Steve Kistulentz: Panorama

A foundation for criminal justice reform had hired Richard as their television mouthpiece, given him contractually defined talking points simple enough to memorize: mandatory sentences handcuffed the judiciary, put a disproportionate burden on youth and minority offenders, gave too much discretionary power to the police, to prosecutors. But he’d hit all the high notes in the first segment, closing with, “If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then absolute discretion divvied up between police and prosecutors is a power that will be absolutely abused. We all want safer schools, safer streets. But those good intentions haven’t led, in this case, to good public policy.”

On the adjacent set, Max Peterson, tonight’s anchorman, fiddled with papers; Richard knew from experience the papers were blank, a prop. A former Marine and a Rhodes scholar, Peterson could be counted on to digress eloquently on anything from the Stanley Cup finals to the risks inherent in American naval presence in the Persian Gulf. His appearance as a substitute anchor tended to evoke a similar reaction in most viewers: I thought he’d retired. Among the inside-the-Beltway talent, Peterson was famous for trying to get his guests to crack, interrupting arguments about the serious issues of the day with a discrete flash of a hand-drawn pornographic cartoon, something like Uncle Sam sporting a monstrous erection. No shenanigans tonight, however, which made the attorney in Richard suspect that maybe Peterson had been spoken to by human resources.

Richard stood and smoothed his suit, eavesdropping as the anchor mumbled monosyllabic responses to his in-ear instructions. Forty-five seconds back. The director would probably offer him some comments as well; the previous segment featured Richard talking over the flustered objections of the other guest, Vance Hiddell, a United States attorney from Alabama.

“One last segment, boys,” the director said. Richard realized he didn’t know a face to put with the voice in his ear. “Let’s try to share our little sandbox. We’ll treat it like congressional debate, two minutes and forty-five seconds, divided equally. Then we’ll go back to Max for wrap-up and his final thought.”

Hiddell stood close by, tapped on the wooden armrest of Richard’s chair. He smelled like a barbershop. “Congratulations. We’re the featured guests on the lowest-rated network-television program of the year.”

“At least we’ll be done in time to join in the festivities. Any plans?”

“Reservations at the Old Ebbitt. My wife insisted. Even though the crab cake that’s twenty dollars every other day of the year is now part of a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fixed-price romantic adventure,” Hiddell said.

Richard nodded in a way that he hoped suggested agreement. New Year’s was always difficult, had been for years. The imaginary pressure to invent happy occasions with his now ex-wife had given way to an equally imagined fear that people would judge him if he admitted to his usual habit of spending the holidays alone.

Alone. He repeated the word to himself as he reached for his bottled water.

He heard the shuffle on the studio floor that meant they were going live, the count in his ear, five, four, three. The red light on the anchor’s camera went hot, and Max Peterson set up the final segment. On the reference monitor, the split screen suggested that Richard and his opponent had been brought together by the miracle of satellite, when in fact they sat on the same riser, in identical chairs five feet apart.

“Welcome back. We’re talking about possible revisions to federal sentencing guidelines, what the lawyers might call mandatory minimums. Our guests are Washington-based defense attorney Richard MacMurray and longtime federal prosecutor Vance Hiddell, Alabama Republican and candidate for the United States Senate. Mr. Hiddell, how do you respond to the charge some legal scholars have leveled that mandatory minimums undermine the very premise of equal justice for all?”

“Mandatory minimums are the absolute guarantee of equal justice. They serve as a deterrent to crime and add a system of checks and balances against activist federal judges, one that keeps them from handing out unduly lenient sentences.”

“Or,” Richard interrupted, “mandatory sentencing laws undermine the very purpose of the judiciary, which is to allow our learned men and women the chance to display wisdom, compassion, and judgment. We’re building prisons faster than Stalin, and filling them with college kids who made the fatal error of smoking a joint, or housewives who stole a seven-dollar lipstick.”

Hiddell took an unsubtle detour into his stump speech. “It’s almost as if my friend has forgotten where these laws came from. They keep violent offenders off the streets. They keep our wives and mothers safe from recidivists. And the prisons we send career criminals to are nicer than the hotel I stayed in last night. It costs taxpayers nearly twenty-five thousand dollars a year per prisoner in the federal system, and those felons get three square meals and cable TV. What we need to bring back is discipline. The sense that prison is not a vacation but a punishment. Because right now, we’re not reforming or rehabilitating, we’re simply coddling these people. Sending a three-time loser to a work farm for ten years is nothing more than justice.”

Richard took the reference to these people as a typical us-versus-them gambit, designed to rile up the pickup-truck-and-shotgun crowd. Hiddell probably had polling data in his briefcase that showed how those voters were exactly the kind of people who might put him over the top on election day.

Richard did not know he would pull the stunt until he was out of his chair and crossing the stage. The director shouted through his earpiece, an airburst of profanity followed by the begging of all three cameras to stay with the shot. Richard walked the two steps across the riser, stopped next to the candidate. “Thirty-eight years ago, a teenager pled guilty to a pair of nonviolent felonies for some youthful mischief involving fireworks and bad decisions. Since then, he’s graduated from high school and college, earned a master’s degree, and become a licensed pharmacist. And this week,” Richard said, “a district court in California sentenced this fifty-seven-year-old pharmacist to life in prison. His crime? Stealing a Snickers bar.”

Hiddell prattled on, “We don’t need to send career criminals off to camp. We need them to pay their debt to society.”

Richard dug into the pocket of his suit pants and extracted some change. When he extended his hand, Hiddell reflexively stuck out his own. Richard dropped the coins in, one by one. “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven, and seventy-eight.”

“What’s this shit?” the candidate demanded. The anchor blanched, but all three heard the director answer, “Easy,” into their earpiece.

“One criminal’s debt to society, paid in full.”

They’d end the segment, Richard knew, no matter how much time was left. A slogan popped into his head: More Americans get their news from our network than any other news organization. He knew too that the clip would be picked up on free media and repeated in a seemingly perpetual loop, the candidate sitting there in his chair, dumbfounded and visibly furious, trying to decide whether or not to stand, still holding on to the spare change.

In a year when everything else would go his party’s way, Vance Hiddell would lose his September primary by twelve percentage points.

Richard walked past camera two, unclipped his IFB, then headed through the narrow corridor behind the control room, where he was surrounded by stagehands offering back slaps, laughs, murmurs of congratulations.