Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All (5 page)

Jack is six feet three now, the same height as me. His hair is dark like mine but cut much shorter. His eyes are a chocolate brown and reflect a natural intensity and intelligence. He’s twenty years old, a junior at Vanderbilt, and a member of the baseball team, a program that prides itself on discipline and toughness. He carries himself with the confidence of an athlete, and as I stand to hug him, my heart seems to swell in my chest.

“Big Jack,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck, “you look fantastic.”

“You look tired,” he says as he returns the hug and sits down across from me.

“Didn’t sleep very well.”

“So, how are you? Want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“The execution. Are you handling it all right?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I say honestly. “It’s hard to believe I sat there and watched them kill a man.”

“A man who murdered a defenseless little girl.”

“I know. I’m just not quite sure what to think about it.”

“Then don’t think about it.” He smiles broadly. “Let’s talk baseball.”

I’m relieved he isn’t interested in hearing the details of the event I witnessed several hours earlier, and we begin to talk about our favorite subject while he wolfs down four eggs, two pieces of wheat toast, two apples, and a banana. We talk about coaches and teammates and opponents and Jack’s prospects of being drafted by a major- league team in June. I’m in favor of his staying at Vanderbilt through his senior year, but he’s a power hitter who also hits for average and rarely strikes out, and there’s a good chance the pros might throw some serious money at him in the draft this year. An hour flies by, and at seven forty-five he looks at his watch and gulps down the last of a glass of orange juice.

“Gotta go, Dad,” he says. “Class in fifteen minutes.”

“Sure,” I say dejectedly.

“Something wrong?”

“Nah. I’m just not looking forward to the rest of the week.”

“What’s up?”

“I have a hearing tomorrow morning that I don’t think is going to go well, and your mom has invited Ray and Toni over for dinner Saturday night. She thinks they’re on the verge of splitting up.”

“I talked to Tommy yesterday,” Jack says. Tommy Miller and Jack have remained close despite being hundreds of miles from each other. They speak on the phone often and spend time together during the holidays, which is the only time they’re at home now. The last time I saw Tommy was at Christmas. He told me he loved Duke University and was doing well both in the classroom and on the baseball field.

“Yeah? What’d Tommy have to say?”

“He says things are bad. He’s worried about his dad. He also says he’s going to have to transfer in the fall because they can’t afford the tuition at Duke anymore.”

“I know. Your mom told me.”

Ray Miller’s situation has grown steadily worse since Judge Green threw him in jail on the contempt charge six months ago. The judge made good on the promises he made as Ray and I left the courtroom that day. Less than twenty- four hours after Ray was jailed, the judge issued an order suspending Ray from practicing law in the criminal courts of the First Judicial District. He then filed a dozen complaints against Ray with the Board of Professional Responsibility. Since the complaints were coming from a judge, the BPR—a useless bunch of paper pushers in Nashville—suspended Ray statewide without so much as a perfunctory hearing.

Green’s scorched-earth campaign has resulted in Ray’s being unable to earn a living, which in turn has caused him to be unable to make his mortgage payments, which will undoubtedly result in the loss of his house in the very near future. Two of his vehicles have already been repossessed by creditors, Tommy is being forced to leave Duke, and as the situation has worsened, Ray has fallen into a deep depression. He’s grown a beard, is drinking heavily, and has put on at least thirty pounds. I find myself going by to see him less and less often, because watching him deteriorate is nothing short of heartbreaking.

“So why is Mom having them over?” Jack asks.

“Sounds like it’ll be pretty miserable.”

“You know how she is,” I say. “She always thinks she can help, and even if she can’t, she thinks she has to try.”

Jack rises from the table and hugs me again.

“Tell Mom I love her,” he says, “and tell her there are some things a person just needs to stay out of.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“And you,” he says with a smile. “Can I tell you something without making you mad?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“I’ve learned something since I’ve been here. It’ll probably sound strange to you, but I’ve learned the only thing that’s real is the present. If you think about it, there’s really no future and no past. There’s only now, and that’s where we should concentrate on living.”

