Bronx Justice (25 page)

“No, thanks,” said Jaywalker.

The door leading to the courtroom suddenly swung open, and Jaywalker found himself face-to-face with Richard Timmons. He was a baby. He might have been twenty, but he looked more like fourteen or fifteen. The Castle Hill victims had all described a man who looked like he was between twenty-five and thirty.

“Excuse us, counselor,” a court officer was saying.

Jaywalker stepped aside.

“Fuckin' lawyers,” said another court officer. “Nuthin' better to do than stand around, collectin' taxpayers' money.”

Darren Kingston was sentenced on June 19th, 1980.

Jaywalker met the Kingstons outside Part 16, the same courtroom in which Darren had been tried and convicted three months earlier. With Darren were Charlene, Inez, Marlin and a half-dozen other members of the family. They knew they were out of postponements.

Any defendant will literally beg you to bail him out. Jail is a horrible place, more horrible by a factor of ten than you can possibly imagine. Jaywalker himself had found that out the hard way in his younger years. Being out on bail becomes pure heaven. But everything changes come sentencing day. Suddenly the defendant in jail is the lucky one, for whom the event is just one more bump in the road. The defendant out on bail becomes the big loser. He has to walk through the courthouse door of his own free will, knowing he won't be walking out. He has to kiss his wife or girlfriend goodbye, tell his kids to grow up right, and know from the look on his mother's face that he might just as well have stabbed her through the heart.

The legal term for what he's doing, that bailed-out defendant, happens to be the same as the military term. He's
surrendering.
Some can't bring themselves to do it. They abscond; they jump bail. Some do so elaborately, staging their deaths, moving away, changing their identities, altering their appearances. Others do it more simply, as if biding their time while waiting for the inevitable to catch up with them. Still others commit new crimes, figuring they're going away anyway.

Of the out-on-bail defendants who
can
bring themselves to surrender, there are those who work out and bulk up as the day of reckoning approaches, knowing they'll need to be tough. There are those who shave their heads, figuring
looking
tough is the next best thing. Jaywalker had one client who'd gone to the dentist the day before and had a gold tooth pulled, because he didn't want another inmate knocking it out of his mouth without the benefit of Novocain.

Darren Kingston did none of these things. Just as he had long felt that his innocence would be established at some point, he now believed that before they put him back in jail, something would happen, something would intervene to prevent it, or at least postpone it once again. Only this time, he had at least a semirational basis for his belief.

Jaywalker hadn't exactly been idle over the past three months, what with arranging, attending and taping two hypnosis sessions and one sodium amytol interview; running down half a dozen leads from newspaper items and other sources; working on a motion to set aside the verdict; and spending literally hundreds of hours hanging around the Castle Hill Houses.

In addition to those chores, Jaywalker had made half a dozen trips to the Bronx County Courthouse with a single
purpose in mind. He wanted to keep Darren out of jail after his sentencing. The vehicle for doing that was an appeal bond. It worked the same way a regular bail bond did, except that it covered the period from sentencing through the decision on an appeal, a period that could cover months and sometimes even several years.

The public can hardly be blamed for harboring a misconception about the frequency with which appeal bonds are granted. Open the newspaper or turn on the news, and before too long you'll come across someone who's out on appeal, even though he's already been sentenced to, say, five years in prison. But look again. That someone, it usually turns out, is a former public official, an entertainer, a sports figure or a celebrity of some other stripe. He's out because the same visibility that made him newsworthy in the first place will continue to make him newsworthy, and therefore available, to the criminal justice system, should someone go looking for him. And because his crime—larceny by signature, typically, or driving under the influence—is the sort of transgression that a lot of judges can relate to, sometimes even muttering into their robes,
“There but for the grace of God…”

Rapists need not apply.

Especially black, knife-wielding,
serial
rapists.

The truth is that only a minuscule number of defendants are granted appeal bonds, a tiny fraction of a single percentage point. Defendants sentenced on crimes of violence are among the least likely candidates, as are those convicted of serious sex offenses, or those with multiple victims, or those who've used weapons in the commission of their crimes. Darren, of course, qualified as all of the above.

But in spite of the jury's verdict, there were still some
positive things to say about Darren. He was gentle, polite and soft-spoken. He came from a good family, had a wife and now two kids, and held down a decent job. All his roots and connections were right there in the Bronx. He had no passport, no driver's license, no place to flee to, even had he chosen to flee. Granted bail following his arrest, he'd never missed or been late for a single court appearance. All those things counted. But there was one thing that counted more. There was the vague, unspoken notion that maybe, just maybe, just possibly, Darren Kingston was completely innocent. By now, Jacob Pope had to have that notion, somewhere deep in his gut. Jaywalker had seen to that. And over the three months since the verdict, Jaywalker had made enlisting Pope's help on an appeal bond a crusade of sorts, second only to finding the real rapist.

He hoped to do better on this one than he'd so far done on the other.

He'd begun with the suggestion of yet another polygraph, but Pope had been cool to the mention of Cleve Bryant's name. Then Jaywalker had invited Pope to Herbert Spraigue's hypnosis regression, and Stephen Corman's sodium amytol interview. When Pope hadn't shown, whether by distraction or design, Jaywalker had brought him the tapes, even listening to one of them with him. And in the past month, Jaywalker had put his cards squarely on the table.

“I'm going to ask Davidoff to continue bail,” he'd told Pope. “And I want you to join me in the application. You can say whatever you want. Tell him the corroboration issue is an intriguing one, or the rebuttal witnesses raise a good question of law. Tell him you think his rulings were
right, but it'll be interesting to see what an appellate court says.”

