Being Oscar (5 page)

Trial law is fascinating. You never know where it’s going to take you. In one of my cases in Las Vegas, I found myself again dealing with a concentration camp survivor. Only this time I was on the other side of the courtroom.

This wasn’t a headline case, and it didn’t involve a high-profile client. I used to get my hair cut at a barbershop owned by a young man named Dino. He was a hardworking kid, in his early twenties. Handsome in a Stanley Kowalski kind of way. In fact, he wore those sleeveless t-shirts in the barbershop. He had a girlfriend and was planning to get married. I knew his family, and they were nice people.

One night when he was driving home from work, an elderly women stepped out of the shadows in front of his car. Dino knocked the old lady down. He panicked and continued driving. Two blocks away, he pulled into a convenience store and called his father from a pay phone. Sobbing, he told his dad what had happened. His dad told him to go back to the scene of the accident, which he did.

When he got there, he learned that the elderly woman had died. He was distraught. He told the police he was the driver. He was arrested and charged with manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident.

His family posted bail and hired me to defend him. I was able to get the manslaughter charge dismissed. It was dark, and the woman clearly stepped out in front of him. It was tragic, but it was an accident.

To his credit, Dino told me not to contest the leaving the scene of an accident charge. He did that, he said. There was no disputing that fact.

In Nevada, a victim’s family is permitted to address the judge at sentencing. When we went to court, the elderly woman’s family packed the courtroom. In all my years of practicing law, that hearing might have been my most harrowing experience. One family member after another got up to address the judge. They all told the same story. The woman had been a Holocaust survivor. The victim’s daughter was shouting and crying, pointing at Dino, who sat at the defense table with his head in his hands.

“He did what Hitler couldn’t do!” the woman screamed. “My mother was in Auschwitz. The Nazis tattooed her. Hitler couldn’t kill her.”

Then she pointed at Dino and said, “But he did. Put him away forever.”

A chill went through me. My knees were buckling. Part of it may have been the memories of that case my father defended. But part of it was also my concern that justice might be distorted by emotion. Dino didn’t deserve jail time. It was an accident. He was a kid who momentarily panicked, but who ultimately did the right thing and was ready to take his punishment. But not this.

I started to make an argument, but Judge Tom Foley, who later became a good friend, stopped me.

“I know how the family must feel,” he said to everyone in the courtroom, “but if ever there was an accident, this was it.”

He said Dino’s action in coming back to the scene showed that he had a conscience. And he said prison wasn’t the answer. Probation, he said, was designed for cases like this, and that is what he imposed.

The judge said he knew that the thought of having caused someone’s death, even accidentally, was something that Dino would have to live with for the rest of his life. That, Judge Foley said, was punishment enough.

I thought of my father and his case. In both instances, I believe, justice was served. That’s what being a lawyer and being part of the legal system is all about. I’ve had many other bigger, high-profile cases, but probably none were more important in demonstrating how important our legal system is, and what it means to be a part of it.

My first law office was over a flower shop at Las Vegas Boulevard and Bridger, and as soon as I hung out my shingle, I started earning a living. In the beginning I didn’t have any big cases, but to me and my clients, they were all important. Every day was a learning experience. People watch television and think that’s the way it happens in the courtroom:
Perry Mason
and
Law and Order
are the common perception of the criminal justice system. They think that cases get presented in a neat and orderly fashion, and then the jury comes back with a verdict. Maybe sometimes there’s a dramatic confession, and then the innocent person goes free.

It’s a lot more complicated than that.

Sometimes you practice law the way they teach it in the textbooks. Sometimes you practice law with a baseball bat. I learned that difference in the beginning of my career. I was court-appointed to represent Lewis “Brown” Crockett, a black man and a suspected drug dealer accused of killing a guy who was going to testify against him in a narcotics case.

I never asked my clients if they were guilty or innocent. Most of the time they wouldn’t know the answer anyway. The law is both art and science. For instance, imagine that you get home from work one day and your front door has been jimmied open, your house has been ransacked, and you’re missing a lot of valuables.

The first thing you do is call 9-1-1 and tell the police dispatcher, “I’ve been . . .” Most people will say, “robbed.” Wrong! You’ve been burglarized. Robbery is taking something by force or threat of force, but burglary is an illegal entry. What’s the practical difference? For a defendant, about ten years. A robbery conviction carries a lot more time than a burglary conviction.

When I first get involved with a client, the only thing I really want to know from them is if they have an alibi. That’s something you can work with in court. However, most times they don’t.

Lewis Crockett didn’t have an alibi, but he insisted he was innocent. Crockett was thought by law enforcement officers to be a major drug dealer on the West Side of Las Vegas, which was the black community. In the 1960s, Las Vegas was the “Mississippi of the West.” Back then, communities were segregated. There were still a lot of Jim Crow laws on the books in several states, and in Nevada there were people with Jim Crow attitudes. A lot of that has changed for the better.

