Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

Then, she started to scream only when Cerone refused to pay her for the pleasure of her company. The severe mental handicap of the woman made her a scapegoat for a vicious cross-examination at the trial, and the conviction was possible only because of the compelling testimony of the neighbor who had intervened to save her.

“This shouldn’t be very complicated. I’m going to ask for the max, the defense attorney’ll jump up and down about it, and this judge is likely to end up somewhere in the middle.”

“Doesn’t sound like there’s much of a middle to me. Oh, by the way, I was talking to my editor last night, Alex, and he’d really like me to flesh out some more detail, if you understand me. He thinks the story will be too dry if we don’t get sort of a ”behind-the-scenes“ view of what makes you do this. He’d like some more personal information about you.”

I let out a very soft groan.

“Like what?”

“Like how do you spend your free time, what do you do on weekends, who do you see when you go out?”

“Look, Ellen, I don’t mind talking to you about my work when the press office directs me to, but I’ve just got to separate my private life from this business.”

“That’s just the point. Most people can’t understand how you do that. Don’t you take this work home with you every night? I don’t mean the papers and documents, I mean the emotional baggage. Doesn’t this job just make you hate men?”

I laughed at that one. Maybe Goldman wasn’t as smart as I had initially thought, to ask such a hackneyed question.

“No, of course not. The people who commit these crimes are deviants, Ellen. This is really extreme, aberrant behavior. Most of the men I’ve ever met in my life are incapable of this kind of conduct. I am not one of the women who believes that all men are potential rapists. That’s one of the main reasons I can deal with these cases. And it really doesn’t carry over into my relationships with men not for a moment.”

But if you want to know what makes me hate men, I thought to myself, this is the right day to ask me.

“Are you seriously involved with someone now, Alex? This investment banker you were out with last night?“

“Did I tell you who I was going out with yesterday?” I shot back at her. “I wasn’t aware I mentioned-‘

”I told you I’ve done my homework. I’ve already interviewed a lot of your colleagues.“

“What branch of the Israeli military did you serve in Intelligence?”

“Not so lucky. I was in a special patrol force on the West Bank. Actually an elite antiterrorist unit. Not a cushy desk job doing background checks.”

I was impressed.

“Listen, Ellen. Can we go off the record for a few minutes?”

“Sure. Off the record.”

“Whatever you heard about the investment banker and whoever’s been talking about it, you need to know it’s over. I’ll give you other stuff – personal stuff if you have to have it but I beg you to leave the romance angle out of it. He’s not a part of my life anymore and I don’t want to see anything about us in print. Please.“

“Yeah, sure, I’m really sorry. People had been telling me you were very happy together. Picture-perfect couple and all that kind of thing. Of course I won’t write about it if it’s not true. Is this all very recent?”

It was a Catch-22. I couldn’t get her off the subject without going on to explain why it didn’t make sense for her to stay on the subject.

“Recent? Let’s just say if you had asked me the same question before you left me in my office yesterday afternoon, you would have had a different answer. History, Ellen, it’s over.”

I was relieved to see Cerone’s court-appointed attorney come out of the door which led from the holding pen behind the courtroom. The clerk stepped back and knocked on the judge’s robing room and I couldn’t hear what Ellen murmured to me as the court officer announced “All rise.” when Hadleigh mounted the three steps to his seat at the bench.

The clerk called the case from the calendar, directed both counsel to state our appearances for the record, and arraigned the defendant for sentence. He went on to ask, “Does the assistant district attorney wish to be heard?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” I recalled for the judge the facts of the case, referring to actual pieces of testimony about the victim’s ordeal which I had pulled from the transcript. In greater detail, I described her mental condition and the vulnerability that handicap also endowed her with. Her legal guardian had called to tell me that, even to this day, the young woman awakened with nightmares, screaming the name of the defendant and pleading for help. I closed by urging the Court to impose the maximum sentence, a range of eight and one-third to twenty-five years in state prison.

Cerone’s lawyer spoke next. He still disputed the verdict of the jury, arguing that his client would be vindicated by an appellate review of the facts. He assailed the descriptions that had been given about the woman’s mental capacity, saying that there really wasn’t anything wrong with her at all: she was just slow.

“There is nothing in the trial record to indicate that this was a violent, brutal attack, like the People claim.

“Your Honor,” he continued, “I must also call your attention to the history of this complaining witness. Ms. Cooper mentioned the victim’s guardian, who reports her nightmares to the district attorney. May I remind you that the reason she lives with a guardian is that she had to be removed from her natural home because she had been the victim of years of sexual abuse by her father and her brothers. All of those events, Judge Hadleigh, have had some kind of impact on this witness and all of those abuses occurred before the events she testified about in this court.

“They don’t excuse my client, Your Honor, but surely the impact of Mr. Cerone’s actions on her is lessened by her past experience.”

Did I hear this guy right? Is he about to tell the judge that it’s okay to victimize someone who has been abused before?

Now Hadleigh was awake, too.

“Well, certainly, the impact of this crime is less severe because of her incest experience. She’s not inured to it, I’m sure, but it had to be less serious than the first or second time she’d been through this, I have to agree with you.”

I was on my feet in a flash.

“I’m going to object-“

“Just a minute, Miss Cooper. You’ve had your chance. Sit down. I’ll hear counsel out on this, he’s entitled to his position.”

“My client still denies his guilt, Your Honor. And I just want to close by asking you to take all these things into consideration in sentencing my client, who has no prior criminal history, and by-”

“Objection. Judge Hadleigh, Mr. Cerone has no felony convictions but he certainly has a criminal history…”

“Miss Cooper, that’s all before me, as you know, in the pre-sentence report. Let’s keep some order here, please. There’s no jury to perform for I know the record, too.”

“So on my client’s behalf, Judge, I’d ask for the minimum in this case – two to six years.”

The Honorable Horace Hadleigh we all called him Horrid, on the prosecution side, which was either the result of or the causal factor in why, for the more than thirty-eight years he had been on the bench, he generally handed members of the defense bar exactly what they wanted – was about to deliver his view of the Cerone case.

He hadn’t bothered to write out any comments about the case in advance – that would have taken both time and intelligence, two factors of which he was in limited supply. So he began by rambling on a bit about the trial and the pathetic young woman who had testified in his courtroom.