INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (18 page)

      
He made it exactly three blocks. Walking along the sidewalk, dog pulling happily on the leash, Michael was approached by a police officer. Officer Rivera wanted to see vaccination reports for the dog.

      
“It’s not my dog,” Michael patiently explained. “But the owner is only three blocks from here. I could go get him for you.”

      
Rivera wasn’t interested. He wrote Michael three separate summonses --one for an unvaccinated dog, one for failing to produce tags, and one for not having, on his person, a paper vaccination report.

      
Now, I have a lot of friends with dogs, and I live near a couple of dog runs. Most every day I pass dogs on the street, dogs in the park, dogs in the elevators. But I have never seen police from any Manhattan precincts interrogating dog owners at any of the fancy dog runs near where I live. Indeed, if the police on Fifth Avenue started writing tickets for absent vaccination papers when the glitzy Pekingese owners couldn’t pull them out of their Gucci handbags, there would be hell to pay. But as with the rest of big-city policing practices, the norms for the rich don’t apply in impoverished neighborhoods.

      
Now Michael was a good-natured guy, and he showed the tickets to his friend the dog owner, who graciously offered to send in the vaccination certificate or pay the fine. The only problem was, he didn’t. And so, a few years later, as Michael was leaving his house on the way to work, the Warrant Squad arrested him.

      
Every year, thousands of criminal defendants fail to show up for court. And in New York, there are tens of thousands of outstanding bench warrants, seeking people charged with crimes ranging from disorderly conduct to murder. It’s the Warrant Squad’s job to find them. There are both good and bad officers in the Warrant Squad. Some start on the assumption that someone simply forgot --and in most minor cases (and even some major ones) they’ll call in advance, remind a defendant that there is a warrant out for them, and just meet them at the courthouse to effect a return. Others love the collar, but most of them would rather pick up the little guys than the scary ones --after all, they’re less likely to catch a bullet arresting someone wanted for a health-code violation than arresting someone wanted on a firearm charge. That’s why, despite the thousands of felony warrants, people charged with minor crimes get disproportionately brought in.

      
They came for Michael on a Saturday morning, grabbing him just outside the house he shared with his mother and little brother. “We’re from the Warrant Squad,” they said, and then, without further elaboration, slapped the handcuffs on Michael and took him to jail. Michael tried to explain things to the cops. “Shut up. Tell it to the judge,” they said. He spent the day in a filthy cell, waiting to do just that.

      
People arrested by the Warrant Squad generally get low priority in the system, and Michael was no exception. A court clerk in the arraignment office of criminal court explained the logic to me once. “The system’s always crowded,” he said, “and these guys already got their shot at going through quickly. They didn’t come back --fuck ’em.”

      
Unfortunately, the police department didn’t get around to shipping Michael to court. As a result, Michael spent the night on the hard floor of the cell, a bologna sandwich and some KoolAid for sustenance.

      
Sunday didn’t go so well either --he waited all day, regularly shuffled from cell to cell. But even though arraignments were going on, no one came for him. No one called his name. He never met a lawyer. He never saw a judge.

      
Michael tried to talk to the police officers guarding the big pens. He tried to ask them what was going on, how long he might stay in jail. They told him to shut up. Sunday night came and went.

      
For the second night in a row, Michael stretched out on the tile floor. No one would explain what was going on or how long he’d be there. Every time he tried to tell his story they’d say, “Save it for the judge.” But no one was taking him to see any judge, nor would anyone let him make a phone call (in the Bronx, the “one phone call” rule has long since been superseded by the “we’ll let you call if we feel like it” rule).

      
Unshowered and terrified, Michael spent his third day in the cell, waiting for someone to listen, for someone to get him up to see the judge. Around him, people, many of whom had been arrested for serious charges, came and went.

      
“Johnson,” an officer finally called out.

      
“Here!” Michael barked, and at long last they led him up the stairs to the holding cells that the lawyers had access to.

      
One of the young lawyers in my office had picked up Michael’s case. “Don’t worry,” the lawyer told him. “This is crazy --these cases should get dismissed, and you should be home tonight.”

      
There was only one problem: Judge Mary Ann Brigantti-Hughes.

      
Judge Brigantti-Hughes is not known for her legal brilliance. In fact, she’s not known for much except her unpredictable rulings and surprising ignorance when it comes to the laws she is called upon to interpret. Though a pol all her life (after graduating from Temple Law School, she worked for a judge before moving on to a job with the state attorney general, eventually becoming counsel to the Bronx borough president), exactly how she wound up on the bench remains a matter of some mystery. Brigantti-Hughes is one of the very few judges who managed to be rated “not approved” by a bar association yet was endorsed by both political parties for a seat in the Bronx Supreme Court.

      
Brigantti-Hughes is short and pinched and beady-eyed, and she speaks with a clipped, exaggerated diction seemingly designed to hide the vestigial Spanish accent lying just below her vowels. In a survey of judges published in the
New York Law Journal
, Judge Brigantti-Hughes was rated one of the worst criminal court judges in the Bronx. She is irritable and mercurial, the latter making her particularly hard to practice before, since a lawyer can seldom really tell a client what to expect. BriganttiHughes can turn on you without warning, even in the most sympathetic cases.

