A Fool for a Client

A Fool for a Client

David Kessler

Copyright ©
199
7 by David Kessler

The right of David Kessler to be identified as the Author of this Work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in
Great Britain
in 1997
by Hodder and
Stoughton

First published in paperbac
k in 1997 by Hodder and
Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline PLC

This eBook edition published by House of Solomon

All rights
reserved
.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the pri
or permission of the publisher.

All characters in
this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

ISBN
978
1
904037
330

House of Solomon

Chapter 1

“Your Honour,” Justine Levy
’
s voice rang out confidently, “this isn
’
t any sort of legal grey area.
Under the sixth amendment I have the right to conduct my own defence.”

There wasn
’
t a vacant seat in the courtroom, neither for spectators nor journalists.
Only the jury box remained empty.
From his vantage point on the bench, the judge surveyed the swaying heads and shoulders that blended in with each other like a stormy sea in tumultuous motion.
Crowds like this were unusual for what was nothing more than a pre-trial motions hearing.
But the charge was murder, and the case had captured the attention of the mass media, and thus the public.
Fact had become blended with speculation in an endless stream of reportage that had been splashed across the pages of the press from coast to coast.
The judge knew that a lot of people were going to try to use this case for publicity.
He hoped that he would be able to prevent the proceedings from degenerating into a circus.

“The right to proceed
pro se
was affirmed by the State Supreme Court in the McIntyre decision and upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court in Faretta Versus California.”

Justine was addressing the judge, the Hono
u
rable Justice Harold Wise.
She was speaking in a forceful but not impassioned tone that would have held him spellbound had he not consciously told himself:
she
’
s just another defendant
.
As Justine presented her brief argument, Justice Wise, a quietly dignified man in his mid-fifties, sat there in patient silence.
He was a patrician figure with an upright posture and proud bearing.
His hair, still full and thick, had lost every trace of the light brown that it had possessed in his youth, and was now a solid dark grey, almost like a storm cloud.
But its shade made him look all the more distinguished.
He wore his robes with an air of confidence, as if they had been tailored to fit his body, and he looked at people with eyes that were firmly focussed but not intimidating.

He noticed that unlike inexperienced
lawyers
, many of whom tend to play to the jury even when there is no jury present, this girl, amateur though she was, did not gesticulate or raise her voice.
She stood still, her arms at her sides, almost like a soldier standing to attention, giving free reign to a voice that rang out with an echoing timbre.
But the most striking feature was that she stood before him alone with no lawyer at her side and no papers or notes before her.

“I must disagree with the defendant” the prosecutor said in a voice which the judge noted was uncharacteristically timid.

At the prosecution table stood Daniel Abrams, a man in his mid-forties whose neat dark hair, well-cut suit and commanding height couldn
’
t quite distract the judge
’
s attention from the beads of perspiration that stood out on his forehead.
Throughout Justine
’
s short speech, Abrams had remained on the edge of his chair, poised to rise.
Now, standing in the centre spotlight, he looked as if he was suffering from stage
fright.
This seemed strange to the judge.
Abrams was an experienced lawyer and should have long since been rendered immune to this kind of nervousness by practice and maturity.

Flanked by a female aide in her early thirties to his right and a young man in his twenties to his left, he looked like a leading actor on opening night, afraid of forgetting his lines.

“The Court may rule that the defendant is not mentally competent to conduct her own defence,” Abrams continued.

“Not without declaring me unfit to stand trial,” Justine retorted.
If I
’
m sane enough to stand trial, I
’
m sane enough to conduct my own defence.”

“Your source for that?” the judge inquired.
His tone was mildly pedagogic, as if he were testing her.

“People versus
Davis
,
New York
, 1979.”

The judge knew that any partisan display would be professionally improper.
But he couldn
’
t resist the urge to smile approvingly at Justine
’
s intellect and the thoroughness of her preparation.

“I see you
’
ve done your homework Miss Levy.”

The Assistant District Attorney surreptitiously loosened his necktie.
The judge knew what was on his mind.
The job of Deputy District Attorney was coming up for grabs and Abrams had to come over before the public as man of fighting spirit in order to stay in the running.
It was widely known in legal circles that Abrams was in line for the number two slot, but the DA wouldn
’
t like it if Abrams conceded even a
mildly
significant point without offering at least a token show of resistance.
The judge, who was no stranger to the political shenanigans of the legal profession, could guess that this whole charade was part of Abrams
’
strategy for pushing his name to the top of the DA
’
s short-list.

But the Judge sensed that Abrams had a more personal motive.
If Justine Levy won on this point then in a sense she would “win” with the public regardless of the verdict.
Conducting her own defence was bound to create sympathy for her, and the outcome of
court cases often hinges more on the sympathies or anger of the jury than on the raw facts of the evidence.
The news media were already playing
up the Murphy extradition case, although it was by no means certain that the two cases were connected.
The last thing any politically ambitious prosecutor would want was for a young, pretty female defendant to come over as a crusading heroine fighting off the powerful machinery of a monstrous and unjust legal system.

