Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 02 - FINAL ARGUMENT - a Legal Thriller (13 page)

“I had that Morgan appeal in my caseload for a long time. I’ve read that trial transcript three or four times, looking for error. You did a fine job in the first stage. Hard to argue with any of it. But in the punishment part, you were lousy. You just gave up.”

“I didn’t want the Morgan kid to die.”

“Well, that didn’t help me at all. My chief point on appeal was incompetent defense counsel in the sentencing phase, and one of the judges up in Tallahassee commented, off the record, ‘Mr. Hoad, just between us, it may have been the other way round.’ Another one told me, ‘We can see clearly why the trial judge didn’t accept the jury recommendation of a life sentence. A specific argument in favor of the death penalty, detailing the aggravating circumstances as per Florida Statute 921.141, was not advanced by counsel for the state.’ “

I sighed. “You had the appeal from the beginning?”

He nodded. “But I didn’t get over to Tallahassee until ‘81. I had half an hour to persuade the seven dwarfs that Morgan shouldn’t be strapped into an electric chair and jolted to death. Hopeless. Then we got turned down in the Eleventh Circuit. Didn’t have anything to take to the feds in Atlanta, but I went anyway. It’s a beautiful old court. Gives you a feeling that justice might be lurking. But it’s an illusion.” He peered at the dregs in his coffee cup. “One of the judges up there was sympathetic. He said, ‘Counsel, if we rule your way, won’t we also have to grant relief in a lot of other cases that present the same claim?’ “

“You had an answer for that, I hope.”

“I said, ‘Yes, probably you would, Your Honor, and probably you should.’ They kicked me out of there in under a hour. But that was already in ‘86. That’s the name of the game. Keep your man alive.” “Did you argue against Eglin’s override of the jury recommendation? That there was a rational basis for the jury sparing Morgan and that the trial judge abused his discretion?”

“Sure. It didn’t work. In 1987 a man named Beauford White was executed after the jury gave a twelve-to-zero recommendation for life. And there was an override on a guy named Dobbert in 1984, where they’d voted ten to two for life.”

I didn’t know what to say. But he did.

“Florida, Indiana, and Alabama are the only three states that have the
post-Furman
override provision. There’s been one override in Indiana, about six in Alabama, and more than ninety in Florida. This is the killer state.”

I told him about Jerry Lee Elroy’s 1979 deal in exchange for perjury.

“And the cop, Nickerson, he set that up?”

“If Elroy’s telling the truth.”

Hoad seemed excited. “Will your client testify to what he told you?”

“There’d have to be something in it for him. Elroy is not your basic altruist.”

He looked at his watch. “Damn, I have to get back to court and help put the judge to sleep again.”

Going up in the elevator, I said, “Why did you get so involved with this case?”

“Have you ever been to Raiford, Mr. Jaffe?”

“No.”

“An execution is not something you quickly forget. You know, they’re having one day after tomorrow. A local boy.”

“Who are they burning?”

“Sweeting. Remember him? Killed a pair of coeds at Jacksonville University eight years ago. Chopped them up, buried them down by the river, dug one up again because he had these dreams that she might still be alive and
blaming
him. Well, he dies on Saturday. You should go and watch Eric Sweeting pay for his sins. Then you’ll understand why I get involved.”

The elevator stopped at the second floor. The woman prosecutor was waiting for us. She said to Hoad, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

They talked, then Hoad returned, the prosecutor preceding him, heels clicking, moving briskly on strong legs into the courtroom. She carried her head high and didn’t smile. She was a good-looking woman, I thought.

“Making any progress?” I asked.

“Suarez is backing off,” Hoad said. “Looks like she’ll cut a deal. Fifteen years for armed robbery and attempted murder, concurrent. That’s not bad. I’m gonna tell my guy to go for it.”

“That’s Suarez? The woman you were talking to?” She was the assistant state attorney who had prosecuted Jerry Lee Elroy and let him go.

“Right.”

“I’ll hang out for a while,” I said. “Maybe we can all have lunch together.”

By noon the armed robbery case in Courtroom Four was history. The prosecutor, Muriel Suarez, and the public defender, Brian Hoad, shook hands, and both went off to lunch with me. I remembered the ritual. You laughed and didn’t talk much about the case, but you gossiped a lot about other cases, other lawyers, judges. In the courtroom the lawyers had snarled and yelled at each other, because that was the protocol—the adversarial relationship was the basis of the system and the only way approximate justice was achieved. Justice was not the same as mathematics.

