Marcia Clark: Guilt By Degrees

Eric put his hands on his hips and looked at me expectantly. “I know you hate waiting in court, but…”

I hate waiting in general, but I especially hate it in court, where you’re not allowed to do anything except sit there and watch proceedings so boring they make you want to bang your head against a wall.

I held up a hand. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I’d heard that Judge Foster was on the rampage about having to wait for DAs to show up. “But he’s got another murder on the calendar before mine, so I’ve got-” At just that moment, my phone rang.

I motioned for Eric to give me a second as I picked up. It was Manny, the clerk/watchdog in Judge Foster’s court.

“Rachel!” Manny whispered. “Stop eyeballing the calendar and get down here. Are you out of your mind? You know what’ll-”

I refused to give Eric the satisfaction of knowing I was already on the verge of being chewed out, so I did my best to put on a relaxed smile. “I’m so glad you called,” I said cheerily, as though I’d just heard from a beloved sorority sister, which it might have been…if I’d ever joined a sorority. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to talk!”

Manny, momentarily nonplussed, sputtered, “What the…?”

I mouthed sorry at Eric and again smiled pleasantly. Eric raised a suspicious eyebrow but moved off down the hall.

I waited a couple of beats to make sure he was gone, then curtly answered, “I’ll be down in fifteen seconds.” I snatched my file and scrambled out the door, strategically heading for the hallway less traveled.

I’d made it down two corridors and was just about to dash out to the bank of elevators when a voice behind me said, “In a hurry, Knight?”

I abruptly downshifted and turned back to see Eric standing at the other end of the hall, his arms folded.

Exhaling through my nose in a futile effort to hide my recent sprint, I forced a calm tone. “No, but I figured I should go see what’s happening, just to be on the safe side.”

He shot me a knowing look, turned, and walked into his office.

I trotted out to the elevator, wondering why on earth I’d ever thought I could fool Eric. Four stops and twelve additional bodies later, the elevator bumped to a halt on the fifth floor. I pushed through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd and made my way to court.

I movedswiftly into the courtroom, trying to keep a low profile so Judge Foster wouldn’t notice me. The case before mine was still in play, and defense counsel was making an objection that, fortunately for me, kept the judge occupied. But it didn’t shield me from the wrath of Manny. He gave me a stern look and shook his head. I pointed to the lawyers as if to say, What? No one’s waiting. Manny just rolled his eyes. I took a seat at the back of the courtroom; that way, when they called my case, it would look to Judge Foster like I’d been there all along. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a murder trial or a blind date-it’s always about strategy.

The judge overruled the defense objection, and the deputy district attorney resumed direct examination with the standard nonleading question: “Tell us what you saw.”

The prosecutor looked vaguely familiar, though his name escaped me. He was in his early thirties, and his carefully coiffed brown hair, perfectly tailored navy-blue suit, red power tie, and French cuffs sporting pricey-looking cuff links said that he didn’t have to rely on his civil servant’s salary to pay the rent. Or that he was still getting a free ride with Mommy and Daddy.

The witness, a surfer dude with long, bleached-out hair, stroked his sparse soul patch and licked his lips nervously before answering. “Uh, he reached out toward that lady, and the next thing I knew, he was lying on the ground.”

“And when you saw he was on the ground, what did you do?” the prosecutor asked. “Did you call the police?”

The witness bent his head and hunched over. He looked away from the prosecutor, and his eyes darted between the floor and the top of counsel table for a few long seconds. Finally he sighed and replied in a quiet voice, “No. I, like, I don’t know. I guess I thought he was just drunk or high or something.” The low hum of whispers and shuffled papers suddenly stopped, opening a vacuum of silence around the witness’s last words. The surfer dude reddened, darted another look around the courtroom at all the eyes now fixed on him, and added defensively, “No one else thought it was a big deal either. I mean, no one called…at least, not for a while.”

Every face in the courtroom-with the exception of the prosecutor, who’d been expecting that answer-reflected the ugliness of the mental image those words had painted: of people callously stepping over a man who lay dying on the sidewalk. For me, that image immediately sparked the thought of Cletus, my homeless buddy, who made his bed just south of the courthouse on most Wednesday nights. I’d been bringing him Chinese takeout from the Oolong Café nearly every week for the past couple of years. I imagined Cletus slowly bleeding out onto the cold concrete while people stepped around him as though he were an overturned garbage can. I didn’t know who this victim was, but it didn’t matter. No one should die like that.

“Objection, irrelevant,” the defense attorney said in a bored voice. I recognized him as Walter Schoenfeld, a seasoned public defender. “And no question pending,” he added.

“Sustained,” the judge ruled, his voice equally flat.

It was just a preliminary hearing, so there was no jury and the prosecution only had to show probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That meant the objections, while legally proper, didn’t matter much. The judge could winnow the wheat from the chaff.

“So you saw the man fall to the ground and stay there. What happened next?”

“I saw the cops come, and one of them came into the shop and asked if any of us had seen anything-”

“Objection to whatever the cops said,” Walter interjected. “Hearsay.”

“Overruled. ‘Did you see anything?’ It’s a question. Questions aren’t hearsay.”

“Do I keep going?” the witness asked.

“Yes.” The judge sighed. “ Overruled means you’re in the clear.”

The witness went on. “And then Keshia, uh, the other counter person that day, told them she saw me out by the homeless guy before he, ahh…”

Gun-shy after the reaction to his last mention of the man he’d abandoned to die on the sidewalk, the witness trailed off.

“And then you told them what you’ve told us here today?”

The witness nodded.

“You have to answer out loud,” the prosecutor instructed. His duh was implied.

“Yeah, yes.”

“Do you see the man in court who stabbed the homeless guy?” asked the deputy district attorney.

“Wait, excuse me,” the judge said, stopping the witness and turning to the prosecutor. “‘The homeless guy’? He had a name, and I’m sure it wasn’t ‘homeless guy.’ Have the People not come up with any identification for him yet?”

“No, Your Honor. The defense refused to waive time, and so far he hasn’t turned up in any database.”

So not only was he left to die on a city sidewalk but we couldn’t even acknowledge his passing with a name. The sheer loneliness of it all was a lead weight in my chest.

The judge cast a disapproving look at the deputy. “Then, Mr. Prosecutor, the appropriate term would be either victim or John Doe -not homeless guy. ” He turned to the witness. “Is the person who stabbed the victim here in this courtroom?”

“Uh, well…” The surfer dude nervously looked around the room.