INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (34 page)

      
“Bring Mr. Feige’s client out, please,” Birnbaum instructs one of his court officers.

      
“Sure, Judge.”

      
There are still six or seven cases left, and the pews in the courtroom remain sprinkled with defendants, lawyers, and spectators. Hearing the door to the pens opening, I take up my place before the judge.

      
“How’s an ACD?” Birnbaum asks, referring to what is known as an “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal” --the next best thing to an outright dismissal.

      
“ACDs are fine,” I tell him.

      
“ACD on this first case,” he says. “Her other tickets are dismissed as covered.”

      
“Thanks, Judge. Always nice to see you.”

      
“Good to see you, Mr. Feige. Good luck, Ms. Stallings. You have a fine lawyer there.”

      
“Okay,” says Cassandra.

      
“I’ll wait for you outside,” I whisper to her.

      
“Okay, David,” she says as she’s led away.

      
Right on cue, ten minutes later, Cassandra comes trudging out of the courtroom. She’s in the same worn hiking boots she was wearing when she went in. They’re a few sizes too big for her, and I imagine she got them from the trash or from a shelter.

      
“Hi, David.”

      
“Hi, sweetie. How’s freedom feel?”

      
“It’s okay,” she says.

- - - -
 

      
It’s well after 4:00 when I finally make my way back in through the office doors, Cassandra in tow. I set her up with one of the available social workers to ensure that she’ll get train fare to the shelter in Brooklyn and back.

      
My mailbox is full again --letters from clients in prisons across the state. There are messages too --a flutter of little pink squares --from impatient judges who insist on leaving word with Lorraine rather than on my voice mail.

      
Upstairs, a management meeting is in full swing, Robin presiding in her little fishbowl of an office. I should be there, but it’s been a long day, the meeting is almost over, and I have less than an hour before I have to go to night court. Walking past the office, I give a little wave, intending to just keep walking. Robin, though, motions me in for a brief appearance.

      
Back in my office ten minutes later, there are a dozen new voice mail messages. I’m tired, and I just can’t deal with voice mail right now. So after dropping the afternoon’s files on top of the bulging Redwelds devoted to Clarence and Reginald and Alberto, I turn my attention to the stack of letters. The phone rings.

      
I’ve been in my office for less than two minutes. It’s Gerald --I haven’t heard from him in months. “Happy Chanukah!” he says. It’s the first time his salutation is even close to appropriate; the calendrical propriety of the greeting never seems to occur to Gerald --there were several times over the summer, after I first met him, that I’d pick up the phone in my sweltering office only to hear Gerald cheerfully announce: “Happy Chanukah!” Gerald is obsessed with Jews, and he often goes out of his way to identify someone as Jewish (“Horowitz,” he’ll say, “that’s a Jewish doctor”). I can almost hear him nodding with satisfaction at the other end of the pay phone.

      
The pay phone he is calling from is on 20E --the locked psych ward at Bellevue Hospital. I had dropped Gerald off there back in July after he got arrested for allegedly pulling a knife on a security guard at the psych ward at Lincoln Hospital.

      
Handsome, calm, and in his midforties, Gerald showed no obvious signs of mental distress. He’d gone back to Lincoln to get some of his things. When they’d discharged him (after a short voluntary stay for some auditory hallucinations), the hospital had sent him packing without his belongings. The security guard had given him the runaround and even refused to let him talk to the people who had his stuff. Gerald admitted to a heated argument but said he’d never even pulled out the knife.

      
Judges, of course, are always afraid to let people out when they’re alleged to have a mental illness, and despite Gerald’s calm deportment and lack of criminal record, I was worried that a judge might actually hold him.

      
“Jail is the worst possible outcome here,” I declared when Gerald’s case was called. “If you think there’s a psychiatric issue here, just let him go and he’ll go to Bellevue for an evaluation.”

      
“And how do I know that, Mr. Feige?” the judge snapped, a sour look on her face.

      
“Because I’ll take him there myself. Tonight. After court,” I told her.

      
“You will?” She was a bit incredulous.

      
“Yup. If that’s what it takes, I sure will,” I said firmly.

      
And that’s why, on a sweltering night at 2:15 in the morning, with Gerald in the passenger seat humming loudly along with the radio, I found myself pulling into a parking spot just off First Avenue and strolling the halls of the hulking hospital, my footfalls echoing on the old granite floors. Bellevue was mostly empty, and as we made our way from triage to the psych ER, past a door marked “Elopement Precaution,” accompanied by a Guyanese nurse with darting eyes, I wondered whether they were actually going to admit him and what the hell I’d do with him if they didn’t.

      
Luckily, they did.

      
“Hi, Gerald! So how’s it going?” I ask. Apparently he’d been released but is now back for another short stay.

      
“I’m good, Dave,” he says frankly, “I’m good. The food isn’t up to my standards, though. I cook for myself, you know . . . that’s how I keep my strength.”

      
“I remember, Gerald.”

