it home, didn’t I?”
“But your car should have been at home,” I told him. “A suspended license means you can’t drive even if you’re completely sober.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know that, and that’s why I got my nephew to drive me to the ABC store. But on the way home, there was this roadblock up ahead, and Leon, he didn’t want to go through it. I don’t know why, so he just drove in the tobacco field and left me setting there. Well, it was only a half mile from my house and I had to get my car home, didn’t I? And I won’t going to drive on the highway. I was figuring to go through the fields once I got turned around.”
The trooper who’d pulled him, Ollie Harrold, testified that he was assisting in a license-check roadblock when he saw Mr. Samuelson’s Ford drive into a tobacco field about a hundred yards away. “The driver jumped out and ran through the field and disappeared. After maybe ten minutes, the person in the passenger seat got out and went around to the driver’s seat. It was almost stuck in the sand, but he kept rocking it till he got it backed out of the field and onto the road, and that’s when I went down and asked him for his license.”
Harrold also testified that he’d administered the Breathalyzer test and Mr. Samuelson had blown a point-oh- eight. Not so long ago, that would have been well under the legal limit. Not anymore, though. And under the required sentencing a Level One DWI meant a mandatory minimum of thirty days’ jail time.
“Your Honor?” said Harrold, who knew what sentence the old man was facing. “I know Mr. Samuelson, and I know he’s telling the truth about not intending to drive.”
A case like this one is precisely why I hate mandatory sentencing. Nothing left to the discretion of the judge except to decree guilt or innocence. My hands were tied.
The intent of mandatory sentencing is noble. It’s supposed to ensure that everybody will be treated roughly equally under the law. Black, white, brown, red, or yellow. Rich or poor. A Daughter of the American Revolution or a just-off-the-plane Nigerian immigrant. Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist. Almost no wiggle room for bigoted judges (think there aren’t any left?) to come down hard on some groups and easy on people just like themselves. As with most noble intentions, however, the law of unintended consequences always comes into play and here I was with Mr. Samuelson, who hadn’t meant to drive. If his superior hadn’t been out there on that roadblock that day, the patrolman would probably have found a way to get Mr. Samuelson and his car back home without anything official going down in the books.
Once he’d written the ticket, though, all the legalities were set inexorably into motion.
I could see the pleading in Harrold’s eyes for me not to do what the law required, and I leaned back in my chair to think of my options. I wasn’t helped by the throbbing that had begun on my right foot.
Even though they’re pretty and had cost more than I usually pay, the low-heeled navy shoes I’d chosen for the funeral were reminding me why I seldom wore them, funeral or no funeral. I’ve never had corns but I do have a rather prominent bony knob at the base of my big toe and some shoes rub me raw there if I wear them more than a couple of hours. I slipped my foot out to ease the pain and concentrated on Mr. Samuelson’s dilemma. Mine, too. Nothing would be served by sending an eighty-three-year-old man to jail for thirty days. He hadn’t deliberately gone out to break the law. If his nephew hadn’t left him with his ox in a ditch, so to speak—
A glimmer of possibility gleamed through the legal underbrush. A legal out no doubt inspired by the Book of Luke: “And which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day?”
I looked at Mr. Samuelson. “Sir, did you feel this was a real emergency?” I asked. “And that you had no other choices?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. I won’t going to leave my car there. Time I might could get somebody to fetch it, it’d be stripped down to the axles. They’s some bad people out here, Your Honor.”
“There is a legal term called the Doctrine of Emergency,” I said, “and it protects those who perform technically illegal acts during an emergency from the legal consequences of those acts. I hereby declare that Mr. Samuelson’s actions were covered by that doctrine. Case dismissed.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Harrold murmured quietly as he stepped down from the witness-box.
Tracy just shook her head and called her next case.
Hey, if it was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for the state of North Carolina.
I slipped my foot back into my shoe and that place at the base of my big toe protested. I decided then and there that these shoes weren’t going back into my closet. As soon as I got home, I was going to put them in the Goodwill box. Let somebody else wear them.
Somebody else?
One train of thought immediately coupled itself to another, and then another, till I had a whole line of freight cars pulling out of the station loaded with possibilities.
Well, damn!
Tracy moved into routine cases of excessive speed and seat belt violations, but I gave her only half my attention. The other half was chugging around the carnival lot as I remembered all I’d seen and heard these past few days. The things Tally and Dwight had told me, the things I’d gleaned from the Internet, the things I’d wondered about. All came together in such dovetailing clarity that it was all I could do to sit there and rule on these misdemeanors. I might not know why Braz was killed, but I had a pretty good idea why Polly Viscardi was.
While the ADA sorted through her shucks before calling the next case, I scribbled a note to Dwight and called the bailiff over. “Give this to Major Bryant, please, Mr. Overby. And if he’s not there, see if they can locate him?”
He nodded and went out, and for the next hour and forty-five minutes, I did my best to pay attention and dispense justice.
When I recessed at three for the afternoon break, Dwight was waiting outside in the hallway talking with Reid and my other former law partner, John Claude Lee. I’d’ve paid a nickel to have heard what Reid had to say to Dwight the first time they met after that Saturday morning sunrise surprise, but now was not the time to ask.
“You wanted to see me, Your Honor?” Dwight said formally.
