Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

Not so with DeLeon and when it was over I watched him exhale a half hour’s breath then, after drinking in a little of the power those moments created, I said goodbye and split. Now DeLeon and I were about to reunite in the pens behind Part F and I knew I had to steel myself to hear all about the horror of his false arrest. An arrest, he would doubtless claim, borne from a desire on the part of law enforcement, as a general entity, to avenge its earlier ignominy.

The way Part F worked was this. The part was a pit stop for wayward felonies. With some exceptions, felonies that had been arraigned in criminal court but not yet presented to a grand jury and indicted were placed on the Part F calendar. Consequently the part had a little suspense to it since essentially everybody — judge, defendant, defense counsel, curious onlooker — was there to hear whether the defendant had been indicted; his case morphing from a mere felony complaint housed in criminal court to an indictment voted by a grand jury and requiring that the case be transferred to Supreme Court. And because of New York Criminal Procedure Law 180.80, which required that a defendant charged with a felony be released without bail should “one hundred forty-four hours” elapse following his arrest without an indictment, this suspense was decidedly greater where the client was incarcerated and in the part waiting to hear his fate. Because if you made your living committing felony crime, being indicted on your 180.80 date (the date this period expired) was the norm and carried the extra sting of keeping you in jail on the last possible day you could be held on a felony complaint. Like everyone else, ADAs loved the last minute, so the 180.80 date was generally not only the day they announced the defendant had been indicted but also the day they did the actual indicting.

Of course the defense attorney’s mission was to prevent this whole indictment business. This he attempted to do primarily through begging, begging the DA not to present the case and offer his guy a misdemeanor plea or better yet to reduce it to a misdemeanor outright. In addition to these cases, indictments were also avoided, at least temporarily, where the DA couldn’t get his act together in time, the complainant was uncooperative for example, and the defendant was released and given a court date to return. These latter cases leaned heavily towards eventual dismissal after six months and intermittent trips to the part.

All of this was highly relevant because those cases that were indicted and subsequently transferred to Supreme Court were truly bad news for the indictee. The overwhelming majority of those cases ended in convictions. First, very few cases actually went to trial (one percent?) and even fewer were dismissed, for whatever reason, in Supreme Court. The result was that almost every case upstairs ended through plea bargaining: the DA or the judge offered the defendant a particular sentence in exchange for a plea of guilty and the defendant, leery of a higher number after trial, accepted the offer and pled guilty. So forget whatever revolving-door bullshit you’ve been fed up and until this upcoming lucid and edifying moment and remember this: almost every single serious, read indicted, case ended in this manner — with a plea of guilty, a conviction. And of the few cases that actually went to trial, well over fifty percent of those also ended in at least some level of conviction. So even armed with just elementary reasoning you can see that when a DA stood before a judge in F and announced that the person to your left had been indicted, she was not often signaling the beginning of a battle, she was more likely cueing you to cut your ( pl .) losses.

And all that hung over that courtroom: would you go upstairs with all that entailed or out the door to freedom?

What I hated about the part was the waiting central to the whole process. When you walked in the first place you headed was the table supporting the approximately ten page calendar listing the hundred and twenty or so cases being heard that day. The cases were listed in ascending order based on their docket numbers. The docket number itself represented what number arrest the case was for that year in that respective borough, with 2000NY100000 meaning the hundred thousandth customer in New York County in the year 2000 and so on. Once you found your case on the list you had to ascertain what number that case was on the calendar. The case’s calendar number was listed on the far left. Now you needed to know whether your client had been produced , that is whether he had ridden the blue bus touting New York’s Boldest from Rikers Island to 10 °Centre Street and the pens behind the courtroom. The quick way to do this was to check the list the court officers posted identifying by number those cases where the defendant had been produced. Your next stop was a visit to the DA clerks who had their own table set up in the well. In case you were not already aware of it they would tell you if the DA assigned to the case was making any offers, those coveted misdemeanor dispositions I mentioned earlier that prevented the case from ever being presented to a grand jury. If you served cross grand jury notice at arraignments, indicating your client wished to testify before the grand jury, they would ask if he still intended to testify so they could let the DA know and make the necessary arrangements. Apart from all that, what you really needed to know was whether they had word on the case. Their response took one of three forms. They might tell you the case had been indicted in which case you could have the case called and pick a date, usually exactly two weeks later, in Supreme Court for arraignment on the new indictment. Or they might tell you there would be no grand jury action which allowed you to go into the pens and tell your guy the good news that he was going home with a new court date that he would in all likelihood assiduously avoid. That case was as good as over. Finally, there was the dreaded no word yet . What that meant was that the DA intended to indict the case but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. The dread came from the fact that the case would not be called until either the 180.80 time was up or until the DA informed the clerk in the part of the case’s status. This fact plus the number of cases that had to be indicted every day made for a lot of waiting in F.

So I waited a lot that day. And in between waiting some things occasionally happened. Robert Coomer, the chess-playing, sexually confused, unaided-human-flight-attempting bon vivant received the coveted, and expected by him, no grand jury action and was accordingly released on his own recognizance. Terrens Lakes’s big concern was whether or not he was getting credit towards his future sentence for the time he was currently spending in jail. He was, and his indictment meant he would be shipped upstairs to work out the particulars.

Like Coomer, Darril Thorton exuded confidence when I first spoke to him in the pens. He was confident Valerie Grissom would not be coming to court and that he would consequently be released. And after I extracted a torturous admission from him that Grissom might appear to testify in the grand jury, as the DA was indicating she would, he reiterated his desire to testify before said grand jury, my feelings on which you’ll perhaps recall. Reeling, I asked him if it was not logical to deduce that if the expelled angel was powerful enough to compel Ms. Grissom to appear before the grand jury and spin a complete fabrication then he would similarly use that same power to ensure that the members of the grand jury would vote to indict him. Otherwise where was the sense right? He goes through the trouble of getting Grissom to lie in the grand jury, an admitted evil of the sort he was required to engender, yet he would then allow the grand jury to see through the lie and fail to indict an innocent man, a greater, more perfect evil? He stared at me all happy that I had finally discerned what the case was truly about then, conceding the power of my sally, indicated that if Grissom appeared to testify before the grand jury, as she later did, he would speedily read the wall’s handwriting and exercise his right to remain silent with respect to that process. He was indicted.