The conference room turned out to be little more than a storage space
that held the water cooler and a bulletin board posting the required
equal employment disclosures. There were four boxes of files stacked
in the corner and a small table I could use for work space.
'Do you need anything?' Nelly asked.
'No, I should be fine. Thanks.'
'You sure? Because I think I'm going to head out. Judge Olick told me
to take the rest of the day off. I was going to try to finish some
things up, but I'm pretty useless right now.'
'You should definitely go. I'll be fine.'
'Thanks. Just let yourself out.'
I thanked her again and turned to the files. I began by spreading the
boxes side by side on the floor, quickly scanning the file headings to
see if anything jumped out. Nope. No in the
EVENT SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS Or LITIGANTS WHO HATE ME files, just case
names.
I started at the beginning, dictating the names of the parties and the
nature of the dispute for each file into the hand-sized recorder I
still owned from my days at the U.S. Attorneys Office. The machine
served more as a paperweight in my current position, since the District
Attorney staff refuses to type for the deputies. But considering I
didn't even know what I was looking for, taped notes would be good
enough for now.
Case after case, nothing seemed relevant. One thing was for certain:
There would be no problems finding things of interest in my files. In
fact, the problem would be too many defendants who were angry, mean, or
outright psycho enough to go after me. On a weekly basis in the drug
unit, some dealer who blamed me for the sentencing guidelines would
throw me a devil eye, his thrusted chest, or the very worst the
blood-boiling c-word. Hell, I could fill one side of a tape with the
spitters alone. Experienced prosecutors know always to sit at the end
of the table farthest from the defendant.
Clarissa Easterbrook's caseload, on the other hand, was a major snooze.
How disgruntled can a person be about a citation for un mowed grass, an
unkempt vacant house, or a toilet left on the front porch? Although a
few of them huffed and puffed in their appeal papers, the tough talk
was generally reserved for the nosy neighbors who had sicced the city
on them or the unfeeling civil servants who responded, and even those
were rare. More typically, the appellants tried hard embarrassingly so
to be lawyerlike in their prose. Lots of henceforths, herewiths, and
thereto fores
When I got to the Js, I came across the Melvin Jackson file. Now this
one stood out. At least two letters a week for the past six weeks,
filed in reverse chronological order under correspondence. They began
as pleas for compassion about his recent past, which I learned went
like this:
Melvin Jackson was the father of three children, ages two to six. He
and his wife, Sharon, had always struggled with their shared
addictions, but when their youngest son, Jared, was born addicted to
crack cocaine, Melvin entered the rehabilitation program offered by the
office for Services to Children and Families as an alternative to
losing Jared. Through the program, Melvin had gotten clean. Sharon
hadn't. One afternoon, Melvin came home from his part-time job as a
Portland State janitor to find another man leaving his apartment and
Sharon inside naked, smoking up with Jared in her arms, the other two
children curled together on the sofa. He told her to choose between
the drugs and her children. The next morning, Sharon went to SCF and
signed a voluntary termination of parental rights.
Melvin had been taking care of the kids ever since. He saved enough
money for a used van and was getting by through public housing, public
assistance, and occasional work as a landscaper and handyman.
Melvin was about to lose his public housing because of his unemployed
cousin, who moved in with him a year ago in exchange for watching
Melvin's kids when he worked. One night four months ago, a community
policing officer assigned to the Housing Authority of Portland caught
the cousin and her friends smoking pot on the apartment complex swing
set. The officer found less than an ounce, decriminalized in Oregon,
so the only repercussion for the cousin was a ticket for possession, no
more than a traffic matter. But federal regulations authorize public
housing agencies to evict tenants who have drugs on the property. The
problem for Melvin was that public housing evictions aren't by the
tenant; they're by the unit. Two days after the swing set smoke out
HAP served Melvin with a notice of eviction. Then an SCF caseworker
told him his kids would be placed in foster care if he became
homeless.
I knew a little bit about these kinds of evictions. A few years ago,
the United States Supreme Court upheld the federal housing policy
nine-zip, permitting the eviction of a law-abiding grandmother whose
grandson smoked pot on public housing property. Never mind that she'd
taken in her grandson to save him from a drug-addicted mother. The
only option for someone in Melvin s place was to hope for leniency, but
it would have to come from the housing authority; a court could do
nothing about it.
