“If that opportunity presents itself, it’d be a mistake not to consider it.”
Nothing if not pragmatic, Lucy tells me she agrees, and I tell her I will be in touch again soon. There is no doubt in my mind about who runs things in the Cunningham family. His father, Dade told me, got to take off to drive up to the Alabama game, but his mother was the one he called to tell he wasn’t being allowed to play any more.
Ten minutes after I put the phone down, the phone rings again and I am asked if I can get down to Channel 4 for a live interview on the ten o’clock news to give my re action to the Chancellor’s decision. The caller, who identifies himself as an assistant producer, says, barely containing his fury, that I haven’t been breathlessly waiting by the phone for his call, that he has been trying to get me all night. Still in my underwear, I look at my watch. It is a quarter to ten, and I need a lot of work. I say I can’t make it but will give a statement. In a weary voice, he says go ahead, and I say I am disappointed and reaffirm my belief in Dade’s innocence.
On the ten o’clock news I watch as Coma Newby, the station’s newest anchor, chops my comment to one word “disappointed” and spends a good two minutes on the phone with Chancellor Henry, letting him pontificate about how educational values have been served.
Shit, I should have gone down there naked and demanded equal time.
I wait for the phone to ring after the news, but mercifully it is silent and I go to bed, unable to get out of my mind the words from an old song: “Mama said there’d be days like this. Mama said.”
“The problem-solving ability of the average two-and a-half-year-old child,” Steve Huddleston testifies in a booming, authoritative tone, “is not developed to such an extent that it can be assumed that she would know by climbing out of the tub she could avoid the hot water.”
The consternation registered on the faces of the guardian ad litem, Joe Heavener, the attorney appointed to represent the child, and the attorney for the Department of Human Services, Cassie McKenzie, is so obvious I have to resist the temptation to laugh. From my past experiences as a caseworker I know there is no time for preparation of these cases, no discovery of witnesses by the attorneys, and consequently no thinking about the crossexamination of experts, who almost never appear in juvenile court on behalf of typically indigent parents.
“Your Honor, I object,” Joe whines, pushing his big frame to a standing position.
“There’s no evidence the child in question is average. The witness admits he’s never seen her.”
Fighting the urge to lean on the podium in front of me, I turn to Judge Sloan.
“Your Honor, Glenetta’s doctor at St. Thomas has previously testified she was of average size and weight and seemed normally developed. Dr.
Huddleston has been qualified as an expert in child development and can testify about what he knows from the literature.”
Joe looks helplessly at Cassie, who shrugs as if to warn him not to make too big a deal over this. If this testimony can’t be kept out, the only course of action at the trial level is to make an objection and to act as if it is of no importance.
Until this moment the case for the Department of Human Services has been going more or less as planned. The photographs of the burned child have been enough to turn my stomach. After seeing the pictures, I marvel at the fact that the little girl is still breathing. The term “stocking and glove” burns does not adequately describe the discolored, cooked flesh in the photographs.
The treating physician at St. Thomas has testified that it was his opinion the burns occurred as a result of the child having been held down in a sitting position in about ten inches of water.
The only real hitch in the case has been the social worker’s failure to measure the water that was still standing in the tub when she arrived to investigate. As expected, a detective from the police department has testified that the heat of the water from the faucet coming into the tub is 140 degrees, which links up with the doctor’s statement that assuming a water temperature of 140 degrees a child could receive full and partial thickness burns after only five seconds. Steve, decked out in red suspenders and a polka-dotted blue bow tie over a pink shirt and blue suit, is allowed to step down after a few harmless questions from Joe and then Cassie. He plops down in the back of the courtroom to watch the rest of the trial. He may have second thoughts in the morning about what he has done, but now he seems proud to have come through unscathed and gives me a nod as if to say that now I owe him one.
Chastely outfitted in a teal pleated dress that comes well below her knees, Gina Whitehall makes a tearful witness on direct examination. The pleats emphasize rather than hide her already ample hips, but she is not modeling lingerie. One would never suspect she makes part of her living as a prostitute.
“I realized Glenetta didn’t have a towel and went downstairs to get one after I turned off the water and left her playing,” she says, her voice tremulous and soft.
“I stopped to get myself a glass of water, and that was when I heard her screaming.”
Here, the tears well up in her clear blue eyes. This isn’t quite the version we had rehearsed (she told me Glenetta didn’t have a clean towel, not that she didn’t have one at all), but in juvenile court not every attorney will pick up on the discrepancy between the story she is telling now and the statement she made to the police and to the social worker. If she is charged with a crime, the attorneys in the prosecuting attorney’s office will be swarming all over her.
I pause in my questioning to let the tears come. Her credibility here is everything.
“What happened then, Gina?” I ask, putting as much sympathy into my voice as I know how.
She brushes her eyes with her knuckles and continues in a low but intense tone.
“I ran upstairs and saw she had managed to turn the tap and I snatched her out of the water and went and called 911” I glance at Judge Sloan’s face. He is one of our younger judges with kids still in grade school. I am hoping he will remember what it is like to have small children bumping into corners of tables, running shoeless over hot-air vents, pulling pans off stoves. If you turn your head for a second, and all of us do, they have fallen or grabbed a pair of scissors from a table. I will remind him of this during my closing argument, but likely he will have made up his mind long before then. I can’t read his expression, but he is listening closely to Gina, and that is all I can ask. He has to be wondering what if he returns the child to her and he’s wrong, will this young woman do it again? He knows as well as I do that child abuse isn’t usually a one-time event. The next time the child may be DOA. I break the crucial moments down for Gina, so she can give the judge as much detail as possible and then finish with her visits to the hospital.
“They watch me like I’m going to steal her,” Gina says bitterly, her voice hostile for the first time.
“I don’t think the nurses care whether I visit Glenetta or not. They just want to see how I act.”
No one from the other table will deny this. If she weren’t visiting regularly or showed little interest in Glenetta when she did, someone from St. Thomas would have been called to testify about her behavior and demeanor.
Instead, I have subpoenaed the records and have forced a nurse to tell the judge she has come to see her child almost every day and has acted appropriately (talking, holding Glenetta’s hand even though the child had been barely conscious in the beginning) during her visits.
“Were you angry at Glenetta the morning this accident happened?” I ask Gina, whose own anger at the nurses at St. Thomas has given her voice some steel. It is imperative we overcome the testimony by Glenetta’s doctor that child abuse of this type sometimes occurs as a punishment for bedwetting.
Gina shakes her head as if she has never considered being angry at her child in her life.
“Not at all,” she says.
“She was in a good mood, laughing and playing like she always did. Her bath is one of our favorite times because she’s always so happy in the mornings.”
I ask if Glenetta is completely potty trained and how she is punished. Seemingly without a hint of guile, Gina turns to Judge Sloan and tells him that her child occasionally has an accident in her pants but what two year old hasn’t? As for punishment, you don’t hit children. All it does is teach them to hit back. As a prostitute, a successful one anyway, a woman must be a successful actress, and it crosses my mind that Gina is playing the role of the good mother no less skillfully than a woman who convinces a man she is dying to have sex with him. Being the hopeless creatures of ego we are, men want desperately to believe women, and as I listen to my client’s answers, I realize how lucky she is that this case didn’t land in Anne (Queen Anne) Tongin’s division. It wouldn’t even be close. I introduce into evidence the photographs of the bathtub fixtures Gina has taken. A child, they clearly show, could easily have turned the handle.