Crockett came from a well-known family in his part of town. His dad, Johnnie, owned a barbershop, and the family had status in the community. Of course the police said the family’s power and influence came because of drug dealing. There might have been something to that, but there was also a hint of racism. When I first started practicing law, that attitude was part of every case involving a person charged with a crime from the West Side.

Crockett was a young guy, fairly well-spoken, and easygoing. He was charged with killing a guy named Curtis Wheeler who was planning to testify against him in a drug case. Wheeler drove a delivery truck for Dot’s Dry Cleaners and was making a pickup at an apartment in North Las Vegas one morning. When he went to the door, he was greeted with a shotgun blast to the chest. That eliminated Wheeler as a witness in the drug case, and a short time later Crockett was arrested for murder.

The key witness to Wheeler’s murder was a guy named Bingham who had been painting parking lines at the apartment complex that day. Bingham was from a prominent Mormon family in town, which added another dynamic to the case. As the only one at the scene to testify, he swore that he saw Crockett climb out of a window carrying a shotgun. He said Crockett then ran to a car and took off. The identification was based on about twelve seconds’ time and from a distance of maybe fifty yards.

I wasn’t involved in Crockett’s first trial, which ended with a hung jury. The vote was eleven-to-one to convict. One female juror had locked herself in a bathroom during deliberations and refused to be a part of the process. Maybe she was scared, or maybe she decided she didn’t want to be involved in a death penalty case. But the judge threw the case out and set a date for a retrial.

The judge appointed me along with another lawyer to represent Crockett. Although I was supposed to be second chair, I ended up handling most of the case. I was paid about $900, which was the fee for a court appointment on a murder case back then. We contested everything during the trial: cross-racial eye-witness identification, withholding evidence by the prosecution. But Bingham’s testimony was overwhelming.

There was one juror, Mrs. Homer Black, who kept making eye contact with me. She seemed like a nice lady. But when the jury came back with its verdict, I looked at her and saw that there were tears in her eyes, and I knew we had a problem.

There’s a rule of thumb that most defense attorneys agree is a fairly accurate assessment of the jury process. If the jurors return to the courtroom to announce their verdict and they don’t look at the defendant, it means they’re coming back with a guilty verdict. When I see a juror crying, particularly after a hotly contested trial, I know my client is in serious trouble. That certainly was the case in this trial.

In Crockett’s case, the verdict was guilty of first-degree murder. In those days, that left the judge to impose the sentence, and the only option was the death penalty.

The judge was Tom O’Donnell. He came from coal country, Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and he was tough but fair. He was a Catholic who I don’t think believed in capital punishment. I was distraught over the verdict and was desperate to find a way to
get it undone. Knowing the judge’s propensities, I needed to figure out a way to get the case back before him; the concept of the judge as the thirteenth juror. I wanted to get him to nullify the verdict.

I knew the judge was ticked off at the Mormons for having taken a position in “The Book of Mormon” that the Catholic Church was the “abominable whore” of the earth. He used to quote that phrase, citing the page number and paragraph where he said it was stated. He also felt the Mormons considered the blacks to be inferior and relegated to a position at the bottom rung of the societal ladder. Therefore I had a feeling he wasn’t thrilled with Bingham’s testimony.

Carolyn was in the courtroom when the verdict came in. She could see how disappointed I was. Afterward I told her I wanted to go back and talk to Brown. She waited outside the visiting room just off the courtroom, and she heard all this sobbing and crying. When I came out, she was standing there.

“He took it badly,” she said.

“No,” I said. “That was me.”

I was beside myself, angry and disappointed. I needed to do something. I spent the whole night researching the law. I stayed in the law library, drinking water, eating crackers, and reading. The next morning I was leaving, exhausted, and a reporter from the newspaper came up to me and asked about the case.

“My client’s gutsy,” I said. “He has a lot of guts.” Then I mumbled some other stuff about an appeal and what I was trying to do.

Either the reporter didn’t hear me or I was so tired I wasn’t making sense, but the next day in the paper the headline read:

LAWYER SAYS CLIENT IS GUILTY

Now I was even more upset. I went down to the jail to see Crockett and explain what had happened. He was very understanding.
Given the circumstances, I’m not sure many clients would have been. But he said, “I knew you wouldn’t say anything like that.”

Then he told me that he wanted me to meet somebody who was in jail with him, a fellow named Floyd Hamlet. I had been trying to find Hamlet during the trial because Crockett had said Hamlet was the guy who went out the window with the shotgun. But Hamlet had been released from prison, and he was nowhere to be found. I figured that was the way the prosecution kept me from getting to him.

Now he was back in jail on some other charge. I met him and it was amazing; he was the spitting image of Crockett. Hamlet told me that he was the guy leaving the apartment that day with the shotgun. He said that he didn’t shoot Wheeler, but he was the guy that Bingham saw.