My Beloved World Part 19

Maybe, I thought, I am ready to go out there.

CHAPTER Twenty

YALE WAS ONE of the very first law schools in the country to admit women, and yet every point in the building seemed to be separated by miles of corridor from the nearest women's rest-room. On a typical trek, of an early evening, taking a break from the library and a treatise on tax law, I pa.s.sed the open door of a conference room. At the back, I spotted a bonanza-a table of cheese and crackers and cheap wine, the kind of arrangement that pa.s.ses for hospitality in university budgets and a free meal in the straitened lives of graduate students. The makeshift sign on the door read, "Public Service Career Paths." A panel of public-interest lawyers were pitching alternatives to private practice to a thin scattering of third-years. Just then, the moderator was introducing the final speaker, a district attorney from New York whose name I didn't recognize. He seemed none too comfortable at the podium and promised to be brief. I decided it was worth sticking around until he finished so I could make for the cheddar cubes.

My ears perked up when I heard him say that he had a couple hundred a.s.sistants who all tried cases. "Within your first year on the job," he said, "you'll be going to trial, with full responsibility for how you develop and present your own cases. You'll have more responsibility than you would have at any other job coming out of law school. At your age now, you'll be doing more in a courtroom than most lawyers do in a lifetime." I liked what I was hearing. At Paul, Weiss, I had watched an a.s.sociate who was thoroughly steeped in the details and strategy of a case brief a senior partner who then did a star turn in the limelight before a judge. The a.s.sociate was too diplomatic and well compensated to admit to any demoralized frustration, but clearly work in a big firm meant laboring in the shadows for years.

When the presentation was over and we descended on the food, I found myself in line next to the New York district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, a legend unbeknownst to me. His halting, raspy voice was no different talking face-to-face. This was not a man who relished chitchat. But being capable of talking up anybody, I proceeded to ask him to tell me a bit about his background, what he'd liked about each of his jobs. Maybe he was used to talking to ignorant students; he didn't betray any hint of annoyance. He asked me what my plans were-not sure, maybe a small firm, still exploring-and then he said, "Why don't you come by and see me? I have some openings in my schedule tomorrow."

Sure enough, the next morning at the Career Office, there were still interview slots open: among Yalies, the DA's Office was not the most sought-after place to work. But I was surprised to find my name already penciled in. In fact, Bob Morgenthau had come by, pulled my resume, and already placed a call to Jose Cabranes, whom he knew well from their work together on the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. The interview was actually enjoyable and ran a half hour longer than scheduled. At the end he invited me to visit his office in New York.

"You're interviewing where?" said Rudy, aghast. Even Jose, who had given me a glowing recommendation, seemed disappointed that I found the DA's Office more interesting than a clerkship. "Do you have any idea what they pay?" Rudy demanded. I did, but I had never seen money as the definitive or absolute measure of success. Sure, I wouldn't make much compared with an a.s.sociate at a major firm. But my starting salary would still be more than what my mother had ever made as a nurse, which to t.i.ti Aurora, who worked as a seamstress, had always seemed lavish.

In the end, as I usually do, I trusted my instincts, although I was a bit surprised where they were leading me. I knew I wasn't ready for a big firm, but apart from applying for a job at the State Department, I had not devoted much thought or effort to public-interest options. Nor was I encouraged to: unlike today, there were few pro bono law clinics at Yale then; I knew of one on prison disciplinary hearings, one of the few settings in which students were allowed to practice, another on landlord-tenant disputes, and a third on denial of veterans' benefits. But they were not attracting many from our hyper-ambitious cohort. Perhaps Bob Morgenthau's job stirred a memory of what had first intrigued me about being a lawyer: the chance to seek justice in a courtroom. Despite my success in the trial advocacy program and in reaching the semifinals of the Barristers' Union mock trials, Perry Mason was a vision that had been eclipsed at Yale amid the immersion in case law and theory and self-doubt. Now, it seemed, that untutored fantasy was beckoning me again, conspiring with a bit of free cheddar to decide my fate.

