INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice (9 page)

      
“Wassup, Feige?” he says, giving me a street handshake and a warm hug. He’s decked out in shiny black shoes, a perfectly pressed white shirt, and nicely tailored slacks. The only hint of his past is the thick gold chain around his finely sculpted neck.

      
Branford was fourteen when he swallowed the bullets, .22-caliber rifle shells --live, long, and lethal. Branford was running with an older crew then, selling drugs, robbing people, and running the streets. The shells matched a sawed-off that the crew had ditched just after a shooting not far from one of the most violent spots in Soundview --a blood-bathed strip of pavement perched at the top of the Oval at the intersection of Randall and Rosedale Avenues, and referred to by the neighborhood kids as Kozy Korner.

      
When the cops had rolled up, Branford had the bullets in his jacket pocket. So as the cops worked their way down the long line of kids, tossing one after the next, Branford, with a furtive look to his left, slid the bullets from his inside pocket and started downing them. It worked: they pinched another kid for the gun. Branford walked.

      
The X-rays were pretty astonishing --five rounds of live ammunition working their way through the duodenum of a fourteen-year-old boy. Even in the overcrowded emergency room overflowing with gunshot wounds and accident victims, the attending physician called the residents together to admire the film. “It was a dare,” Branford explained, opening wide his transfixing eyes. “I just wanted to win the bet.” The assembled doctors nodded, credulously accepting his explanation.
Stranger things have happened in the Bronx
, they probably thought to themselves.

      
A laxative and twenty-four hours later, Branford was back on the streets. The other kid wasn’t so lucky. He spent about a year in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. When you grow up in the Soundview projects, that’s the kind of lesson you learn, usually the hard way: the kids who’ll swallow metal walk; the ones who freeze go to jail.

      
Branford understood this. He was fearless, itinerant, and lethal. In time, though, the life catches up to you. Like virtually everyone else in the game, Branford eventually went to prison.

      
Once released, Branford came to work at the Bronx Defenders, devoted to the idea that he, unlike so many of his brothers from the street, was never, ever going back. Almost all ex-cons start out this way. Jimmy Seelandt, another ex-inmate we hired, did well for almost a year before lapsing back into addiction. By the end of his second summer of freedom, Jimmy was dead, a needle in his arm.

      
Freedom is tough.

      
In a certain way, it’s only the worst, most successful criminals that ever have a chance to make it in the straight world. The transition is so alienating, the cultural transformation so complete, that only those with unimaginable willpower really stand a chance. The temptations are everywhere, the signals are constantly crossed, and restraint has to replace reflex in a way few can manage. When quick thinking and violent reactions often save your life, it’s hard to hold your fist, let alone your tongue.

      
Branford, though, has made it more than five years, and though it hasn’t always been easy and he still has moments of thuggish stupidity --mostly in inappropriate clothing choices (it was years before we got him to surrender the huge, golden faux-diamond-encrusted hand-grenade pendant) and his religious insistence on driving a fancy car that he can’t really afford (it’s what he always dreamed about in prison) --Branford has actually succeeded in making the shift.

      
“What you got today, Feige?”

      
“The usual shit,” I tell him. “Three murders in Moge’s part though.”

      
“Yeah?”

      
“Yeah --and Clarence’s one of ’em,” I tell him.

      
Branford knows Clarence. Everyone in Soundview knows everyone.

      
Clarence Watkins is charged with murdering Shamar Hardy. Clarence was raised in 1715 Randall Avenue, two buildings away from the crack house where Bemo slept. He has a handsome, elegant face set off with big, expressive eyes. He is utterly innocent.

      
Number 1715 is one of the hulking buildings arrayed around the Soundview Oval. Clarence lives on the second floor, down a dirty, poorly lit hallway, in an apartment he shares with his mother. Clarence is not a particularly magnetic guy, but he’s not particularly offensive either. He doesn’t do drugs or run with gangs. He is sweet, shy, and almost demure. He knows the neighbors in the casual way of those who have lived in the same building for years. Clarence, though, as almost everyone who knows him will tell you, doesn’t talk much. He prefers to keep his own company. At thirty-seven years old, he has lived in Soundview for nearly his entire life.

      
Though a hustler for a short time in his youth, Clarence had pretty much avoided trouble as an adult. He’d joined the navy, and after his service, when he couldn’t find a job, he’d gone to Israel to proselytize. That didn’t work out so well, and after about eight months he returned to New York and to Soundview, where he was slowly working his way through college, holding down various jobs to get money for classes, and getting good grades.

      
Until he was arrested and charged with murder.

- - - -
 

      
A semiautomatic .380 is a small but deadly weapon. Petite enough to fit in the palm of a large hand, the .380 may not have the stopping power of a larger-bore handgun, but it is often more effective. When you divorce bullets and bodies from the pain and loss and suffering, the former causes the latter --weapon choice becomes a complicated compromise between stealth and lethality. In the Bronx, it’s not easy to sneak up on someone with a huge .44 Magnum in your hand --and certainly not if they’re also armed or anxious. The gun is just too big. A .44, and even its slightly smaller cousins, the 9mm, .357, or .45, is also likely to raise police suspicion.

