Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

I then took it even further. I knew all the objective facts about his life from our extensive conversations. I started keeping a diary from Barnes’s point of view like actors sometimes do. I got an apartment in his neighborhood and lived there for a couple of weeks without going to work. To simulate Barnes’s existence, I gave myself a meager allowance for those weeks. I would wake up each day in this putrid apartment with like twelve bucks in my pocket. Then I would just drink all day and like hang out. But I knew I had to do more. Barnes smoked crack. He was high on crack the day he went into that apartment. I started smoking crack.”

“What do you mean you started smoking crack?”

“What’s vague about that?”

“There’s nothing vague about it, it’s just incredibly bizarre don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Well where’d you get the crack from?”

“I bought it, on the street. Where I was living there was no shortage of places.”

“You could’ve been arrested! Your career would have been over. Not to mention the embarrassment. Everyone would’ve thought you were a crackhead.”

“As far as my career goes I can scarcely think of anything I attach less importance to, with the possible exception of my concern for how others view me. The very reason I was buying and smoking crack was to prove these same people wrong. They say perfection in human endeavors is impossible. I say they’re partly right. It is impossible, for them, but not for me or a select few others. Besides the risk is minimal if you take precautions.”

“So what happened?”

“I put it in my pipe and smoked it.”

“How many times?”

“Several”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did it feel like?”

“Pleasure. Extreme pleasure in a way that makes everything else irrelevant. At first, it seemed like all other pleasures like sex and good food were merely facets of this larger pleasure.”

“Have you smoked any since?”

“No.”

“Weren’t you worried you might become addicted? Did you at any point feel it becoming addictive, feel it becoming a need?”

“It was more like an objective realization that if I had nothing else going on, if I didn’t have sufficient access to other pleasures, I could see myself wanting to do nothing else. It was another challenge because there’s a weakness involved with addiction. But please kids, don’t try it at home. Anyway, the crack wasn’t the point. Perfection was and the drug use was done solely in service of that goal. The end result was that those weeks allowed me to prep Barnes perfectly to testify because I had a special insight into what form this individual’s testimony would take.”

“So it went to trial?”

“It did, which introduced the most important party to any trial, the jury. I thought a lot about jurors and the expectations and biases they bring to the process. I feel that defense attorneys ignore the role of mass media in shaping juror attitudes to their extreme detriment. As research, I read or watched every single popular depiction of our criminal justice system. This included reading fictional legal thrillers for example. This was no small sacrifice as these books are uniformly and horribly bad. They all have these galactically idiotic names like Proof of Service or Notice of Appeal too. Nonetheless, they are extremely popular so I read them and in the process gained insight into the layman’s hack warped view.

Knowledge of what jurors bring with them and what they expect when they come into a courtroom to sit on a case is the single most important area of knowledge to have if you’re trying to get an acquittal. Jurors are conditioned to expect and want dramatic performances but at the same time, for a particular kind of juror that we encounter often in Manhattan, their ego can’t help but be implicated. As a result, although it is probably true that the more smooth and polished you are the more persuasive you’ll be, I believe this is only true to a point. If you cross that point you now implicate the juror’s ego and he becomes cognizant of not wanting to feel he’s been hoodwinked by a silver-tongued salesman. If you think I’m wrong ask yourself this. How many times following an acquittal have you spoken to the jurors? What you find invariably is that a substantial portion of them will be falling all over themselves in their rush to tell you what you did wrong and how it wasn’t really your arguments that led them to vote not guilty but rather something that they thought of on their own once they started deliberating. This is a juror who most likely went against every preconception she had when she entered the courtroom and voted to acquit but before she goes home she wants to convince herself that she did so based on objective facts and not your performance. Seems to me it stands to reason that this popular emotion can often be an impediment to acquittals.

Because of this, a bit of intentional fumbling or display of nerves can be useful in creating the perception in these jurors that to the extent they find an attorney’s argument compelling they do so not as a result of any skillful, read deceptive, oratory by that attorney, but rather due to the argument’s logical appeal stemming from its relationship to the truth. With that in mind, during the trial I had to skillfully negotiate the line between a perfect performance, which one instinctively feels should be highly polished, and a truly perfect performance which includes some appearance of imperfection in order to create a more acquittal-friendly atmosphere.

The trial lasted about a week. My performance was perfect. Perfect pretrial legal arguments and perfect voir dire rounds followed by perfect selections then a perfect opening. Of course those things were under a great deal of my control so I was never really concerned. The people’s witnesses were a greater challenge since I was then being asked to achieve the perfect in conjunction with an openly antagonistic party. Well I did it. Perfect crosses of the kind usually reserved for the stupid movies.

Then Barnes testified. I directed him perfectly and he held up beautifully under cross thanks to the perfect preparation. All that was left was for me to give a perfect summation and then get an acquittal of course. If I did that I would have achieved my goal; a goal I had worked tirelessly at for five months. I had overnight to work on the summation. I had written it months ago and it required little revision. I spent my time the night before reflecting. I had no doubts about the upcoming acquittal. The DA was a beaten shell who if given a vote probably would herself have cast it to acquit. The jurors had set aside their poker faces and seemed to be openly rooting for my success. They were in the presence of a progressing perfection and they seemed to recognize this. They seemed to understand that a meaningless criminal case paled in comparison to what was being achieved before their very disbelieving eyes and with their near-compulsory complicity.

In the morning I would deliver this perfectly-reasoned, perfectly argued, and perfectly-rhetorically-pitched speech. I would do so without notes, which wouldn’t be necessary since by that point the summation was as much a part of me as my nose. I would deliver it with the perfect tone for the situation and then I would be done. Perfection would become a part of my being. For the rest of my life I would know what I had always suspected, that I was not bound by the limitations of the average person. I was better, and better in a way that couldn’t be quantified. I would stand alone in my perfection. I would be greater than God. God is perfect merely by definition. And it is his tautological perfection, not his own will, that makes his every deed perfect. I on the other hand would have created perfection out of imperfection, an altogether greater achievement.