There had been little mention of Russell Moore at Saturday night’s dinner. His acts shamed us all, but he’d been arrested back in June, so the nine-days-wonder element had long since dissipated.
When I got to my own courtroom, I was dismayed to find another white officer of the court and his wife standing before me, red-faced and repentant. Marvin Pittman was a town of Makely policeman, but the SBI had accidently discovered that he was fighting cocks out on his farm. An undercover agent on the trail of some illegal Mexicans suspected of running drugs through the area had gotten himself accepted enough to go along for a drug buy out in the country.
In addition to rounding up six men dealing the drugs, they had stumbled across the social aspects of the buy— one of the largest cockfighting arenas they’d ever seen. Inside Pittman’s barn were four pens, bleachers, and an announcer’s booth. Pittman’s wife and fourteen-year-old son were even running a snack bar on the side, selling hot burritos and cold beers. Some forty people were arrested there that night and issued criminal summonses.
In addition to dozens of razor-sharp spurs, leather thongs, and other cockfighting accessories, the SBI had confiscated a half-kilo of coke, eighty-nine hundred dollars in betting money, solid gold prize jewelry worth another couple of thousand, and twenty-six gamecocks.
The gamecocks were currently residing at the county animal shelter.
The SBI conceded that the Pittmans had nothing to do with drugs and were technically unaware of the side action. All the same, cockfighting is illegal and they were charged with animal cruelty, selling beer and food without a license, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Unfortunately, cruelty to chickens is only a Class 2 misdemeanor in North Carolina. Dogfighting is a felony, but not cockfighting. And just for the record, a second offense of animal cruelty other than chickens is a felony, but a second offense of chicken cruelty is still a misdemeanor. Where are North Carolina’s chicken lovers on this? Why aren’t they up in arms?
Even after all the charges were combined, a thousand-dollar fine and a suspended sentence were about the most I could give him since he didn’t have any prior convictions.
The wife had a prior DWI, but feeling sorry for their teenage son I suspended any jail time for her on condition that she contribute one hundred hours of work at the county animal shelter and take her son with her for at least fifty of those hours.
After that, it was almost a relief to be presented with Bullard Morris, a fifty-year-old black man who had appeared before me more than once since I came to the bench. Bull Morris might have been shiftless, but he was usually amiable and philosophical when arrested for shoplifting or public drunkenness. This time, though, he’d been charged with disorderly conduct, and the police officer who testified against him said he’d been loud and profane and belligerently ready to fight when the officer was arresting Morris’s roommate for possession of stolen property.
After he’d pleaded guilty as charged, I said, “That’s not like you, Mr. Morris. What happened?”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. Usually I wake up sober. I reckon I’m not real good at waking up drunk.”
I gave him court costs and a suspended sentence on condition that he go for yet another alcohol assessment at Mental Health. “You don’t get your drinking under control, you’re liable to wake up shot some morning,” I lectured him.
He earnestly agreed, but we both knew we’d be meeting like this again.
A bailiff approached the bench and told me that they were ready for my testimony in superior court, so I recessed for an hour, left my robe hanging in chambers and slipped into a deep green cropped jacket, and hurried down to the larger courtroom, adjusting the collar of my white shirt as I went.
Zack Young, the best criminal defense attorney in our district and certainly the one I’d retain if I were ever in serious trouble, had agreed to defend Russell Moore. According to courthouse gossip, Zack planned to argue mitigating circumstances—that the embezzlement began as an oversight error in bookkeeping and then escalated when Russell’s widowed mother developed a leaky heart valve and had no insurance for the needed operation. As for the forgery, well, that was just Russell’s well-known empathy for people in embarrassing situations, an empathy developed when he was a gawky hayseed who was jeered at because he drove back and forth to his night classes at law school in an old rattletrap that was held together with duct tape and baling wire.
According to Zack, he couldn’t bear to see his client humiliated and reduced to commuting to his white-collar job by motorbike.
As I entered the courtroom by the side door, I took the nearest seat on a bench directly behind the defense table. I couldn’t see Russell’s face as Zack Young finished up with the witness ahead of me, but he seemed to be staring straight ahead. Zack is good, but I had a feeling that Russell knew he was staring at a few years of hard time. Juries aren’t particularly sympathetic to attorneys who bilk their clients.
My testimony seemed to be part of the prosecution’s clearing out of the underbrush before they got into the embezzlement part. Brandon Frazier was ADA and his questions were straightforward when I took the stand.
“Did you remember this case, Judge Knott?”
“Not specifically.”
“When did it come to your attention?”
“When the attorney of another DWI with a similar suspended sentence petitioned for the same judgment as I’d supposedly given Mr. Moore’s client.”
“What did you do then?”
“I had a clerk pull the record.”
“Why was that?”
“When someone to whom I’ve given a suspended sentence comes up again on the same charge, the original sentence is automatically activated. It would have been improper for me to give him limited privileges. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. That’s why I had the record pulled to see what was going on.”
“And yet your signature was on the form?”
“It had been signed with my name, but that wasn’t my signature.”