      
A .380, by contrast, is a weapon of stealth. Easily concealable and capable of firing more rounds than a standard police revolver, a .380 has a reputation on the streets as a perfect mixture of small and dangerous. Generally lacking the power to fly completely through a body, smaller caliber bullets will often bounce around inside those unfortunate enough to be shot by them. The bullets are slowed by tissue and deflected by bones, and the wound tracks left by a .380 or its smaller cousins, the .22 and the .25, are often tangled freeways of physical destruction. This is especially true when a little slug winds up in someone’s head. The thick carapace of bone in the skull will absorb so much energy that the bullet can’t escape. The result: a deflection off the other side of the skull and scrambled brains as the bullet ricochets inside the skull cavity. Not surprisingly, mothers and doctors hate small-caliber weapons.

      
It was a .380 that killed Shamar Hardy in December of 2002. He was gunned down inside the cramped lobby of 1715 Randall Avenue --four feet from the mailboxes, eight from the elevator. The building lobby, like most in the projects, was built small, the architecture of low-income housing dictating that common areas be intentionally hard to hang out in. The foyer was barely large enough for four people to stand in, and when Shamar’s dead body came to rest there, it stretched half the distance from the vestibule doors to the elevators. Shamar took six shots: five to the body, one to the head. Shell casings were sprinkled around like metallic potpourri. His clothing soaked up much of the blood.

      
When the police came, just minutes after the shooting, the shooter was long gone. Knocking on doors, they got nowhere. The crime scene unit came up with nothing other than some spent shells. No one would admit to having seen anything. There were rumors that a couple of people had been seen running from the crime scene, but no one could provide much information, or if they could, they wouldn’t. That wasn’t terribly surprising to the night-watch detectives who showed up well after EMS had carted Shamar’s body away. In the projects, no one sees anything, or at least few people say they do. The fact that local drug dealers live by their own rules, and often die by their rivals’ guns, is a matter for gossip and speculation, but not, in most cases, court testimony.

      
Edmundo Rulans was drinking the night of the shooting. He and Mary, a friend who also lived in the building, had gone through several forty-ounce beers before hearing the shots. Edmundo isn’t the most stable of people --even according to his wife, he’s drunk much of the time, medicated nearly all of the time, and what she calls “very imaginative.” Still, what he told the police set everything in motion: “I saw Clarence shoot Shamar.” Those five words put Edmundo Rulans in the middle of a murder prosecution and sent Clarence Watkins to jail.

      
Edmundo’s statement to the detectives, made a week after the shooting and a week before he himself was busted for drugs, was the only thing that linked Clarence to the murder. The police, though, didn’t need anything else. Clarence Watkins was arrested and charged with Shamar Hardy’s murder.

      
There are times as a public defender when you can just smell innocence. It’s easy to spot weak cases or tenuous legal theories, and the naive among us regularly have the waft of innocence in their nose to begin with. But when you’ve been a public defender for a long time, the smell of innocence is rare and unwelcome. Clarence reeked of it.

      
Defending the guilty is easy. Not all clients are classically pleasant, of course. Some are defiant, others pathetic, some terribly needy, others inalterably enamored of the gangster life. But every client has a story --not a story about the crime or charges, but a life story that is by turns tragic, compelling, and unique --and getting to know clients makes them easy to defend. It’s easy to want to protect someone you know from the horror of prison --even if they’ve done something criminal.

      
But God help you when you have those innocent kids. Nothing good can happen when you represent an innocent client. If you beat the case or the client is acquitted, it is precisely what everyone expects --no joy there, just the relief associated with avoiding a terrible injustice. And if you lose, the case haunts you, so that in the middle of the night and until sunrise you wonder what you did wrong, what you forgot, what you could have said or done --how such a thing could have happened. It is a searing, guilty pain that can last for years, if not forever. It’s the innocent ones that drive you out of the work.

      
It is precisely this problem that leads many criminal defense lawyers to shut out questions of guilt or innocence. The responsibility for the innocent can simply be too much. Sometimes it’s better not even to wonder.

      
When Clarence sat down across the battered table from me in arraignments, not far from the stinking cells that hold the dozens of people waiting to see a judge for the first time, I knew this was going to be one of those “God help me” cases. It wasn’t his rap sheet that made me think he was innocent --he was a twice-convicted felon. And it wasn’t the strength of his defense either: “I was at home with my mother when the shooting happened” is one of the worst defenses imaginable. Everyone believes that family will lie to protect family, so jurors never believe the “I was at home with my mother” stuff. Often it’s better not even to introduce it. This is especially true when being at home puts you thirty seconds from the scene of a homicide.

      
Still, I believed Clarence almost immediately, and as I sat there, the woozy fear set in.

      
It was because Clarence smelled so innocent that I began to think for the first time since Gillian Sands that a grand jury would toss a murder charge. It wouldn’t be easy, but it seemed like a risk worth taking.

      
A grand jury story is like tissue paper --gossamer thin and nearly translucent. When done right it explains the client’s innocence and lets the jurors see the person inside. When done wrong, it’s a thunderously painful disaster. Take, for instance, Alonzo.

      
“I’m gonna tell ’em my side, yo!” Alonzo sputtered in the midst of a vitriol-laden tirade in which he attacked my legal acumen, impugned my manhood, and suggested rather stridently that I was seeking to “get paid” by pleading him guilty.

      
“Ah, right, Alonzo.”