice is an ideal, a vague concept we strive for but can barely define, much less master.
Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the Holy Virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass-produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.
So there I was, going farther east on
Calle Ocho
, or Eighth Street, or Olga Guillot Way, according to the new sign that threw me. I don't know why the bolero singer got the honor, unless it was because a few blocks away, Celia Cruz, the salsa singer, has the same street named for her, and a few blocks from that, so do Carlos Arboleya, Felipe Vails, and Loring Evans. If that's not baffling enough, a stretch of Twelfth Avenue, near here, is called Ronald Reagan Avenue.
Our city and county commissioners, ever desirous of licking the boots of their constituents, once named a street Leomar Parkway after a major campaign contributor who turned out to be a major drug dealer. There are streets named for Almirante Miguel Grau, a Peruvian admiral in the 1800s, and Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general. There's even one named for José Canseco, the baseball slugger, who has been fined repeatedly for driving his sports cars at more than one hundred miles an hour. Maybe a lane at the Daytona Speedway would be more appropriate.
Eventually, I doubled back and found General Máximo Gómez Boulevard—no, I don't know who the hell he was—and made my way north to the Justice Building, which houses criminals and other miscreants such as judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.
It was just before nine A.M. when I slipped into a parking place next to the jail. Overhead, prisoners were being taken across an enclosed walkway directly into holding cells on the fourth floor. Chrissy would already be inside, having arrived by bus from the Women's Detention Center a few blocks away.
I hurried down a narrow alley toward the back entrance of the building, nearly running into Curly Hendry, who was leaning on his rolling trash bin. Curly, who was bald, had spent several stretches in the county jail, plus a couple of years upstate. I represented him once, when cops found an ATM machine all trussed up in a towing chain, the other end of which was attached to a winch on his heavy-duty Dodge pickup. These days, he pushed a broom for the county.
"
Qué pasa
, Curly?"
"Don't talk no Espan-oley to me, Jake. I'm just a cracker who's got to clean up after them crazy island fuckers." He pointed into the trash bin and held his nose. "So far this morning, three dead chickens and a goat's head. Now what's this?"
He bent down and looked at a cake with frosted icing.
"To sweeten a judge's disposition," I told him.
"Damn voodoo."
"More like Santería."
"Makes me want to move to Georgia. Yesterday, had some damn broken eggs out here. The sun got to 'em before I did, could smell 'em all the way to Hialeah."
"They're to make the case collapse."
He scooped up the cake and tossed it into the trash bin. "Last week, a dead lizard with its mouth tied shut."
"That's—"
"I know. To shut up a snitch."
"Right."
"So, Jake, what brings you out here with all these witch doctors and Third World types?"
"Bond hearing. Say, Curly, you find anything that'll get me bond in a murder one?"
"To hell with cakes and lizards, Jake. Just pray for a judge whose brother-in-law is a bondsman who needs the work. If not, slip some Ben Franklins in an envelope and call it a campaign contribution."
"Curly, you know I don't play the game that way."
He went back to his broom. "No damn wonder I did twenty-seven months at Avon Park."
"If a bad childhood were an excuse for murder, our prisons would be empty," Abe Socolow said gravely. "I'm quite sure every inmate on death row had a perfectly atrocious childhood. Far worse than that of Ms. Christina Bernhardt in her oceanfront mansion, I daresay."
He daresay?
Abe Socolow had a tendency toward pomposity, but for a prosecutor, he was almost human. A little rigid, a little self-righteous, but honest and fair. He was tall and lean and sallow and preferred undertaker-black suits with white shirts and blood-red ties. His cuff links were miniature silver handcuffs.
At the moment, Honest Abe was ridiculing my assertion that the state had overcharged my client, going for murder instead of manslaughter.
"Recovered memories," Socolow sniffed. "Posttraumatic stress disorder. Judge, these silver-tongued defense lawyers come up with more syndromes than a dog's got fleas."
Damn, it sounded like Abe had been talking to my granny. Either that or he was just trying to be folksy, something that didn't come naturally. Judge Myron Stanger peered down from the bench, his eyes hidden behind tinted glasses so we couldn't tell when he dozed off. He had a bulbous nose lined with tiny blue veins and a white fringe of hair on his egg-shaped head. His Honor was fond of the Bolivar brand of Cuban cigars, and at this moment was chewing on a cold Corona Gigantes, in violation of both courtroom protocol and the federal Embargo Act. The judge was flanked by the American flag and the Florida flag. A set of
Florida Statutes
sat, still in shrink wrap, on his desk. Only a few spectators were on the long wooden benches that resembled church pews. I was sitting at the defense table on a heavy mahogany chair whose brown leather seat had cracked with age and taken on the shininess of cheap trousers.
Abe rambled on, "Battered-spouse syndrome supposedly lets a woman kill her husband, though she's in no immediate danger. A white man guns down two black teenagers and says he's been traumatized by urban survival syndrome and ought to be excused. A woman who shot her husband on Super Bowl Sunday says she suffers from football widow syndrome. A fellow charged with tax evasion has failure-to-file syndrome. Abused-child syndrome, black rage, mob psychosis—where's it going to end? I ask Your Honor, where will it all end?"
Judge Stanger seemed startled, perhaps wondering if Socolow really wanted an answer. Then he said, "Let's not argue the case today, gentlemen. This is merely a bond hearing, and under
Arthur
v.
State
, the defense has the burden of showing that the proof is not great and that a presumption of guilt is not evident. As I understand the proffered testimony of Dr. Schein and Mr. Lassiter's argument, there's no factual dispute. The defendant shot her father."