CHAPTER Twenty-One

AT THE NEW YORK District Attorney's Office, "duckling" is the term of art for a rookie a.s.sistant DA, and in the mouth of a senior prosecutor it expresses gallows humor more than endearment. Forty of us tender, fuzzy types were about to be crunched in the jaws of a huge, complex, and fast-moving machine. Guidance of senior colleagues would add seasoning over time, but meanwhile we would need every sc.r.a.p of what scant training would be provided during our first few weeks. I wasn't the only one among us with minimal background in criminal law-just the required basic course at Yale and the mock trials. But even if I had devoted all my studies to the finer points of the field, there remained essential lessons inaccessible in the cla.s.sroom or from books and acquired only through the fiery baptism of the courtroom. I was about to get that baptism.

New York City in 1979 had been struck by a crime wave of tsunamic proportions. Mayor Ed Koch had been elected two years before on a promise to restore order after a summer of widespread looting, vandalism, and arson triggered by a ten-day blackout. If the immediate threat to public safety had lifted after the lights and air-conditioning came back on, New Yorkers still had reason to live in a state of diffuse chronic fear. The city's fiscal troubles summed a decade of economic doldrums nationwide, and severe budget cuts were preventing the DA's Office, as well as the police department, from adding enough staff to cope with an avalanche of criminal cases. To make matters worse, rising tensions brought a rising number of police brutality complaints.

Most of the new ADAs were a.s.signed immediately to one of six trial bureaus, each with up to fifty prosecutors of varying levels of experience, along with support staff. We would cut our teeth on misdemeanors: petty thefts, minor a.s.saults, prost.i.tution, shoplifting, trespa.s.s, disorderly conduct, graffiti ... Later we would be promoted to felonies, and we might move to one of the bureaus that investigate fraud, racketeering, public corruption, s.e.x crimes, or other specialized crimes. There was no choice in the matter, we were told. Soldiers go where they're a.s.signed. Ducklings, too, apparently.

First we had to get to know the procedural maze. If a defendant is arraigned on an unsworn complaint, how many days do you have to fix it? Failing that, how do you handle a preliminary probable cause hearing? We also went out on patrols to get a sense of how cops do their job, the routines and the issues we needed to be sensitive to. Every sixth day we were in the complaint room for a nine-hour shift, interviewing arresting officers and witnesses to draw up the initial charges on each case. Every street arrest in the city funneled into the system through this room, which was not unlike a hospital ER on a rough night. Decisions made quickly would have a long tail of repercussions. It looked like chaos, but there was order and discipline under the surface, and that combination appealed to me. So did the pressure to improvise, the comfort of clear rules, and the inspiration of a higher good.

The way Bob Morgenthau, the Boss, structured the office to meet extraordinary challenges was a model of efficiency and integrity for jurisdictions across the country. All of our case work, for example, was organized horizontally, with cases a.s.signed the same prosecutor from beginning to end, rather than handed off up the hierarchy. The Boss also pioneered collaborative efforts with counterparts in other boroughs, as when the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor was established to coordinate investigations citywide so that prosecutions were not restricted by boundaries that the drug rings crossed routinely. He set up units for s.e.x crimes, Chinese gangs, consumer fraud-each a center of specialized expertise and methods of investigation.

But great ideas couldn't shift the reality that the city was strapped for cash. The physical plant creaked under the burden of incessant use, our headquarters a warren of small rooms, the larger of which had three or four metal desks squeezed into them. My first office was an anteroom, actually more of a doorway, into which a desk had somehow been implanted. Eventually, turnover would deposit me in slightly more commodious shared s.p.a.ce, though my desk still blocked the entrance, behind which door was wedged an old couch, horsehair poking out of cracked leather. Papers were piled everywhere, stacks of files, boxes of evidence, somebody's lunch. In the summer the air-conditioning failed constantly and sweat soaked through my suit, while in winter the same rooms became drafty caverns in which I might need to keep my coat and gloves on all day. The lights were dim, the electrical cords were frayed, and the plumbing leaked-sometimes into the courtrooms.

Of all the resources in short supply, time was the shortest, and mine perhaps more than most. Kevin had been accepted into the graduate program in biochemistry at Princeton, so we had moved there from New Haven. After our cozy nest on Whitney Avenue, we found ourselves living near campus in graduate student housing that had been built during and after World War II to shelter the families of returning soldiers. I was commuting by train between Princeton and Manhattan, sometimes up to two hours each way. I left home at dawn and rarely got back before nine. Kevin cooked and we'd share a late dinner every night, though I was routinely dead on my feet until the weekend brought a brief respite. I made it through the workweek on cans of Tab and my own adrenaline.

