The 37th Amendment: A Novel (19 page)

Jordan shook her head. “I think it’s too risky,” she said. “What if somebody traces the phone line back to your number?”

“What phone line?” Ted said smugly.

“Isn’t this a dial-up connection to my office?”

“Nope.”

“What is it, encrypted wireless?”

“Nope.”

“Well, how is it connected to my office?”

“It’s not connected to your office.” Ted was enjoying this immensely.

“It’s obviously connected to my office,” Jordan said. “This is my computer.”

Ted couldn’t suppress a grin. “Pretty good, huh?” he asked.

Jordan swiveled on her bar stool to face Ted. “Would I rather not know?” she asked.

Ted laughed. “It’s a copy. It’s an exact duplicate of the entire system. Everything that was accessible from your office computer, every document, every file, everything that was there as of 7:30 last night has been copied. There it is.” He pointed to a box of disks on the bar. “And there it is.” He ran his hand along a tangle of thick gray cables and pointed into the ballroom, where the last light of the sunset was streaming through the glass doors and landing in gold rectangles on the wall. There, lined up in a row across the scuffed dance floor, were sixteen servers humming like a kazoo band.

Jordan was pale. “You stole the files?” she whispered.

“Absolutely not,” Ted said. “I arranged to have a protection copy made of the last full back-up.”

Jordan nodded. “Thank you for clearing that up,” she said.

“It’s a secret copy of the back-up copy,” Ted explained. “Nobody knows it exists.”

Jordan squinted at him. “A back-up like you use after a crash?” she asked.

“Exactly,” Ted said triumphantly.

“But how did it get on this computer?” Jordan was nervous.

“I have a friend who’s a data recovery specialist.”

A flash of recognition crossed Jordan’s face. “RCN Data Systems,” she said. “That girl you took to the basketball game.”

Ted nodded.

“None of my business,” Jordan said. “As long as you can trust her.”

“We can trust her,” Ted said.

“So did she make this copy at the Criminal Courts building?”

 “No!” Ted said. “She made the copy at the place where they send the back-ups in case there’s a fire. Nobody knows about it.”

Jordan nodded. “And is this equipment all ‘borrowed’ from the same place?”

“No!” Ted said. “I bought it this morning. It’s lucky the D.A.’s office uses such outdated technology. Julia got everything on only sixteen of these new servers. Your office has about 275 of the old kind.”

Jordan swiveled to face the screen again. She placed her hands flat on the bar. “So nothing is stolen,” she said, “and nothing is missing.”

“Correct,” Ted said.

“And I can print any document from the files and give it to Dobson Howe, and the computer network at the office will have no record that the document was retrieved.”

“Correct,” Ted said.

Jordan sat very still for a moment. “Let me make sure I understand this,” she said. “Assume the mayor’s goon squad suspects me of leaking the Dency medical report. I print up some documents from other cases right here in your house. I give them to Dobson Howe and he gives them to the newspapers. The mayor’s goon squad thinks, ‘Aha, the leaks must be coming from Rainsborough.’ They check my network traffic records and they see I never retrieved any of those documents. They figure they must have been wrong about me on the Dency report, too. And then I’m in the clear.”

“That’s the plan,” Ted said. He handed her his wireless. “Call Dobson Howe,” he said. “Tell him you’ve reconsidered.”

Jordan nodded. “Is there anything behind this bar?” she asked. “I’m drinking ’way not enough.”

Monday, July 10, 2056

“Goddammit!” screamed the mayor into the phone. She slammed the newspaper down onto her desk, sending papers flying. “What am I paying you for?”

“We’ve got some very good leads.” The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Gregory Ulrich.

“Listen to this!” Mayor Martinez continued, picking up the newspaper again. “‘D.A.’s Memo Proves Robbery Suspect Framed,’” she read aloud, “‘Los Angeles District Attorney Thomas J. Huron knew that a witness’s testimony in a rape trial last year was tainted and ordered prosecutors to conceal that information from defense attorneys, according to a memorandum obtained by the Times.’”

“I...” Ulrich began.

The mayor interrupted him. “‘It is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the beleaguered D.A.’s office. In the last two weeks, fifteen criminal convictions and two executions have been called into question by the disclosure of new information.’ Two weeks, Gregory,” the mayor ranted. “Fifteen leaks! And you still have no idea who is doing this to me!”

“Mayor Martinez,” Ulrich said tensely, “I’ve got people living in the basement of the courthouse building. Every time there’s a leak, they check to see who retrieved the document from the servers. So far, they haven’t found that any of the documents were retrieved. That means the leaks were probably copies of documents from paper files that could have been printed months or years ago. We have to investigate every person who could have handled those files. This is going to take time.”

“There is no time!” the mayor shouted. “Are you seeing what’s going on here?” She picked up the newspaper again. “‘District Attorney Huron has said that all cases will be reviewed and he will ask for new trials where appropriate. However, calls for his resignation have been increasing. Governor Mike Hughes’ office released a statement this week expressing ‘grave concern’ about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles. Mayor Taylor Martinez, whose law-and-order reputation has been tarnished by the growing scandal, last week vowed a full investigation into the policies and practices of the Los Angeles Police Department.’”

“And we are investigating,” Ulrich said dryly.

“Gregory,” the mayor said. Her voice was quietly intense. “I am not paying you $5 million so I can open the paper every day and read how ineffectual I am.”

“Five million?”

“Yes. Forget the computers and get your hands dirty. Someone must know who’s doing this.”

Dobson Howe’s news conference was a roaring success, and he hadn’t even said anything yet.

