Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

On a morning in late August, Karp was standing at the counter buying coffee in Sam’s when someone pinned his arms from behind, and said, “Hey, big shot! What’s going on? You don’t fucking talk to your old friends, now that you’re a padrone. I got him, Roland, let’s punch him out!”

“Guma, you jerk! Let go, I’m spilling the coffee here.”

Guma released his grip. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Stumpy arms. It could’ve been V.T., but he cleans his nails. How’s it going, Roland?”

Between time on the new job and time with Marlene, Karp had seen neither Guma nor Hrcany much since the start of the summer.

“Sucks, as usual. I’m about ready to quit. Sit down, Butch, let’s hear what you’re up to.”

“I can’t. I got a meeting with my staff in five minutes.”

“ ‘My staff,’ my ass! Listen to this guy, Roland. We taught him everything he knows, now he gets a little rank, he gets snotty with us.”

“Yeah, Karp, fuck your staff. You’re the boss, let ’em wait.”

They muscled Karp into a booth.

“OK, give!” said Guma. “Where the fuck you been? Getting any gash?”

“Who has time?”

“I’m cryin’ my eyes out. Nah, you’re getting it somewhere. It shows. Who is it? Somebody we know?”

“Guma, you think I’d ball anybody you knew?”

“Don’t be so wise, Karp. OK, tell us about life in the big time. What’s this guy Gelb like to work for?”

“Damned if I know. I never see the guy. He’s cruising all day looking for another job, like everybody else.”

“You, too?” asked Hrcany.

“No, although I thought I’d never say this. I’m having a good time.”

“See, it’s the gash,” said Guma.

“Nah, he sold out to the weenies,” said Hrcany, in a not entirely facetious tone.

“Look,” said Karp, ignoring this, “they’re trying to control the whole office with numbers. But you can’t really control anything with numbers unless you have a sense of what the numbers mean. Which they don’t. Bloom and Corncob, they don’t know jackshit about what really goes on. It’s like that story about the Russian chandelier factory. They get a quota from Moscow every year-make six tons of chandeliers. So they make one six-ton chandelier and take the rest of the year off.

“So what they want out of the Criminal Courts Bureau is clearances. You got to have a certain number every week, every month, based on what comes into the system through the Complaint Room, a percentage, right? The felony hearings are the choke point of the whole system-where we get the plea bargaining-so the pressure is on my guys to clear at any cost. The data weenies are calculating percentages right and left.

“Naturally, it takes about twenty minutes after Bloom’s system goes into effect before every skell and every skell lawyer in town knows the score. Why should they take a hard deal, right? They know the kid ADA has to deal, or his own people are on his ass. Hey, my client shot four old ladies, we’ll cop to simple assault and time served, right?”

“Yeah, right,” said Hrcany.

“No, wrong. We got standards for cases like that, signed by Bloom in his own blood. The skell goes up for five to seven or we try.”

“But how can you do that, Butch? What about the percentages?”

“Easy. We’re supposed to clear a set proportion of what comes in through the Complaint Room. That’s the base. And who controls the Complaint Room?”

“You do,” said Hrcany, “but what does that matter, if … oh, I see, said the blind man. You sly devil, you, you’re cooking the Complaint Room books.”

Karp placed a finger next to his nose, like old St. Nick. “That’s a shocking accusation, Roland, and impossible to prove. None of the weenies ever sets foot in the Complaint Room. They might see a victim and have to throw up from the degradation of it all. I will say that although we have a terrible crime wave in New York, we of the New York District Attorney’s Office are keeping the cases moving through the system at an ever increasing rate. I quote our fearless leader.”

“Amazing. But how much can you fudge?”

“Not a lot. Enough so that when we get a case that would break our rate if we had to try it-but which we can’t let the assholes just walk away on-we can hold out for a tough plea. I won’t say it’s winning. It’s just losing slower. And it lets my guys keep their self-respect, which otherwise would be down the drain the first day. Look, it’s been real, folks, but I got to go.”

“But, Butch, what’s the fucking point. How long can you keep it up?” asked Hrcany.

Karp slid out of the booth and stood up. “I don’t know, but I’m building my character. Look, you know that old John Wayne movie, where he’s got only four bullets left and he’s in this cabin with about two hundred bad guys surrounding him. They figure he has to be out of ammo, so they send a bunch of guys up to flush him out. Wayne lets them get close and then, pow, he shoots one and they all run down the hill again. He can’t beat them, but he sure as hell can make them keep their distance until the cavalry comes. It’s the same thing.”

“But how long can you hold out if there’s no fucking cavalry,” asked Guma.

“I don’t know, Goom,” Karp said with some asperity as he walked away. “I guess that’s why the Duke doesn’t wear a watch.”

There were nearly thirty lawyers waiting for Karp when he walked into the bureau training room. Besides shafting the system, and putting at least the very worst of the asses in jail, training young lawyers was the other thing that made Karp’s job worth doing.

He was a good teacher, and teaching lawyers how to win cases was not all that different from teaching kids how to play basketball, which Karp had spent his teenaged summers doing at a camp in New Jersey. His current crop of young attorneys looked to him now about as old as those campers. Karp was five or six years older and felt like the ancient of days.

Today Karp was giving what he had billed as his looney lecture. He told them about the legal doctrine of insanity, the M’Naughton and Durham rules, and the little kicker in the New York State criminal code that allowed a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity if a defendant “as a result of mental disease or defect lacks substantial capacity to know or appreciate the nature and quality of his act, or that it was wrong.”

“Now,” Karp continued, “this is going to shock you, but there are people out there who commit crimes and who don’t have a mental disease or defect and who still put in an NGI plea. Our job is to prove to the jury that they’re not crazy. The defense brings in their shrink, we bring in our shrink. The jury is confused at all times, which works in favor of the defense, you understand. We have a social horror of convicting somebody on a capital offense if he really thought he was cutting up a pumpernickel, but it was really the neighbor. However, ninety-nine percent of the NGI pleas you will see are not like that. They’re mutts trying to rip off the system. Yeah, Phil?”

Phil Dellia, an intense and studious kid just out of Fordham Law, had raised his hand. “But what about bizarre, motiveless crimes? Somebody likes to cut up redheads, or bald guys with cigars. What do you do?”

“Good question. The answer is, bizarre is not crazy, motiveless is not crazy. The issue you have to focus the jury on is, did he know he was killing a human being? Did he know that killing was wrong? I’ll demonstrate. Let’s say I don’t like Mister Krier here. He’s a pain in the ass, I want to get rid of him.”

Here Richie Krier, the class clown, turned in his seat to face the group, smiled, and waved. Krier wanted lawyering to be like lawyering in the movies, because what he really wanted to be was an actor. He had the wit and the physical equipment-tall, dark, and handsome-and was disappointed that what he did in real life was so different from what he had been led to expect. He didn’t begrudge the waste of three years in law school-it had kept him out of the draft-but he had seen the light and was now attending acting classes in the evenings, doing as little work as possible for the DA’s office, and doing that sloppily.