If the long hours were straining our marriage, I was too preoccupied to notice. What I did see, in the small corner of my awareness not cluttered with cases, procedures, and the minutiae of criminal law, was Kevin finally doing work that excited him and earning recognition for it. He was thrilled to be at Princeton again, this time on his own account, and he was making new friends. He was thriving at his own thing, just as I was at mine.

IN THE PRACTICE HEARINGS that were part of our training, I was cast in the role of the defense attorney. Somehow by pure instinct I realized a witness implied vaguely that she had seen something, though she avoided stating it outright. On cross-examination, I asked an apparently tangential question that led her to describe the precise conditions that would have made a direct line of sight impossible for her. The senior a.s.sistant DA leading the exercise came up to me afterward. "I've been doing this training for years. You're the first person who ever spotted a hole like that in a witness's story and then pried it open." It was fortunate that thinking on my feet in such a situation came naturally to me, because I was the first of the ducklings to have a case a.s.signment come to trial. It happened faster than I thought possible, just weeks after I'd started in August. None of us had expected to enter a real courtroom before the new year.

The defendant was a young black man who'd been charged with disorderly conduct for getting involved in a street fight. He was a college student, a pretty good one too, and from a solid family; at arraignment he pleaded not guilty. His counsel was Carole Abramowitz, a seasoned Legal Aid attorney, who had defended felony cases for years. I don't know why she was handling a misdemeanor that day, but she was determined to get the case thrown out, knowing full well that any plea to the least of charges could destroy a black kid's future. That was all I knew about the case, and I was learning it on the spot as the defense attorney and I stood before Judge Joan Carey in the first conference. Normally, I would have written up the complaint myself and interviewed the arresting officer, but this case had been rea.s.signed after the departure of my predecessor, one file in a big stack of them that had been dumped on my desk and that I hadn't so much as opened yet.

"We're ready to go to trial," said Carole Abramowitz.

"We'll start Monday," said Judge Carey.

"But, but, but, but ...," I stammered. It was then Friday. I needed some time to prepare. I needed to find the witnesses. This was a real trial!

Judge Carey looked at me without pity. She complained that we weren't getting dispositions fast enough. "You'll start the wah-deer on Monday or I'll dismiss the case."

At least that's what I heard. I ran upstairs to Katie Law, adviser for the ducklings in our trial bureau. Katie was a Harvard graduate who had returned to law school after raising three daughters and getting a divorce. A southern belle from a wealthy family, she certainly didn't need to be in the trenches at the DA's Office, but she was pa.s.sionate about community service. And she was infinitely patient with beginners.

"Katie, what does 'wah-deer' mean?"

She shook her head in despair. "They're sending babes into the wolves' den." It wasn't my fault, she a.s.sured me: not everything could be covered in our two-week training course. It was expected the rest would be learned by example and osmosis during the months new ADAs typically worked in the complaint room covering the pretrial motions before one of their cases went to trial. It was just my bad luck getting there so fast. Katie spent the remainder of the afternoon explaining the voir dire process and jury selection, the strategies for making the most of this chance not just to disqualify unfavorable jurors but to establish a rapport with those selected. Public awareness of voir dire is much greater these days thanks to media coverage of high-profile trials, to say nothing of television court dramas, and the science of juror selection that has sp.a.w.ned an industry of consultants. But when I joined the DA's Office, it was all rather arcane stuff, especially since New York State is one of the few jurisdictions where lawyers can get involved in the process, which in many states, as in the federal system, is handled by judges.

I wish I could say that my first real trial was a triumph of spirit over experience, but in fact Carole Abramowitz mopped the floor with me, and then bad luck wrung me out. The courtroom was a repurposed office with a few rows of rickety wooden folding chairs serving as a jury box and gallery, and the bench was of painted plywood. In the middle of my summation, everyone's attention suddenly turned elsewhere: the defendant's grandfather clutching his chest in a sweat, the old man's daughter panicking beside him. The judge called a recess; the paramedics came trooping in. And by the time it was clear that the poor man was all right, an hour of confusion had intervened before I could continue my remarks. The jury took less time than that to find the boy not guilty.

