The Hanging Judge (48 page)

“Who had the inhuman idea that we could rationally select people for execution anyway? It’s lunacy.” Broadwater’s voice turned peevish. “Then they say to us trial judges, ‘Here, you manage it!’ ” He shook his head disgustedly and shuffled the pages of the newspaper. “And did you notice this article about the O’Connor boy?”

“Which one?”

“Edward, the middle kid. Says here he’s still positive Moon Hudson killed his mom, and he always will be.” Broadwater eyed the photograph of the boy and quoted. “ ‘Justice in America a joke, says victim’s son.’ ”

“Can’t please everybody.”

A nurse with short blonde hair hurried in to adjust her patient’s IV and check his vitals. She smiled briefly, but said nothing before disappearing. After she was gone, Norcross lifted his head slightly.

“Buzz me up a little, will you?”

Broadwater walked over and pushed the button to raise the top of the bed six inches. Despite his improvement, Norcross was, after three trips to the operating theater, still semi-mummified in bandages and warned to keep his movements to a minimum.

“After my last procedure, when I was still kind of a mess,” Norcross said after he resettled, “Claire got a little worked up. Said she wanted to see Mrs. Abercrombie boiled in oil, or worse. She got pretty upset. I was afraid the nurse was going to have to ask her to leave.”

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it? Human beings aren’t designed to handle this sort of situation as though it’s some form of arithmetic. It’s like asking a chimpanzee to make gingerbread. People don’t work that way.”

“Same as love, I guess,” Norcross said, drifting a bit and closing his one unbandaged eye. “Doesn’t follow instructions very well.”

“Drawing tidy boundaries around the irrational,” Broadwater muttered. “Might as well try putting pantyhose on a gust of wind.”

Claire entered the room with a leather satchel on one shoulder and let out a happy cry at seeing Broadwater. After a quick hug, she walked over and gave Norcross a kiss. “Hey, tiger.”

At this point, the blonde nurse rejoined them, carrying a food tray. Claire pulled up a chair next to Broadwater while the young woman organized her patient for his meal.

“I wanted to ask you a question,” Claire said, touching Broadwater’s arm. “I have a friend, or at least an acquaintance, at UMass. One of his students is threatening to sue him for sexual harassment.”

“Oh God, not one of those horrors.”

“He’s saying that what he did couldn’t be harassment, since the two of them did not actually, um … ” To Broadwater’s amusement, Claire hesitated. “ ‘Hook up,’ as my students say, until after he’d submitted her final grade. Does that make sense?”

“Not to me,” Broadwater said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “But I doubt I’ll be on the jury. There might be some group of twelve men and women that would swallow that argument, though. You never know. Who are the parties?”

“Forty-seven-year-old legal studies professor and a blonde undergrad with an inconsistent lisp.”

“Ouch,” Broadwater said. “I’d get out my checkbook.”

“Salt and pepper,” Norcross said, chewing. He wiggled his eyebrows at Claire.

As the nurse departed, Broadwater tried to work through what this exchange might mean. His friend and his lady had their own little jokes. Then he noticed the time and jumped up. “I’d better run, or I’ll be late for the memorial.”

“Oh dear. Who died?” Claire asked.

Norcross swallowed and shook his head. “One of the lawyers who tried the
Hudson
case, Bill Redpath. It was very sudden, very sad.”

“A phenomenal trial lawyer, and a good man,” Broadwater said. “His secretary found him sitting at his desk with a draft motion to suppress and a cigarette still burning in the ashtray. He’d just gotten the news about the
Hudson
dismissal. Half of Boston will be at the church.”

The three of them fell into a moment of silence for William P. Redpath Jr., defense attorney. While they paused, a car moved by outside the window, playing hip-hop. The insistent rhythm rose, hit a crescendo, and faded into an addictive refrain that stuck in the mind, like the arc of a particularly effective cross-examination.

As Broadwater said his good-byes, Claire had to resist the temptation to kiss the man on the top of his shiny bald head. Time and again, his kindness had kept them afloat. After he left, Claire pulled her chair closer to David’s bed. She sighed and took his hand.