With a lawyer in her corner, it might be possible to secure a plea-bargain, thereby saving the state the expense of a trial and obtaining from the girl a public admission that she had done wrong and was not the courageous crusader that she was being portrayed as.
On the other hand, the judge knew that the case was a potential feather in the DA
’
s cap for his
own
political ambitions as well as those of his
protégé
, and they were probably as loath to accept a plea-bargain as to drop the case altogether.

“It
’
s times like this,” said the judge wearily, “that make me yearn for the good old days before the Gideon decision.”

It was the Supreme Court
’
s ruling in
Gideon versus Wainwright
which held that in even mildly serious cases, the right to a lawyer, at least at the trial phase of the proceedings, was a claim-right and not just a liberty: that is, a right that the subject could demand be fulfilled at the taxpayer
’
s expense.

“All right,” the judge continued.
“Let
’
s not have any more of this bickering in open court.
I
’
ll see you both in my chambers.
The Court stands in recess for twenty minutes.”

It was unusual for the judge to hold an in camera meeting with the defendant, for fear of accusations of cooking up a deal that denied the defendant
’
s right to a fair trial, plea-bargains always being unofficial.
But in this case he had no choice.
He wanted to resolve the matter quietly, and take the sensationalism out of the case.
From the point of view of the law, the decision was very simple.
But the attention of the press had turned a simple legal problem into a complex political one.
And he didn
’
t want the trial to carry on with this kind of showmanship and playing-to-the-crowds.
He just wanted it to proceed smoothly.

Two minutes later Justine Levy and Daniel Abrams were shuffling awkwardly into the judge
’
s large, blue-carpeted chambers.
An uneasy quiet settled over the room as they took their seats at ninety degrees to one another, facing the judge across a polished rosewood desk.
But the electric tension that had hung in the air since they started their trek down the labyrinth of corridors steadily intensified with each passing second.
Justine looked around at the lustrous leather panelling and the massive leather-bound volumes that surrounded her.
Black shadows danced across the law books as birds fluttered back and forth before the window.

Ignoring the eyes of the judge and the
ADA
, Justine turned to look out through the window on the fourth side of the room.
It offered a panoramic view of the city. She swallowed a lump in her throat, as a fleeting memory came and went.

Half a minute ticked by while the judge stared at Justine.
Her height was only a few inches above average, but he could see immediately the enormous power pent up within her.
Most women would have regarded her as plump, but to men she was a Grecian goddess, cast from the same mould as the classic statues.
Even from afar one could see the straight, broad back of a rock climber, the powerful shoulders of a swimmer and the long, well-toned but not muscular legs of a runner.
But her image could never have been preserved in marble or bronze.
For Justine Levy had the quality of something firm yet constantly in motion.
Only kinetic sculpture could have captured her essence.
She was a robot with a face of ivory and a body of tempered steel.

Apart from her smooth complexion, her eyes were nature
’
s major concession to her femininity.
They were wide, inset deeply in large orbits, looking out at the world like the trusting, curious eyes of a child, until a change of mood made them narrow down into feline slits that neither sought nor offered comfort.

But the feature that stood out most was her hair.
It was neither ginger nor gold, but rather a true deep red.

Red like wine or red like the sunset?
Justice Wise wondered.

He remembered his college days, when he still had the youthful tenacity that he now saw in Justine.
He had majored in philosophy and he had always been impressed by the symbolism of Nietzsche
’
s metaphysics.

Apollo versus Dionysus.

He somehow sensed, by Justine
’
s posture and steady gaze, that she was very much an Apollonian in character, rational and sober.

Perhaps that
’
s what this was what the case is really about.

Then he remembered that the colour red also symbolized blood.
But he dismissed the thought from his mind.
He realized in that instant, that he didn
’
t
want
Justine to be guilty.
He wondered if any male juror could look at her and see the case any more objectively.

But that was the system.
He had seen rapists walk because prosecutors couldn
’
t prove lack of consent, or because the victim faltered or wavered in the wrong place under cross-examination.
He had looked on helplessly while overworked ADAs allowed muggers to plea-bargain a knifepoint robbery down to petty larceny.
He remembered letting expediency run its course as armed robbers were allowed to swallow the gun.
At times he had been reduced to standing on the sidelines as harried prosecutors allowed seedy little tenth-rate shysters to bully them into watering down near-fatal stabbings into simple assault, using the ultimate threat: to go to trial and force the understaffed DA
’
s office to spend time and money proving to a jury what both sides knew to be the truth.

Who am I to start complaining now?

He looked away from Justine
’
s face to the file that rested before him.
Twenty three years old, it said.
Old enough to vote, he thought.
Old enough to drink... almost old enough to become a congresswoman...Old enough to be married and with a couple of kids.
At twenty eight, his own daughter had three.
But this girl
–
this woman
–
who sat before him seemed older in some ways, as if she had seen things from which a woman of any age should be protected. Or perhaps I
’
m just being old-fashioned.

“All right Dan, now that we
’
re out of the public eye perhaps you
’
ll tell me why you
’
re so dead set against her conducting her own defence?”