Although the grandfather's cardiac crisis seemed at the time the ultimate fluke, soon I would discover that among trial lawyers it was a familiar variant in the canon of mishaps that occurred so frequently as to have been enshrined in the lore and legend of the courtroom. Some view these events as rites of pa.s.sage for a young lawyer, although their recurrence is likely due to a predictable degree of coincidence in the ways people react to the stress of a trial. In any case, there could not have been a better lesson in the necessity of being ready for any contingency. If anything redeemed that day, it came in the swell of pride I felt when I first introduced myself to the jury-"I am Sonia Sotomayor de Noonan, and I represent the people of the County of New York"-a moment of grace that would repeat, and ground me, at the opening of every subsequent trial I prosecuted.

If my first trial was a cartoon of chaos, my second was a mess of a very different kind. A man had got into an argument with his wife while riding the subway. He chased her screaming off the train, before beating her and then kicking her in the face when she fell to the station platform. A Good Samaritan rushed to intervene, striking the husband with an umbrella, whereupon the defendant punched the Good Samaritan in the face, leaving him with a black eye. As often happens in cases of domestic violence, the wife was unwilling to testify against her husband, but a righteous and determined young prosecutor was not going to let that stand in her way. I subpoenaed the defendant's wife.

But on the day of the trial, the wife didn't show. She had a fair excuse; she was in the hospital. But then it became clear that she had scheduled an elective procedure on that day to avoid coming to court. When I learned that she had had an abortion, I felt a terrible rush of sadness and guilt. What had I set in motion by pursuing her? My action could not have reasonably provoked the decision, but by the time violence enters a marriage, often reason has already receded.

Even without the wife's testimony, however, we got a conviction. The defense attorney was Dawn Cardi, a rookie from the Legal Aid Society in her very first trial. She fumbled as badly as I had in my own maiden voyage, and this time by comparison I seemed like an old hand-pity the poor judge and jury with the likes of us two presenting! There were moments during cross-examination when Dawn seemed to be working for the other side, as when she got the Good Samaritan to repeat his story. Fortunately, there were no heart attacks, but Dawn did suffer the distraction of admission to the bar: while the jury was out for deliberations, she had to run out to attend her swearing-in ceremony. When she had raced back, the jury returned the guilty verdict. But any pleasure I might have derived from my first conviction vanished when we reconvened for sentencing.

"Ms. Cardi, I'm disposed to send your client to jail for a year," the judge said. The color drained from Dawn's face, and she began to tremble. I too was thunderstruck in that moment, realizing the terrible thing I'd accomplished.

"You can't do that!" Dawn sputtered. "He has a job. His family depends on him for support. He's never had an arrest before in his life. This will destroy him. You can't put this man in jail!" As Dawn's nervous verbal torrent flowed on, I was thinking about the abortion and the length this man's wife had gone to not to be there. And a part of me would have preferred not to have been there either. I have always believed that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions, and I have no tolerance for spousal abuse. But I also understood that the defendant would not be the only one bearing the hardship of his punishment. Jail might be a justifiable punishment, and the only absolute insurance against his striking his wife, but it would exact a high price on his whole family.

Dawn trailed off, and the judge looked to me. "I think Ms. Cardi is right," I heard myself saying, without premeditation, and feigning a self-a.s.surance I wasn't feeling inside. I acknowledged that putting him in jail would have significant negative consequences for his family. I said that I would be satisfied with probation if Dawn could get him into a treatment program for domestic abuse that required regular attendance and that also checked in on his wife regularly. For a man in his thirties with no prior arrests, I thought that treatment and the imminent threat of jail would be sufficient protection for his wife.

"Find the program," the judge said to Dawn. And we both breathed a sigh of relief.

Dawn thanked me afterward. She was stunned by my concession, which seemed especially strange for a beginner, given that a prosecutor's career is built on a reputation for toughness and winning stiff sentences. I was having my own doubts by the time I reported my actions to John Fried, my bureau chief. John heard me out and responded in his typically thoughtful and deliberate way. He noted that he might have done differently himself, since the a.s.sault on the Good Samaritan suggested a danger to society, but he acknowledged my reasoning: "You did what you thought was right." I can't know if he extended the same trust to everyone who worked under him, but the freedom to exercise my judgment without fear of being disciplined promoted a confidence that helped me grow into the job more quickly.