“I have to do this right away or I won’t manage it, ” she said. “We’ve been talking to your doctors, and there’s some lousy news. I’d like to get through this without another one of my famous meltdowns.” She took a deep breath, gripped David’s hand, and let it all out at once. “You’ve lost most of the vision in your left eye for good. There’s nothing more the surgeons can do. They’re at an end point.”

“Huh.”

“The bullet was small, .22 caliber, and it hit at an angle, so it mostly just sort of dug a furrow in your skull. In a few days, they’ll have the bandages off. But your eye …” She steadied herself. “With the powder flash. There was too much damage.”

“Is it going to keep giving me …” David tugged at the sheet. “Will it keep hurting like this?”

“No. They don’t think so. You’ll just … in that one eye …”

“I’ll be sporting a patch, like Jack Sparrow.”

“If you like.” Claire lifted his hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry, but I’m just glad the eye is the worst. It’s been so scary.”

The machine beside David’s bed whirred. A dolly rumbled down the hallway outside the room. Claire heard a mingling of voices calling back and forth unintelligibly.

“Guess I won’t be making the bigs now,” David said finally.

“Probably not. Be hard to catch up with the high heater.”

They sat together without speaking. Claire looked around and noticed that more flowers had arrived since her last visit. The room was beginning to smell like a florist’s shop.

“May I touch your nose?” she asked.

David let go of Claire’s hand and interlaced his fingers on his stomach. He breathed deeply, getting ready.

“All right,” he said, “go ahead, but control yourself.”

Claire ran the tip of her finger down the bridge of David’s nose and drew a slow circle around his mouth.

“A patch,” she murmured, “might give you just that touch of continental panache that is the hallmark of tall, awkward guys from Wisconsin.” She sat back. “The girls of Green Bay will go apeshit.”

In the long silence that followed, Claire could not tell whether David was taking the time to absorb the bad news or drifting off to sleep again. His unbandaged eye remained closed for a long minute. Finally, he spoke without opening it, and Claire realized he had been awake the whole time.

“You know Lady Justice?”

“The long-waisted babe with the great tomatoes and the scales?”

“That’s the one.” The edges of his mouth turned down as something struck him. “I wonder whether I’d have gone into law if Justice had been a short fat guy with hair on his shoulders.”

“I bet not.”

David turned his head slowly and rolled his eye toward Claire, crinkling it into a smile. “Those were the very first words you spoke to me. Remember?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, maybe the blindfold hides the fact that Lady Justice has only got one good eye. She has to do her best with just the one.” He sighed drowsily. “Considering everything, she does okay.” There was another pause, and then he added, softly, as he faded, “The point is to try … as hard as you can. Come here for a sec.”

Claire stood and leaned over him, putting her face close.

“I love you,” David said. “I can see that plenty clearly.” His face relaxed; sleep was overtaking him.

“That’s nice,” Claire said and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Tell me again some time when you’re not on so much Demerol. Rest now. I have papers to grade.”

She moved her chair back to the far wall so as not to disturb David, settled herself, and pulled a sheaf of papers out of her bag. The grading occupied her for about thirty seconds. Then, she put the papers on the floor, pulled out a Kleenex, and dabbed her eyes.

In a few minutes, David was asleep, breathing regularly, and Claire leaned back in the chair, letting her eyes drift over the vases of flowers from David’s various friends, judicial colleagues, and old law partners. The summer sunlight, filtered by the mini-blinds, made the room seem to glow, and the current of air-conditioning caused a few curling flower petals to flutter. One stray band of gold made its way across the wall and touched a chrome table in the far corner, where the Knight and the Wife of Bath sat side by side, and a cluster of red, white, and blue balloons tied to one of the metal legs bounced gently against the ceiling.

68

O
n March 18, 1984, Governor Michael S. Dukakis issued a proclamation exonerating Dominic Daley and James Halligan. Their prosecution, the document read, “was infected by such religious and ethnic prejudice” that they had been denied a fair trial.