That was why no one ever wanted a truly innocent client. That was nightmare. That was something you couldn’t joke about so easily.

In Worman’s Deli near the federal courthouse, seated at a table in the back, Suarez munched on a pickle. She said to Hoad and me, “I heard a good one yesterday. These two lawyers—civil lawyers”— grinning, showing badly capped white teeth—”are walking along the beach, and they see this gorgeous woman in a thong. One lawyer says, ‘Boy, I’d love to fuck her.’ Second lawyer says, ‘Yeah? Out of what?’ “

In this country, it seemed to me, lawyers had taken the place of Poles as the butt of jokes. The only difference was that we may have deserved it.

We had corned beef sandwiches for lunch, and when we were finished Hoad stood and said, “Folks, I have to fly. I’ve got a woman over in the jail pled guilty to possession of crack cocaine. It turned out to be wax, but the state attorney won’t let her rescind her plea. I have to get over there.”

“Speedily, I’d imagine,” I said. “I’ve got the check. I’ll call you about the
Morgan
file.”

When he had gone, Muriel Suarez said, “The name Morgan rings a bell.”

I brought her up to date.

“I remember the case. Floyd Nickerson told me Elroy was a creep, but a reliable creep. Gap in his tooth, right? I remember him. And Carmen Tanagra.”

The way she said that last name made me wait for something more. But there was nothing. Her eyes moved away, and she reached for her mug of Michelob.

“Carmen Tanagra was the other detective on the Zide case. She have anything to do with Elroy?” I asked.

“She was Nickerson’s partner. I knew her. But it was Nickerson who came to me and proposed the deal.”

“Tanagra still around?”

Muriel shook her head decisively. “Got more or less kicked out. She wasn’t a really smart cop. I mean, she was a good woman, but they corrupted her.”

Something clicked in my memory. “Was she by any chance involved in the Bongiorno episode? The cop who got the snitch to lie? And they found out in time?”

“Right. They nailed Carmen’s ass to the wall. She didn’t like it, so she quit.”

“To do what?”

“We’re not in touch,” Muriel said, and there was still an edge in her voice, something I didn’t understand.

Then she smiled and looked at me with more cheerful eyes. They were dark and Latin; they actually flashed, as in the old songs. Her parents were Cuban, she told me, and had brought her here as a baby. Once again I became aware of how attractive a woman she was.

“So, Mr. Jaffe, Mr. Civil Lawyer from Sarasota, what are you going to do about all this?”

“Morgan’s still alive. Barely. They’re going to execute him in April.”

“You think you could get him a new trial?”

“I could try for a stay of execution. That’s what I told Beldon.”

“And what did my lord and master say?”

“You can’t guess?”

“ ‘Morgan was guilty, he shot those people. Leave it be.’ “ She grinned. “You care if he lives or dies?”

“Yes, I damn well do,” I said, with a vigor that surprised me. And so I repeated it. “I care. And I’m going to do something about it.”

“You losing any sleep? That’s my standard. You hit the pillow and pass out, you’re okay.”

“Do you always hit the pillow and pass out?”

“Not lately,” Muriel said.

“What’s happened lately?”

“One of my first cases as a felony prosecutor was Eric Sweeting. The name mean anything to you?”

“Brian mentioned it,” I said. “They’re burning him Saturday morning down at Raiford.”

“Right. Unless the governor grants clemency.”

“Why are you losing sleep? Sweeting was guilty.”

“And the jury recommended death by a vote of nine to three.” Muriel drank some more beer. “But I’m going to be there when they pull the switch. Witness it, by God.”

“Why do you want to do
that?”

“Because when I did the case eight years ago, the morning before I asked the jury to bring in a verdict of death, I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Muriel, this is not a statistic you read in a book. This is a human being, with a mother and father and three sisters who love him, and you’re arguing in favor of his being killed. You’re not only trying to kill him, you’re condemning those other people to grieve for maybe the rest of their lives. If you haven’t got the guts to witness that execution and the moral fiber to face his family on the day it happens, you shouldn’t argue in favor of it.’ So I promised myself, if it ever happened, I’d go. Well, he’s exhausted his appeals quicker than most, and now it’s happening. The day after tomorrow. Only an hour away from where we sit. Unfortunately, I don’t have any excuse.”

