No Way Out

Wednesday, 19 August 2009 — 13:45

“Andi? Earth to Andi.”

“Oh I’m sorry.”

The embarrassment was palpable.

“Where were you?”

“I’m sorry.” Even now, back in the real world, Andi seemed confused, reluctant to talk. “Sometimes when I’m thinking about a problem I immerse myself in it so completely, the world could end and I wouldn’t notice.”

Juanita brushed it off.

“The thing that puzzles me is how could anyone fiddle the jury software in such a way as to exclude blacks? I mean the data on the voting register and drivers license records wouldn’t include any reference to race — at least not the data that’s fed to the court administration for jury selection purposes.”

“I don’t understand either. But if I’m right then they must have found some way. Maybe they rigged it to screen out certain selected names?”

“Like what?” asked Juanita, almost laughing. “Jackson? Washington?”

“Or maybe first names.”

Juanita’s smile widened.

“LaToyah? Denzel?”

“Okay! Okay! I get the point.”

“Look I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make fun of you. But that’s one explanation that’s not going to fly.”

“Well maybe they rigged the software to screen out names from street addresses with large numbers of people with the same surname. In other words big families.”

“That would screen out a lot of Hispanics, and a lot of Irish and Polish Catholics. Oh yes, and a lot of Mormons!”

They both burst out into girlish giggles at the absurdity of it. As they fell about laughing, Juanita put a gentle hand on the back of Andi’s — a brief moment of intimacy, camouflaged as friendship.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you Andi. Are you still uncomfortable working on this case?”

Juanita realized that she had allowed a note of seriousness to intrude into her tone. But unlike her half- hearted attempts at probing Andi’s strange reaction a moment ago, she sensed that Andi would be grateful for the chance to get if off her chest. She knew about Andi’s dilemma over Gene and the rape crisis center. But she wanted to know how Andi felt about it now. Was she comfortable about what she was doing herself — regardless of what her lover thought about it?

But Andi hesitated for a few seconds before answering.

“I don’t know why defending a person has to be based on attacking the victim. I mean, sometimes you’ve got no alternative, but why can’t it be done gently?”

“How do you assassinate a witness’s character gently?”

Andi thought about this, realizing that she was thinking with her heart and not her head.

“Well I tried to with Bethel Newton. I tried to focus on the possibility that she made a mistake. But I was also obliged to use the dirt we dug about her previous rape accusation. If I hadn’t, Claymore might have been convicted, but then he’d’ve got it overturned on the grounds of inadequate legal representation. That would have hurt Alex too — and Levine and Webster.”

“That’s the way it works Andi. That’s the adversarial system. They put up their strongest case and we put up ours.”

“And for that we have to put the victim on trial?”

“That’s the way of the world Andi — the legal world at any rate. Alex calls it the ‘desanctification of the victim’.”

“That sounds like a nice way of describing an ugly process.”

“That’s exactly what it is Andi.”

“And what if you don’t find any dirt.”

“Well some lawyers use the hundred to ten approach.”

“Hundred to ten?” Andi echoed.

“It’s based on the theory that even a living saint has some enemies. And enemies means people who are ready to speak ill of that person. The idea is that if you talk to enough people who knew the victim, sooner or later you’ll find some one who’s ready to give you some dirt to throw at them. In fact you can usually find several people. Then you call as many of them to the witness stand as you can and turn the jury against the victim.”

“But why is it called the hundred to ten approach?”

“It’s based on the theory that for every hundred people who knew the victim, about ten are ready to say something mildly negative about the victim, four or five are ready to say something very negative and two or three are ready to say something extremely negative. Then you use as many of these as the judge lets you get away with.”

Andi thought about this.

“I suspect that if the victim was Alex you’d probably only have to speak to a handful of people to get the dirt you needed.”

They both fell about in hysterical laughter.

“We’re here,” said Juanita, still laughing, as the car pulled up at the white stone building.

Wednesday, 19 August 2009 — 15:15

“It’s going to be quite tricky without the source code.”

They were in David Sedaka’s office at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics in the renovated LeConte Hall. He was sitting on a high-backed blue chair inside a huge wraparound cherrywood desk while Juanita and Andi — on similar chairs — sat facing him on the outside of the round end. It was the only part of the desk that wasn’t cluttered with papers, and that was because David had stacked them all up and moved them to the other side of the table to give them space.

“But you can decompile it at least,” said Andi, staring at David and admiring — in some inexplicable way — his geek-chic appearance. He was five feet six with unruly black hair and wore boxy, TV-screen glasses. She wasn’t drawn to him sexually, but he was the sort of person she could think of as a younger brother.

“Oh sure,” said David. “But without the original source code, I have nothing to compare it to for errors. And no explanatory documentation. All I can do is try to figure out how it works. And that’s going to take me some time. I hope I can finish before I fly out to Switzerland”

The room was flooded with light from a large window and the room itself was surprisingly large. Andi had assumed that academics lived in a very austere, comfortless world, all the more so when they were working in an old building that had been renovated to house a group of scientists who had previously been without a fixed home. David, they knew, had been a PhD for the last three years and was doing post-doctoral research into anti-matter. One of his predictions — that anti-matter can decay into photons without needing to come into contact with matter — was soon to be tested at the new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

“I guess the first thing to look out for is lack of randomness,” said Andi. “Anything that interferes with the randomness of the selection, whether it has anything to do with African-Americans or not. I mean the glitch in Grand Rapids, wasn’t about race per se, it was about zip codes.”

“I’ll look for that and for anything that might interfere with referencing the database. Ideally we’d have a copy of the database itself. Maybe that’s where the problem lies.”

Computer programming as such, wasn’t his field. But like many physicists and others in science, he had some