Photograph by George Peet

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
want to thank my earliest readers and supporters, Ted and Esther Scott; Julie Perkins; Nancy Winkelman; Carolyn Mitchell; Jeni and Scott Kaplan; Sheila Graham-Smith; Dr. Peter F. Shaw; and Dr. Randall H. Paulsen. My gratitude extends particularly to my author friends, whose guidance has been so important and reassuring: the poet Ellen Bass, Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd, Jonathan Harr, Elinor Lipman, Anita Shreve, Joe McGinniss, Joseph Kanon, John Katzenbach, Madeleine Blais, and Suzanne Strempek Shea. Others whose advice was particularly helpful include the literary agent William Reiss, David Starr of Springfield’s
Republican
newspaper, and David’s friend Loring Mandel. Boston’s Grub Street provided invaluable help through its annual Muse & the Marketplace seminars.

I also thank judicial colleagues who have read the draft, including my former boss and now dear friend, US District Judge Joseph L. Tauro, as well as Chief Judge Patti B. Saris, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, Judge Rya W. Zobel, Judge Denise Jefferson Casper, and Judge William G. Young. My thanks also go to my former colleague Judge Nancy Gertner, currently a professor at Harvard Law School.

Several of my law clerks and coworkers at the US District Court in Springfield read drafts of the book—during their time, I must emphasize,
outside
working hours. These include Luke Ryan; Emma Quinn-Judge; Ruth Anne French-Hodson; Beth Cohen (now of Western New England University School of Law); my judicial assistant of nearly thirty years, Elizabeth Collins; and the court’s supervising pretrial services officer, Irma Garcia-Zingarelli. Stephanie Barry of the
Republican
newspaper helped by reading the draft in light of her unique knowledge of the Springfield community. My wonderful friend Bill Redpath, who does not smoke and is not an attorney (though he’d be outstanding if he were), kindly lent me his name.

The early support of Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education was crucial in getting the book into the light of day. I am especially grateful to Jack Reilly, Maryanne G. Jensen, Annette Turcotte, and Richard Millstein, and particularly to Ben Monopoli for his sharp-eyed editing and helpful suggestions.

All the people at my publisher, Open Road Integrated Media, have been smart, warm, fun, and full of good ideas. The opportunity to work with someone like Jane Friedman, with her intelligence, vision, and experience, has been awesome in every sense. I also offer my thanks to Tina Pohlman, Nina Lassam, and Luke Parker Bowles, consummate professionals who have steered the book through its production and promotion. I am most especially thankful to Maggie Crawford, my editor, whose tactful, persistent, and good-humored support has done so much to improve the manuscript and make her dear to me.

My literary agent, Robin Straus, deserves her own paragraph, and more. She has been, at every step, a supremely competent advocate, a knowledgeable adviser, and the best of friends. I am so grateful to her.

My parents, Ward and Yvonne Ponsor, and my sister, Valerie Pritchard, were kind enough to trudge through the manuscript when it was barely embryonic. Their loving support has kept me working. My gratitude to them, for everything, is beyond words.

The tragic story of Dominic Daley and James Halligan has been told and retold over the years. My best resource about the incident has been the Honorable W. Michael Ryan, retired first justice of the Northampton Division of the District Court Department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judge Ryan not only provided detailed comments on the draft, but he put his extensive collection of materials on the events of 1805–06 into my hands. This is not intended to be a scholarly work, so I will not canvass all the references I have dipped into. Three articles were most helpful: Massachusetts Superior Court Associate Justice Robert Sullivan’s “The Murder Trial of Halligan and Daley—Northampton, Massachusetts 1806” in the
Massachusetts Law Quarterly
(1964) at 211–224; James M. Camposeo’s “Anti-Catholic Prejudice in Early New England: The Daley-Halligan Murder Trial” in the
Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts
, Vol. VI, No. 2 (Spring 1978) at 5–17; and James C. Rehnquist’s “The Murder Trial of James Halligan and Dominic Daley” in
Legal Chowder: Lawyering and Judging in Massachusetts
, edited by Hon. Rudolph Kass (retired) (Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, Inc., Boston, 2002), at 232–235. Particularly helpful was a detailed document, lent to me by Judge Ryan, “Report of the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan,” compiled anonymously by “a Member of the Bar” and published by S. & E. Butler in Northampton. I also enjoyed and found helpful Michael C. White’s fictional treatment of the story in
The Garden of Martyrs
(St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005).