I said nothing. Could I do that? No. That was one of the reasons I had quit the business of putting people in barred cells.

“If you recall,” Muriel Suarez went on, “it was a particularly heinous murder. So the first time I met Sweeting, I expected a monster. I gritted my teeth, walked into the jail with the public defender to meet this beast who chopped up his teenage victims. Eric was nineteen years old, weighed about a hundred and fifteen pounds, about the size of a jockey. Red hair, freckles, braces on his teeth. A polite, dumb country boy—looked like a cross between Alfred E. Neuman and a pit bull.”

“Retarded?”

“The defense tried to prove that. But it wasn’t so.”

“How do you account for his committing such a heinous murder?”

“I don’t,” Muriel said. “That was the scary part. But he did it. That was the true part. That’s all I had to know and believe, and I did. Like you knew and believed Morgan did it. Why is not our province.”

“It’s brave of you to go down there,” I said.

“I know,” Muriel said.

That evening, on the porch of his house in the black neighborhood where he’d always lived, Beldon Ruth brought out a pitcher of iced tea and settled down in a rocking chair to talk to me.

“I want to tell you a story,” he said. “When I was younger, I prosecuted a seventeen-year-old black kid. This kid rang a doorbell over on Blodgett, put a gun in some woman’s face, and said, ‘Gimme your money or I’ll blow your head off.’ She gave him the housekeeping money—so the kid came back a few weeks later and did it to her again. I was a brand-new assistant state attorney, and to me this kid was dangerous. Day before sentencing, the public defender in the case—your pal Kenny Buckram, fresh out of law school—gets the woman, the complainant, to sign a statement saying, ‘I’ve just heard about how this boy’s father sexually abused him and beat him with a wooden plank, and his mother was a drunk, and they wouldn’t let him go to school even though he got good grades. I think what he did to me was terrible, but now I can sort of understand why he did it. And I’d like to see him get another chance.’ “

Beldon poured the tea. Laurette, his wife, was inside the house, preparing dinner.

“Buckram gave this letter to Judge Fleming. You remember him? White-haired, crotchety good ole boy, rolled his own from those little sacks of Country Gentleman? Still around, although he’s older’n dirt. And Fleming sat in his chambers from noon to three, we’re all waiting, it’s hot enough for a hen to lay a hard-boiled egg. Finally Fleming hobbles out and says to Kenny, ‘If you’re right about this boy and I put him in prison and he gets ruined in there, his blood is on my hands. If you’re wrong, I’m gonna bring him back in my court and pound his knuckles to the floor with a sledgehammer, and he’s gonna do every goddam day of the ten years I could have handed him.’

“He gave the kid probation. Some people were shocked, including me. I said, ‘Judge, how can you do that? I mean, in conscience?’ Fleming sizzles and said, ‘Because, son, the people voted me into office, and I got the right to do it. Y’all don’t have the right to question me or my conscience.’ Stuck his finger right in my face like ‘Fuck you, Mr. Ruth.’

“That was twenty years ago. The kid graduated from college. The judge, Kenny, and I got a wedding announcement. Fleming took him off probation after five years. The kid went into computers, moved his family up to Atlanta. If Fleming had sent him to prison he’d be out there now, perpetrating more robberies and doing more time and butt-fucking people. Or he’d be dead. Do you know that twenty-five percent of black men in this country have done time, are doing time now, or are on probation? In the case I’m talking about, the system wouldn’t allow for the fact that a potentially good kid had done a violent crime. Fleming grasped it, and he was right.”

Beldon sat back on his porch and sucked iced tea through a child’s bent straw.

“You know what the point of that story is, Ted?”

“No, but I know if I sit here long enough on this porch, you’re sure as hell going to tell me.”

Beldon smiled. “In twenty-five years, that’s the only time I’ve ever known anyone to be right when they gave someone a second chance.
All the rest were disasters.
That’s a pretty piss-poor record, wouldn’t you say? And that’s why I still believe we’re on the side of the angels. And you defense guys, you do your job, but you don’t really help people. The PD’s office has got the right idea. Churn ‘em out, cut a deal. Hired lawyers waste time trying to show clients they’re earning their fee.”

“You’re a disgusting old cynic.”

“I’m a disgusting old realist.”