      
And that’s exactly what happened to Michael.

      
Facing a man who had spent three days in lockup armed with the perfectly reasonable excuse that it wasn’t his dog and that his friend had assured him he’d pay the tickets, almost any judge would have either just dismissed the charges (likely) or at the very least sentenced him to time already served (a virtual certainty). Not Brigantti-Hughes.

      
“If he pleads to the charge, I’ll give him three days of community service,” she said, peering down from the bench.

      
Michael’s lawyer tried again, repeating the fact that the summonses were legally questionable in the first place, and that in any case Michael had already been in jail for more than three days on a three-year-old misunderstanding.

      
“Coun-se-lor,” Brigantti-Hughes said, enunciating every syllable, “I said he could have three days of community service.”

      
“You won’t even give him time served?” the lawyer asked, stunned.

      
“No,” snapped the judge, “you don’t want it?”

      
Michael’s lawyer turned to him, trying to explain on the fly why this was going horribly awry, and that he might actually have to come back to court to clear up the tickets. Apparently the thirty seconds of explanation was too much for Judge BriganttiHughes.

      
“Bail is five hundred dollars on each,” she said tartly. “Next case.”

      
Michael looked perplexed as the court officers turned him around and steered him back toward the door that led to the jail.

      
“Judge, please,” the lawyer begged, but it was too late.

      
“I offered him three days, he didn’t take it. Bail is five hundred dollars,” Brigantti-Hughes said with utter indifference. Three times throughout the night, Michael’s lawyer implored Brigantti-Hughes to rehear the case, and at last, well after midnight, she did so.

      
Back before the judge, Michael was asked again whether he wanted to plead guilty. His choice, according to Brigantti-Hughes, was plead guilty and spend three days cleaning the parks or go back to jail. Michael wanted the plea.

      
“So you knew you had an unvaccinated dog?” Judge BriganttiHughes said, raising her eyebrows and looking at Michael’s lawyer with a smug I-told-you-so look.

      
“Actually, ma’am, it was my friend’s dog; I was just walking it and didn’t have the papers.”

      
“Fine,” said the judge. “I don’t accept your plea.” She turned to the court officers. “Put him back in --this court is adjourned.” And with that, she got up and walked off the bench.

      
Michael finally lost his composure. “What do you want from me?” he wailed. “I told you I’d plead guilty --what do you want? I’m gonna lose my job. I haven’t showered in four days; please let me out of here!” His voice was shaking and cracking as the officers roughly shoved him back behind the metal door, closing it before his lawyer could follow.

      
Behind the door were sobs. “Let me out of here.
Please
.”

      
“Court’s closed,” the officers said firmly, stepping in front of Michael’s lawyer.

- - - -
 

      
“You gotta be kidding me?” Judge Joseph Dawson was shaking his head. “For a
dog
?”

      
Dawson is a criminal court version of Mogulescu --bullying but kindhearted, intemperate but smart, good on the law, and personally charming. He’s a big guy, with a round, jowly face set off with a thick auburn mustache and a pugnaciousness born of being a former organized crime prosecutor. Though Dawson loses his temper occasionally, he is a good man who struggles through a tough job, and on the rare days he can control his impatience, it is almost possible to believe that he is genuinely committed to justice.

      
After word of Michael’s night-court fiasco got back to the office, I had been dispatched to court to get him out of jail. As it turns out, Dawson was presiding over the courtroom where that could get done.

      
Grabbing an assistant DA who knew nothing about the case (ADAs generally aren’t even assigned to summonses), I explained the whole horrifying saga: Dawson just shook his head, rolled his eyes, and tried his best not to dime out a fellow jurist. “Get him out here,” he said.

      
Michael, though, was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared back into the vast system of cells, and no one seemed to know where he was. I headed down the back stairs, to the main desk behind which the corrections officers responsible for prisoner movement sit.

      
“Hey, Counselor,” Officer Dawkins said. “How you doin’?”

      
I get along reasonably well with most of the corrections officers. Unlike the police department, which is mostly white, the New York City Department of Corrections is largely made up of Hispanics and African Americans --many of whom have a genuine connection to my clients. As unbelievably brutal and terrifying as Rikers is, unlike most state prisons, it is mostly guarded by people who know firsthand that mistakes are made and that innocent people are often locked up. Corrections officers know how brutal and utterly unforgiving the criminal justice system can be, and many of these guards are willing to help out, especially when there is a real injustice to correct.

      
“Hey, Dawkins, I got a little problem from last night.” “Yeah? Go ahead.”

      
I told the four or five officers crowded behind the desk the saga of Michael and the dog, of Mary Ann Brigantti-Hughes and the three days of community service, and also, of course, about Judge Joseph Dawson, waiting upstairs to set Michael free.