The Queens Supreme Court building, on the outside, is an anonymous building that could as easily house a school or insurance company as a courthouse. Inside, there are a few stabs at grandeur in the courtrooms, but this building mainly attends to its largely sad business: making the wheels of criminal prosecution and defense run as smoothly as can be desired.
And our peripatetic crew, the Queens subset of RW1, had an assignment: have a look at the innards of just one case, preferably a homicide (Dale was remarkably insistent on that fact). A recon mission by just two of us, on Friday, had produced a sort of Delphic mystery, in which officer after bureaucrat claimed that the entire Queens court system was about the shut down for the high holidays. That claim turned out to be largely accurate, but we managed yesterday to slip in before Rosh Hashanah turned every civil servant (and NY City parent)'s schedule to mud. "Go down to K-6," uttered one of the oracles on the seventh floor, "they're having summations and charges."
Thus were we in at the end of a trial in which every single New York City trope - race, class, class consciousness (which is different, says the woman who knows Marcuse only from the mutterings of others), gender, guns, religion - danced through the behavior of two defense attorneys, a young district attorney, a judge who served in the NY State Assembly under Nelson Rockefeller and two defendants, once fast friends, who didn't look at each other during the trial. I'll not use their names in this post - and if they've not been published yet, I'll likely not do it if I post the story.
But this is not the story. This is the diary. I will tell you that we had a verdict that day: see if you can tell, from the descriptions here, who emerged, relatively, the winner.
As the door opens, the family fills courtroom: from tiny girl in knee-high boots and her young slim parents; a pair of middle-aged women in matching frizzy ringlets; a guy with dreads and a huge suitcase, who I first think is a lawyer. The right side of the courtroom almost filled.
At the defense table, one lawyer is around my age, chubby, hyper: in the hallway, he introduced himself to some of the family members and muttered strategy, and throughout the pre-trial prep keeps updating the family members about what's going on. "They're discussing scheduling..the last witness hasn't arrived...."
The other defense lawyer, sitting at the other end of the table, runs his hand over his hair to calm it and obscure his bald spot, as if he were going to be on TV. He drums his fingers on the table: calmer on the surface than the other, he's a performer waiting to unleash. He also makes eye contact with joshes with the slim South Asian woman across the aisle, even though she's the DA. “While we’re waiting…can I read that?”
This stage goes on for what feels like forever. with lots and lots of muttering across the aisle.
Lawyers must cultivate extreme patience, like revolutionaries. The families look into space blankly, as if trying to pretend to themselves that they’re not really here, that this is not happening. The jury, which at that point includes alternates and has 3 Black men,
6 White men, 4 women (2 Asian, 1 black one white) and 2 Hispanic men,
looks tired as they stare forward.
Finally the bailiff calls us all to order, and the two defendants: young thirtyish men, one with a gym build (his neck alone has more muscle than my entire body) and the other slim, nervous, both in Italian suits and near-perfect shoes.
And before the summations, we get one last bit of testimony: a detective who recites, from memory, a statement he says was given by one of the defendants: out of context it's hard to understand, but it's kind of an exciting story. Rough approximation, also altered to blur identities:
"[Codefendant] and I were on our way to a security job in Long Island when he got a call saying that his brother in law was killed. He said, Whoever did this is gonna pay. We went back to his house and got the gun. We were told the guy who did it drova Lincoln Navigator, so we went to Brooklyn to look for him/ Then we went to [the brother in law's] house. "
One of the two defense attorneys - the hyper one, not the one busy fixing his bald spot earlier - gets up and challenges the detective: "You have no notes.. This is six months ago. How many hundreds of cases like this have you handled since?"
Unruffled, the detective says "About five."
Then we're on to the summations - and first we have the hair-conscious attorney, who gets up first and advises the jury: "This is NOT about what the district attorney keeps calling a "brutal murder." This is a case about a gun, and who had control of it." He mentions what the detective just said, and that it was his client- I'll call him Tommy -- who made that statement, which contradicts what he said two years ago, when first arrested on Valentine's Day. Back then, Tommy said said that it was his gun, and he'd got it from his home it because he was afraid someone would hurt the other guy, who I'll call Max. His buddy.
The attorney then goes on to weave a cohesive story about his client who he paints as childlike and vulnerable to the "controlling, manipulative, rich" Max. His client lives with his mother, he says, goes to church every Sunday, but is just a little slow. He therefore agreed, back then, to "take the rap for the gun" because Max, who was paying his lawyer at that point, said he'd take care of everything and see that Tommy didn't go to jail.
Only after a pretrial hearing, in which an attorney lifted a defaced shotgun and got him to identify it as his own, did Tommy begin to question whether things would turn out for him, and turned state's evidence. He asks the jury to consider that Tommy has no priors, while Max has a conviction.
The attorney goes on to discredit evidence that has been offered by the DA and the cops. The police say that the two drove into a crime scene past police tape: has that been proven? One cop says h sa a silver bullet on the floor of the car: "did it happen that way?" At which point the DA objects, a pattern that continues as the lawyer builds his case and tries to demolish hers.
But he then goes on to bolster part of her case: He describes Max as a "kingman," a powerful man who went to church with Tommy every week, who had all the ideas and gave Tommy jobs so he could control him. He describes Tommy's mom, getting worried when she didn't hear from him - "she wanted to know what he was doing for Valentine's Day." She called Max, who said "Tommy is doing something for me."
And in return, the attorney says, he hired an attorney who got Tommy to claim the gun was his. "Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a frame-up." He goes on to say that Tommy never touched that gun. He asks the jury to find Tommy guilty only of stupidity - of being manipulated by the powerful Max.
Then Max' lawyer, the hyper one, stands up and says simply: "Keep your eye on the ball." In staccato phrases, he sets about to establish reasonable doubt on both the D.A.'s story and that of Tommy's lawyer. Starting with the "kingman" thing: "Should a man be punished for being successful?" The only link they have between Max and the gun, he says, is this late-breaking statement from Tommy.
He then starts a litany of offered facts for which he says there is no proof: a silver bullet on the seat of Max' car, a set of IDs that claimed the two were bail bondsmen, a revenge motive. He describes Max as a strong figure who got Tommy to go to church, and who was so upset, when his brother-in-law was killed, that he asked Tommy to drive. But he doesn't tell it as a story: he throws out refutations at a clip that rivals my speaking pace, and begs the jury to realize there is MORE than reasonable doubt on both cases.
I'll post the DA's story, and the verdict, separately later. The whole summation process felt quite a bit like Rashomon; I also understand why the families didn't look at each other,couldn't.
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