Employees at the Vanhorne Plaza hotel had scrambled to relocate the event to a larger ballroom after the list of media organizations requesting attendance surpassed two hundred. Risers had been set up at the back of the ballroom for three rows of cameras.

There was no longer anyone in America who had not heard of Dobson Howe.

At precisely 1:00 p.m., Howe walked purposefully to the podium. The room fell silent. “Good afternoon,” he boomed. “Over the past several weeks, we all have been disturbed by revelations that the criminal justice system in this city has been manipulated to convict individuals of crimes which they did not commit. To this point, we know that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has wrongly put thirteen people in prison and two in their graves.

“I am not here today to announce the filing of lawsuits on behalf of the victims and their families. I will leave that to others. Nor am I here to condemn the men and women of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, or the Los Angeles Police Department. It is the law itself, not those who practice it or enforce it, that is to blame.”

Howe nodded to a video engineer seated to the side of the small stage. A moment later the lights in the ballroom dimmed. Video screens in the walls came to life as a bright blue square emblazoned with white letters filled each screen. It read, “The 37th Amendment: Justice Denied.”

Dobson Howe’s voice was even more impressively booming as it played back from the video recording. “There was a time in this country when criminal trials took months and appeals took years; when organized criminal gangs terrorized our cities while law enforcement officers investigated each other for insensitivity; when the government’s answer to the rising crime rate was a clever statistical manipulation that appeared to be a lower rate of crime but was, in fact, a lower rate of crime reporting.

“Public disgust with what was perceived to be a system out of control reached critical mass in 2014 when the United States Supreme Court reversed the conviction of confessed mass murderer John Rankin.”

Rankin’s homely face stared down at the room from the video screens.

“The Court ruled 5-4 that Mr. Rankin was entitled to a new trial because Detroit police had conducted a warrantless search of his car inside the garage of his apartment building. Justice Spizer, writing for the majority, said the search would have been allowable had it occurred on the street, but that the garage of a residence was not a public place. In dissent, Justice Welton noted that the garage was open to all the residents of the building. Justice Spizer responded that to protect a vehicle from a warrantless search in the garage of a home but not an apartment building amounted to illegal discrimination against renters.

“Further, the Court ruled that the interrogation of Mr. Rankin, conducted after he waived his right to have an attorney present, was illegal because Mr. Rankin was not mentally capable of understanding his rights at the time of his arrest. Therefore, Mr. Rankin’s confession had been improperly admitted into evidence.

“Justice Spizer concluded that the state of Michigan had deprived Mr. Rankin of his right to due process of law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Mr. Rankin got a new trial. Without the automatic rifle that had been recovered from his vehicle, or the ballistics tests that matched it to the bullets in the victims, or the transcript of the police interrogation, or the signed confession, prosecutors were unable to prove that John Rankin was the man who had leaned out of a car window and opened fire in a shopping mall parking lot three days before Christmas, killing twenty-three people—fifteen adults and eight children—and wounding dozens more. Mr. Rankin was acquitted. He was shot dead a week later by the anguished father of two of the victims, who then turned the gun on himself.

“It was this tragic case that led to the passage of the 37th Amendment, known at the time as the Justice Reform Amendment.

“The 37th Amendment repealed the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The original clauses provided that no person could be deprived of life, liberty or property ‘without due process of law.’ The new clauses stated that no person could be deprived of life, liberty or property ‘in violation of the law of the land.’

“The significance of this apparently minor change in the language was monumental. It effectively overturned a list of landmark Supreme Court decisions that had found in the due process clause a federal guarantee of fundamental fairness in state law and procedures. This opened the way for state governments to operate without federal oversight. Defenders said this was simply a return to the original intent of the Founding Fathers, but others feared the nation would collapse into fifty-one self-contained fragments, accountable to no central authority and unrestricted by the federal Bill of Rights.

“Of course, none of this mattered to the grieving families, to their community, or to the nation that watched it all on television. A mass murderer’s conviction had been overturned because the Supreme Court said he had not received due process.

“Such was the level of public outrage that the Justice Reform Amendment passed both houses of Congress by majorities in excess of seventy-five percent and was ratified within six months by every state except Massachusetts. Many people argued at the time that the new 37th Amendment was reckless and overbroad and would one day result in catastrophic violations of the rights of American citizens.

“It is clear, that day has arrived.”

The lights came up.

“And now,” Dobson Howe said from the podium, “I’ll take your questions.”

A cluster of camera crews was staked out in front of Dobson Howe’s building when his driver brought him to the office the next morning. Howe had barely stepped from the car when a beautiful Asian woman in heavy makeup jumped into his path.

“Mr. Howe, Akira Iochi, Paramount News. May we have your reaction to the overnight polls?”

“Haven’t seen them,” Howe said, stopping abruptly before he ran the woman down.

“Among people who saw your news conference last night, forty-one percent agree that the 37th Amendment should be repealed,” the reporter recited. “Twenty-two percent disagree and thirty-six percent are unsure.”

“I’m pleased that people saw the news conference,” Howe said. “I have always believed that the American people are fair and capable of exercising sound judgment when the facts are put before them. And that is what I will continue to do.” He nodded to the reporters and walked through the entrance to the building. The camera crews followed him into the lobby. The echoes of their footsteps on the marble floor sounded like a stampede.

“Mr. Howe,” called another reporter, “Are you planning to run for governor?”

“No,” said Howe.

“Mayor?” the reporter persisted.

“No,” said Howe. They reached the elevator. Another lawyer from his firm, already inside, held the door. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Howe said to the crowd. “I’ll have a statement for you at five o’clock today.” The elevator doors closed.