For some ungodly reason, and in spite of my client’s stomach-turning lack of remorse, I’m still a believer—not in innocence, maybe not in even in fairness anymore, but in the system. Making sure his rights are protected is my duty and I intend to fulfill it, even if he is an unrepentant wife beater. I learned the hard way that everyone deserves a defense and the right to look your accuser in the eye and question his version of the truth.
“Sit up straight,” I say, poking him in the ribs as the jury files back into the courtroom, his response to which is to lean his head, bald and shiny like a cue ball, atop elbows resting on the defense table as if his neck can’t support its weight. I poke him again, harder this time. Jurors deserve respect. Most folks dodge jury duty like a well-thrown punch.
Things aren’t looking good for our side, however, and the jaw-grinding grimace on my client’s face tells me knows it too. The jury was only out for fifty-three minutes. Hardly enough time for me to guzzle a cup of putrid cafeteria coffee and pick up my court-appointed counsel’s check, a pittance for my trouble.
I count off each member of the six pack as they enter—two men and four women. Even if every single eye weren’t cast down, I’d still know what they decided back in the windowless jury room, sustained by stale bagels and the desire to get home by dinner time. It’s all in the sound. A quick shuffle of feet, like a foxtrot—not guilty. A dragging sound, like a slow waltz performed by a drunk—guilty. And what I’m hearing is one hair stylist, one teacher, a mail carrier, two unemployed realtors, and a retired fisherman waltzing.
“I understand you have a verdict, Madame Foreperson,” Judge Grant says, peering over his half-rim tortoise shell glasses at a world-weary forty-something woman. I knew she’d be the foreperson from the jump. With her slit-eyed scowl she’d scare the others into submission quickly so she could get home to reality TV to escape her own.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
During jury selection, she said she was a hair stylist at a salon in Pompano Beach and she delivered her answers during voir dire with a certitude of one desirous of being seen as a good citizen, the type we can trust with momentous decisions like whether or not to lock someone up. Yet her bird’s nest of fried blonde hair and too-short skirt revealing a tattoo of a thorny rose belie another truth, also known as a lie. She’s no hair stylist.
If I have a superpower, it’s the ability to spot a lie—from clients’ excuses for their bad choices to cops’ flimsy explanations for how an accused developed a raging shiner after the cuffs went on. I’ve even become good at telling myself a few lies, such as the one about how I can keep defending the types I used to lock up. What is true is that I’ll keep doing this work, defending the guilty. I have no choice. I need to be gainfully employed throughout my probationary period. It’s either serve as court-appointed counsel or forfeit my law license again when I go back in front of the Florida Bar Disciplinary Committee a few months from now.
What else can I do? Lawyering is all I’ve ever done, if you don’t count my stint in the Army as a military police officer which, come to think of it, paid better than defending criminals who can’t afford a “real lawyer.” But that misadventure cost me a limb. Besides, it’s not like I’m in any kind of position to attract the upper echelon of criminals at this point. It’s the bottom feeders for me, for now—until I figure out a plan, a way out of this dead-end gig.
My client’s pitiful victim is seated in the first row of the gallery. Tiny, like a malnourished bird, all sharp edges and jumpy. I wonder if he sensed she’d be an easy mark. Wife beaters tell me that. That they can smell which ones will put up a fight and which will bend to their will again and again, grateful to have something to rely on.
Madame Foreperson steps down from the jury box and hands the verdict form to the judge’s clerk. On the way back to her seat, she glances in my direction and shrugs. I sigh in relief. She was his one hope. A woman who’d taken more than a few hard knocks and gotten up. But then, hope is not a substitute for an actual defense.
Truth is, it’s an advantage knowing they’re guilty. It simplifies things. It means I don’t have to worry about screwing up. Prosecutors need to win over all six jurors. No room for error. All I need is to make one gullible soul believe in reasonable doubt. I find it an unnerving thought. Even so, there are no prosecutors with losing records, proof that accused and guilty are as good as synonymous. Although, odds are I put away the rare innocent back when I was Assistant State’s Attorney Grace Kelly Locke, back when I considered that possibility a cost of doing the business of justice. Another unnerving thought.
Judge Grant scans the verdict form, stone-faced, and returns it to the clerk between thumb and forefinger like a smelly sock. “The defendant shall rise.”
I get to my feet but stay more than an arm’s length away from my client. I notice I’m holding my breath, but why? Habit? Or maybe it’s the haunting clank of the shackles as the accused stands. Will it be guilty or not guilty, actual innocence being out of the question? In my mind, there’s no suspense.
The clerk holds the verdict