      
“Well, I just wanted to say hi.” There is a little pause at the other end of the phone, as if Gerald is making sure he’s accomplished the purpose of his call. It seems he has. “Okay, Happy Chanukah, thanks for everything, and keep up all the good work,” he says cheerfully.

      
“Okay, Gerald --always a pleasure to hear from you. Feel free to call anytime if you need anything.”

      
“Will do, Dave. Thanks!” he says, hanging up.

      
And that was it.

- - - -
 

      
The mentally ill and the mentally retarded are a unique and acute problem in the system generally, and for public defenders in particular. Learning to deal with them takes great care and patience --and a really good social worker. Over the years, I’ve represented all kinds: lost people like Cassandra and sociopaths like George --who despite being acquitted in two separate trials, just kept on robbing gypsy cabs until a judge sent him away for twenty years. There are clients like José (charged with firstdegree murder but so retarded that his IQ measured in the midfifties), who look normal, and those who don’t, like Luis, a twenty-three-year-old with a big round head, goofy eyes, a crooked smile, and the mental capacity of a five-year-old. Luis was arrested for trying to show a ten-year-old girl “a bunny.” In fact there really was a bunny --sitting behind the vegetable stand Luis’s father ran. But the little girl, scared at the prospect of being alone with Luis, quickly reported that Luis tried to kiss her (which he might have actually done). The net result: the police came, put Luis in handcuffs, and took him away. His parents were hysterical and terrified, but as it turned out, they had nothing to worry about --Luis was having the time of his life. He had absolutely no clue what was going on. “I rode in the car!” he told me excitedly at arraignments. “A car . . . with the lights! The flashing kind!”

      
Mercifully, Rikers was never in the cards for Luis. Luis’s big, drooling visage revealed a kid so obviously severely retarded that after a few court dates and some mental health records got turned over, his case was dismissed.

      
Sadly, it’s seldom that easy with mentally retarded clients. And it’s harder still with those who are mentally ill as opposed to mentally retarded. Most challenging of all are the few who are both mentally ill and violent. Few things scare judges quite as much.

      
James was one of the most mentally ill clients I’ve ever seen. A white kid with a shaved head and bulging blue eyes, James would rock back and forth, his eyes scanning the room as if the walls themselves were threats. He was paranoid and sometimes nearly incoherent --so much so that if James were portrayed accurately on TV, most reviewers would savage the actor for overdoing it.

      
When I first talked to him, late one night, in a special cell that the police department uses for people it senses are security threats, James, like so many of the mentally ill I’ve represented over the years, was in complete denial about what was going on.

      
I started with the basics.

      
“James, my name is David Feige. I’m going to be your lawyer. I’m going to tell you a little about what you are being charged with, and then we can talk about anything you want . . . okay?”

      
James just sat there for a minute, looking around as if surprised by every unchanging feature of the room.

      
“What do you mean?” he said eventually. “There ain’t no charges against me.”

      
“Well, James,” I said, “actually there are. Your mom says you hit her.”

      
“No she doesn’t,” he said.

      
I slowed down, deliberately overenunciating my words.

      
“Yes, James. She does. That’s why you’re here. Because your mom called the police, and they arrested you, and now you are charged with hitting your mom.”

      
“So I’m going home?”

      
“I’m not sure yet,” I tell him. “I’d like to talk to your mom and see what she thinks . . . okay?”

      
“Yeah, that’s good. She didn’t do this . . . she definitely didn’t do this,” James said.

      
Outside, sitting in the cavernous courtroom in which arraignments are conducted, I found James’s mother. She was small and pretty, with a black eye and a spent look. Animated and loud, she spoke in a heavy Italian accent. We stepped out of the courtroom, and as we crossed the threshold she unleashed a torrent.

      
“I don’t a want him in the house!” she exclaimed. “I had enough a him already . . . somebody gotta do something with him. I can’t stand it; I had enough.” She continued in this vein for several minutes before I could interrupt her.

      
“So you want to go forward with the prosecution, and you don’t want your son back at home?”

      
“I told you already. That kid, he needs help. I can’t do it no more. I had enough a him, someone gotta do something.”

      
Back inside, I tried to explain to James that after speaking to his mother I didn’t think he would be allowed to go home. I tried to get him to give me an alternative address so I could assure the judge that he’d stay somewhere else, but James had no friends, no other relatives he thought might take him in, and he remained convinced that he could in fact go home. Worse, as I looked over his rap sheet it became clear that this was the third time this sort of thing had happened.

      
Called out before the judge, James stood blinking in the light, looking confused. His mother was in the audience watching as the assistant district attorney asked that James be held on fifteen hundred dollars’ bail. I urged the judge to release him --James, after all, was my client, and even though I was pretty sure his release would be bad for both his mother and him, release was what James wanted. And so, as his lawyer, release was what I asked for. The judge set five hundred dollars’ bail. I requested that James get evaluated and medicated while in. I also asked for mental observation.