In the end, as Jaywalker had fully expected, Pope wouldn't go along it with. But he did the next best thing: he agreed not to oppose the application, so long as Davidoff didn't push him to take a position one way or the other.

“Because if the judge presses me,” Pope explained, “I'm going to have to say my office opposes bail.”

A week after that conversation, Jaywalker had happened to bump in to Max Davidoff. It might have had something to do with the fact that Jaywalker had been waiting outside the judge's courtroom for forty-five minutes. But Davidoff had no way of knowing that.

“How's that young man doing?” the judge asked. “Kingston.”

It was about as much as either of them was ethically permitted to say, in the absence of Jacob Pope or someone else from the D.A.'s office. And no doubt Davidoff expected to hear an equally circumspect answer, something like, “Not so good,” or “He's hanging in there.”

Instead, Jaywalker took his shot. “Actually, he's feeling pretty relieved right now. I just told him that Mr. Pope's going to take no position on an appeal bond. He took it like a reprieve from the governor.”

Davidoff, completely thrown off guard, could only raise one bushy white eyebrow, mutter something unintelligible and walk off. But at least whatever he'd muttered hadn't sounded like “No.” He'd had his chance to object, and he hadn't taken it.

Knowing Davidoff was likely to ask Pope about the matter, Jaywalker hurried to beat him to the punch. He made a beeline for Pope's office.

“I just happened to run in to Justice Davidoff,” he said. “He asked me what was new.” It was a stretch, but not much of one for Jaywalker. “So I told him about our conversation. I hope that's okay with you. He kind of caught me by surprise.”

Pope didn't seem overjoyed by the development, but he didn't go ballistic. So now he'd had his chance to object, too, and he hadn't.

And the seed had been planted.

The American system of justice is an adversarial one, pitting one lawyer against another, with a supposedly impartial judge placed between them to resolve any disputes. When one of the lawyers says he doesn't oppose what the other one's asking for, it's the functional equivalent of saying, “Go ahead, I don't care one way or the other.” At that point, the judge is off the hook, indemnified from after-the-fact criticism. Or, in plainer language, his ass is covered.

Ten days later, as fate would have it, Jaywalker bumped in to Davidoff again.

“Did Pope really say he has no objection to continuing bail?” he asked.

“Scout's honor,” said Jaywalker. It was close enough, especially for someone who'd never been a Scout and deemed honor a vastly overrated virtue. “He's going to take no position. He said just don't press him too hard to come right out and say he's okay with it.”

“Protecting his boss?” Davidoff asked.

“There was a time,” waxed Jaywalker, “when the boss didn't need protecting.” That time, he didn't need to add, was when Max Davidoff had been district attorney.

And so the seed took root and sprouted.

By the time they assembled for sentencing, the Kingstons knew that however much time Justice Davidoff was going to give Darren—and it could be as much as fifty years—there was a very good chance he was going to let him stay out pending his appeal. Although even a very good chance may provide cold comfort indeed at such times.

Jacob Pope spoke first. He recommended that the court, in imposing sentence on the Cerami and Kenarden rapes, “cover” the Maldonado and Caldwell attempted rapes. This was either a rather generous move on Pope's part—since it meant that there wouldn't have to be a second, and perhaps even a third, trial—or yet another indication that by this time Pope himself harbored some nagging doubt about Darren's guilt and had lost the stomach for prosecuting him further.

Beyond that, he observed that the court was very familiar with the facts of the case and stated that he had no particular recommendation for length of sentence. This, too, was something of a concession on Pope's part. An assistant district attorney who's won a conviction after trial on a pair of knifepoint rapes typically urges the judge to
impose the maximum sentence allowed by law and occasionally even more than that. The fact that Jacob Pope was urging nothing at all spoke volumes. As he had with his take-no-position stance on continuing bail, Pope was now telling Justice Davidoff that any sentence he chose to impose was okay with the prosecution.

Jaywalker spoke much longer. He began by thanking Pope for his professionalism. Then he moved to set aside the verdict, citing many of the same issues he'd raised at trial—the racially unrepresentative jury panel, the insufficient corroboration, the improper rebuttal case and the discrepancies between the man described by the victims and the one convicted by the jury. Predictably, Davidoff denied the motion.

Next Jaywalker talked about the polygraphs Darren had taken, the hypnosis sessions and the sodium amytol interview. Strictly speaking, none of those matters bore any relevance to sentencing, but Jaywalker wanted to get them into the record anyway. Months from now, a panel of appellate judges was going to have to read the transcript, and Jaywalker didn't want to allow them the luxury of skimming through it as just another case. He wanted them to see how passionately he believed in Darren's innocence, and to know that he wasn't alone in his belief. He wanted, in other words, to make it as hard as he possibly could for them to affirm the conviction. He wanted them to read his words and choke on them.

Jaywalker pointed to Darren's work record, noting that the post office had seen fit to take him back despite the conviction. He mentioned the lack of any prior conviction—indeed, any prior arrest for a sex crime of any sort. He pointed, literally, to Darren's family. It had been his in
tention to name them, one by one. But now, as he turned to them, he saw Inez, Marlin and Charlene sitting together, their hands intertwined, and the sight overwhelmed him. All his pain and frustration and anger boiled over. All the interviews and sessions and tests they'd been through came back to him, all the freezing afternoons he'd spent in Castle Hill. His eyes filled with tears, and as he looked back down at his notes, the words blurred and disappeared from view. As he continued to speak, the tears rolled freely down his face, and his voice cracked like a schoolboy's.

They were the last words he could get out.