Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

Marrying Caroline was the best decision I ever made. She was so beautiful, so full of life, and she taught me the most important lesson I’d ever learned — how to love. Over the next two years we had two beautiful, healthy children, and Caroline helped me learn how to raise them. She nudged me when I needed nudging, held me back when I needed holding back, and did her best to try to ease the intensity that burned in me.

Unfortunately, however, I brought more than my duffel bag home with me from the army. The Rangers are gung-ho, small-unit specialists who pride themselves on being able to fight in any environment on a moment’s notice. I trained all over the world for three years, but didn’t see any combat until two months before my enlistment expired when my unit was sent to Grenada. Terrible images from the short but bloody battles I fought there haunted me through college and law school. I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming, covered in sweat, with my wife talking softly to me, trying to calm me down.

As with Sarah’s rape, I eventually managed to suppress the memories, at least most of the time. I even managed to make excellent grades and graduate from both college and law school, despite the fact that I always held a part-time job and was doing my best to be a good husband and father along the way. I kept myself so busy I didn’t have time to think about the past. I didn’t sleep much during that seven-year stretch.

By the time I graduated from law school, my son Jack was just entering the first grade. When I interviewed for a job at the district attorney’s office back in Washington County, I was disappointed to find that the starting salary for rookie prosecutors was less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year and that it would take me at least ten years to get to the fifty thousand dollars. It seemed like such a waste to have spent all that time and effort for such a paltry salary. Caroline was starting up her own dance studio and we knew it would take some time before she started earning a decent salary. I figured I could make at least twice what the district attorney’s office was offering by practicing on my own, even as a rookie, so I set up shop in Johnson City. I told myself that after I’d made some serious money and gained some experience, I’d close down the office and go to work as a prosecutor.

I immediately started taking criminal defense cases, reasoning that the experience would help me later when I went to the D.A.’s office. I put the same amount of sweat and effort into my law practice as I’d put into being an athlete, a soldier and a student, and I soon became very good at it. I found that the law offered a great deal of leeway to an astute and enterprising mind, and I learned to take on even the most damning evidence and spin it to suit my arguments. Within a couple of years, I started to win jury trials. The trial victories translated into publicity, and I soon became the busiest criminal defense lawyer around. The money started rolling in.

I defended murderers, thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, white collar embezzlers, wife beaters and drunk drivers. The only cases I refused to take were sex crimes. I convinced myself that I was some kind of white knight, a trial lawyer who defended the rights of the accused against an oppressive government. And along the way, I made an unfortunate discovery. I learned that many of the police officers and prosecutors who were on the other side weren’t much different than the criminals I was defending. They didn’t care about the truth — all they cared about was winning. Still, the thought of moving to the prosecutor’s office was always on my mind. But the money kept me from it. I was taking good care of my wife and my kids. I took pride in being a provider. I took pride in being able to give my children material goods and opportunities I never had. Before I knew it, ten years had passed.

And then, along came Billy Dockery.

Billy was a thirty-year-old mama’s boy charged with killing an elderly woman after he broke into her house in the middle of the night. He was long-haired, skinny, stupid, and arrogant, and I was repelled by him from the moment we met. But he swore he was innocent, the case against him was weak, and his mother was willing to pony up a big fee, so I took his case. A year later, a jury found him not guilty after a three-day trial.

Billy showed up at my office — drunk — the day after he was acquitted. He tossed an envelope onto my desk. When I asked him what was in it, he said it was a cash bonus, five thousand dollars. I told him his mother had already paid my fee. He was giddy and insistent. I knew he didn’t have a job, so I asked him where he got the money.

“Off’n that woman,” he said.

“What woman?”

“That woman I killed. I got a bunch more’n this. I figger you earned a piece of it.”

I threw him and his money out onto the street. There wasn’t any use in telling the police about it. Double jeopardy prevented Billy from being tried again, and the rules about client confidentiality meant I couldn’t divulge his dirty little secret.

Prior to Billy, I did what all criminal defense lawyers do — I avoided discussions with my clients about what really happened. I concerned myself only with evidence and procedure. But when Billy slapped me in the face with the truth, I realized I’d been fooling myself for years. I realized that my profession, my reputation, my entire perception of myself, was nothing more than a facade. I was a whore, selling my services to the highest bidder. I wasn’t interested in the truth. I was interested in winning, because winning led to money. I’d completely lost my sense of honor. I’d almost lost my sense of self.

When that realization hit me, I wanted to quit practicing law altogether. But my children were in high school and would soon be going off to college. Caroline had managed our money well, but we didn’t have enough stashed away to allow me to quit outright. So Caroline and I talked it over, and we decided I’d keep going until the kids had graduated and gone on to college. After that, we’d figure out what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

I immediately began to cut back on the number of cases I took. The death penalty cases I was doing were all appointed, payback from judges for the days when I was spinning facts and helping people like Billy Dockery walk out the door. My son was in college and my daughter was a senior in high school. In less than a year, I hoped to finish up the cases I had and walk away from the profession that Uncle Raymond, at least indirectly, had led me to.

By the time I got back from Mountain City, it was almost dark. So far, my birthday had been a bust. Johnny Wayne had been gagged, I’d practically fallen apart in Ma’s room, and the flashback of Sarah’s rape kept playing over and over in my head. I couldn’t reach Caroline or either of the kids on my cell phone. I’d called ten times on the way back down the mountain.

I finally pulled into the driveway and pushed the button on the garage door opener. There wasn’t another car in sight. Rio, my ten-month-old German shepherd, came bounding out of the garage and started his daily ritual of running around the truck. I’d rescued Rio from a bad situation when he was only two months old. I was his hero. When he saw me pull into the driveway every day, the excitement was too much for his young bladder. As soon as I got out of the truck, he peed on my shoe.

Where could they be? I didn’t see my son’s car. When I’d talked to Jack on the phone last week, he promised to come to dinner with us on my birthday. I thought seriously about backing out and going somewhere to drown my sorrows, but I decided I’d go in and see if they left me a note. Surely they wouldn’t forget my birthday. These were the people I loved more than anything else in the world. They’d never forgotten my birthday. They always made a big deal out of it.