The judge nodded toward the defense table, where Chrissy, in a jailhouse smock, sat next to me. We'd get her dressed up prim and proper by the time a jury was called. She seemed dazed, out of place, in the controlled chaos of the courtroom. To those of us who work there, it's a second home. Same for my customers, those recidivists who know as much law as I do. But to someone from east of the highway, as we call those who grew up near the ocean, it's a frightening new world.
The judge waved his giant cigar in my direction and said, "While conceding that the shooting occurred, Mr. Lassiter argues that the defendant may not have had the requisite criminal intent to be charged with premeditated murder. Is that about it?"
"All the elements of the crime having been established, the grand jury indicted her for first-degree murder," Socolow said, raising his hands, as if it were out of his control.
"The grand jury would parade naked down Biscayne Boulevard if Abe asked them to," I piped up.
"Your Honor," Socolow said, shooting me a murderous glance, "even assuming all this psychiatric mumbo-jumbo is true, it's not a defense. Just because criminal behavior is
caused
doesn't mean it's
excused
."
I got to my feet and approached the lectern for the second time that morning. "May it please the court," I said, in the lawyer's traditional line of fealty, "Mr. Socolow ignores the fact that we have raised a substantial issue as to one of the elements of the crime. If the state cannot prove intent, it cannot secure a conviction. The court must instruct the jury that, to be found guilty of murder one, my client must have killed the decedent with premeditation, which the law defines in these terms . . ." I picked up the manual of jury instructions that Judge Stanger would eventually read to the jurors. " 'Killing with premeditation is killing after consciously deciding to do so. The decision must be present in the mind at the time of the killing, and the intent to kill must be formed before the killing.' "
I put down the manual and did a little sidestep toward the defense table, forcing the judge's gaze toward the lovely defendant. She looked as helpless and innocent as an angel without wings. "If Christina Bernhardt was suffering from flashbacks or blackouts which coincided with the shooting, she made no conscious decision to shoot the gun and could not be guilty of murder one. If she's been overcharged, bond should be granted."
"Blackouts," the judge mused. "Flashbacks. Is that your case, Jake?"
Using my given name. A little familiarity, asking me to cut the bullshit and level with the court. What's the trial going to be all about? I had already summarized Dr. Schein's opinion, right down to Sigmund Freud's view of repression as a defense mechanism used to suppress psychic trauma.
"That is the proffer of Dr. Schein's testimony," I said, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Socolow shoot me a look. He doesn't miss much, and he didn't miss this. I hadn't answered the question.
Just before the bailiff called our case, I had huddled with Chrissy in the jury room, our courthouse being woefully insufficient in meeting space. "I look terrible," she said, fiddling with her hair, which was held back in a ponytail with a simple rubber band.
"You look beautiful," I told her, violating another of my rules, the one about maintaining a professional distance from the clients. I don't go fishing with the guy customers and I don't go to bed with the gals.
"Am I going to testify?" she asked.
"Not today. But before we go in there, I need to tell you something. Dr. Schein is prepared to testify that you may have suffered a blackout before the shooting, that you were in a trancelike state when you shot your father."
She looked at me with those bright green eyes. "You're asking me a question, aren't you? Like, is that the way it happened?"
I held my breath and nodded.
"Do you want the truth?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
No
, I thought.
I can't handle the truth
.
"I didn't black out. I wasn't in a trance. I saw Daddy sitting there, so pleased with himself. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hear his screams. I wanted him to hurt as much as he had hurt me. But did I want to kill him? I don't know. I really don't."
"Doesn't matter. If you understood that your actions created a strong likelihood of death, you're guilty of premeditated murder."
Her eyes opened wider, seemed to ask a pleading question:
What are we going to do
? I didn't know. I came into the courtroom drowning in my dilemma, the ethical conflict of a lawyer who owes the highest duty of loyalty to his client and a somewhat more vague duty to the legal system.
Now, I was doing a high-wire act, portraying our defense in terms of "if." If there had been a blackout, blah, blah, blah. At trial, it becomes more difficult. I wouldn't be able to put Dr. Schein on the stand to testify to something Chrissy couldn't corroborate. And now that she told me she had known very well what she was doing, I couldn't let her take the stand to say she had blacked out, even if she wanted to. I've never lied to the court or let a client do it. I like to win, but I like to win fair and square. I know it's old-fashioned, but that's the way I am. I like the low-scoring, smash-mouth, frozen-field Big Ten game, not the lah-de-dah, point-a-minute passing of touch football in the SEC. I hate guys who jitterbug in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. Celebration of self, dirty dancing, and taunting opponents have no place in the game I love.
When I was at Penn State, Joe Paterno ordered us to hand the ball to the official should we ever be so fortunate as to cross the goal line while carrying the leather spheroid. "Act as if you've been there before," he said. I hadn't, but in a game against Pitt, I blocked a punt in the end zone, not with my hands, but with my head. The ball stuck in my face mask and gave me a concussion. I thought I should have had a touchdown, but the officials ruled it a safety because I never had possession of the ball . . . my helmet did. It took two equipment managers to get the ball out of the mask, and I saw double for a week. But I had scored. Two points for my career.
"So, to paraphrase your argument," Judge Stanger said, spitting out a few fibers of Cuban tobacco, "you're seeking bond as if this were a second-degree or manslaughter case."
"That's what they should have charged," I responded, "but let there be no mistake, Your Honor. Our plea is
not
guilty. We'll be seeking an instruction under 782.03 on excusable homicide."