Dawn and I would cross paths often, as her section at the Legal Aid Society was a.s.signed to my trial bureau. Despite the unofficial rule against fraternization between prosecutors and defense attorneys, we would chat sometimes over brown-bag lunches on a park bench. We'd talk shop: the ins and outs of our cases, the temperaments and tempers of the judges we dealt with, the routine s.e.xism that was an occupational hazard. Eventually, we became friends, and as we did, our conversations often edged into bigger themes that were written between the lines of the daily procedures: the explosion of misdemeanors that seemed more symptomatic of social ills than evidence of criminal natures; the crudeness of the tools the system wielded against complicated problems. We often started at opposite poles of an argument, recognizing that our views were conditioned by personality differences. Dawn was a born public defender, her support of the underdog grounded in a native distrust of authority. I was by nature more the prosecutor, a creature of rules. If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it. I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever they may be. And knowing that the poor and minorities are disproportionately the victims of crimes, I'm loath to view the adversarial process of the law as cla.s.s warfare by another name.

By the same token, I don't view prosecutors and defense attorneys as natural enemies, however common that view is both within and without the legal profession. The two simply have different roles to play in pursuit of the larger purpose: realizing the rule of law. Though the roles are oppositional, their very existence depends on a shared acceptance of the law's judgment no matter the pa.s.sion of either side for a desired outcome. This is not to deny that the will to win drives both efforts. Nor is it to claim some simplistic equivalence between prosecution and defense. Rather, it is simply to insist that ultimately neither the accused nor society is served unless the integrity of the system is set above the expedient purposes of either side. This may sound naively idealistic, but there is a place for idealism in the practice of the law. It is what makes many of us enter the profession in the first place; it is certainly what drives some of us lawyers to become judges.

Dawn came to me in distress over another case we shared. "You've got to help me," she pleaded. It was a sad story: Her client had lived his entire life in inst.i.tutions, foster care followed by twenty years in prison for killing a man in a fight. Then, released on lifetime parole, he had been given no support but a bus token. Without life skills, unable to find a job, he survived by selling copper pipes that he stripped from a derelict building, not fully aware that this was theft. The terms of his parole were such that a single violation, even a plea to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct, would have sent him back to state prison. There was something about this man that made Dawn trust him. All things considered, he wasn't doing so badly. He hadn't been dealing drugs; he hadn't robbed anyone. He wouldn't have been stealing pipes if he'd had any help finding a job. He had even met a girl and was in love ... Dawn talked me into accepting an ACD, an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, and she got him into a job program. If he stayed out of trouble for six months, the charge would be dismissed.

One day, two years later, he would be waiting for me outside the courtroom. He introduced himself, shook my hand. "You don't remember me," he said. "I'm the guy who was stealing the pipes." He had found a job and been promoted to supervisor. He had also married his girlfriend. By now, they had one child and were expecting another.

The quality of mercy: "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

THE OCCASIONAL MERCIFUL IMPULSE notwithstanding, I was racking up convictions. Whatever my insecurities-and I had plenty (still do)-I was also fiercely compet.i.tive (still am). I became addicted to the thrill of verbal sparring at trial, the exhilaration of having to reinvent strategy on the spot, not knowing whether it would work, under the specter of a judge who at any moment might catch me out with a question. Fearing such humiliation, I prepared compulsively, the way I had in law school, and my reward was the chance to go out and risk it all again the next day. That I could never be sure of myself while doing it was a big reason I loved my work as a trial lawyer.

Notching up top-count prosecutions-convictions for the most serious charges-while giving up little ground in plea bargains became the adult equivalent of collecting gold stars in fifth grade. I liked the particular challenge of taking cases to trial with unsympathetic victims and unreliable witnesses, like the drug addict whose methadone was stolen by another addict, or the elderly couple with fifty felonies between them who were robbed by their young protege, a grifter in training; or cases that were hopelessly circ.u.mstantial, like the jeweler whose half-million-dollar pouch of gems went missing after a family of Gypsies swept through his store-who could be sure the jewels even existed, until I managed to get them returned? I won quite a few of those.

Certainly, no one could accuse me of being a soft touch, but talking with Dawn always reminded me of the human costs of my success, the impact on an individual's life and his family. Her perspective allowed me to trust the voice in my own head that occasionally whispered: how about exercising a little discretion; having a little faith in human nature? It wasn't easy, with around a hundred cases on my desk at any time and constant pressure to dispose of them as quickly as possible. Cases with the same charge tended to blur together, especially since the DA's Office offered standard plea deals for certain crimes: Possession of a gun? Settle it today, and it's a cla.s.s A misdemeanor. Make me wait, and tomorrow it becomes a felony. Forget about mitigating circ.u.mstances; I don't want to hear it.