“I didn’t know you’d become a philosopher.”

“It’d be good if you’d give it a try, Dad. It’d be good if you’d stop worrying about the future so much, and it’d be even better if you could forget about the past.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m serious. I know you’re my father and I’m biased, but I think you’re the best man I’ve ever known. You should go easier on yourself.”

“Thank you, son. I’ll try.”

He turns away, and as I watch him walk out of the restaurant, I feel a tear slide down my cheek.

5

“Would you state your name for the record, please?”

The next morning I’m standing at a lectern in Criminal Court in Jonesborough, Tennessee, the seat of Washington County and the oldest town in the state. There are dozens of spectators beyond the bar, all anxiously awaiting the outcome of the hearing. The witness on the stand is an intelligent, frail-looking twenty-five-year-old with an acne-scarred face and straight, shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle. He leans toward the microphone.

“My name is David Dillinger,” he says. I notice a quake in his voice. His anxiety is understandable since he’s traveled thousands of miles and is a stranger among us, but anxiety seems to be a way of life for Dillinger. When I interviewed him before the hearing, he had to leave the room half a dozen times to smoke.

“Where do you live, Mr. Dillinger?”

“I live at 401 West Fifth Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.”

“And what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a computer programmer for Royal National Bank.”

“Do you know the defendant?”

Dillinger shifts uneasily in the chair and looks over at the man sitting at the defense table.

“No. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.”

Douglas “Buddy” Carver stares straight ahead from his spot at the defense table. There isn’t a trace of emotion on his sixty-year-old face. His thinning white hair has been combed to the side and held firmly in place by a sticky product of some kind, and he’s wearing a loud, red sport coat. Carver is a slumlord, one of the wealthiest landowners in northeast Tennessee. He’s also an extremely popular deacon at one of the largest Methodist churches in Johnson City and hosts a local television show called
Bringing the Light
that airs at five o’clock every Sunday afternoon. Most of the people in the gallery are supportive members of his church. They stared at me coldly when I walked into the courtroom.

“Would you please explain to the court how you became involved in this case, Mr. Dillinger?” I ask.

“I received notice that Mr. Carver had downloaded some images onto his computer.”

“You say you received notice. How were you notified?”

“By my computer.”

“Can you explain to the court how it worked?”

“I attached what’s known as a Trojan Horse virus to some pornographic material on an Internet Web site. The pornographic material depicted children. When the images were downloaded, the virus notified me. I was then able to get into the computer of whoever downloaded the images. From there, I was able to find out who was doing the downloading.”

“How many pornographic images of children were downloaded?”

“Twelve the day I found out about it, but when I got into the computer, there were about fifteen hundred more.”

“And what did you do, Mr. Dillinger?”

“I called Pedofind. It’s a nonprofit organization that tracks pedophiles in the United States and Canada. I gave them the information I had.”

“And after that?”

“All I know is that Mr. Carver wound up getting arrested, and here I am today.”

Pedofind had contacted the Johnson City Police Department, and they, in turn, had followed up. They gathered enough information to get a search warrant, executed the warrant at Buddy Carver’s home a week later, seized his computer, and arrested him a couple of days after that.

“Did you have any contact regarding Mr. Carver with any law enforcement agency in Tennessee before you found these images on his computer?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did you have any contact with any law enforcement agency anywhere about Mr. Carver before you found these images?”

“No.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dillinger.”

Cut-and-dried, I think. Straightforward. Nothing to attack. But I know there’s never anything cut- and-dried in the field of criminal law. I also know I’m in front of a judge who is strangely sympathetic to sex offenders in general and pedophiles in particular. I suspect he and the defendant might have something in common.

Judge Green has been taking notes and listening intently to the testimony, his glasses perched precariously on his long, thin nose. Buddy Carver’s lawyer is a fifty-year-old named William Kay who brownnoses judges so blatantly that everyone calls him Fudge. He has filed a motion asking the judge to throw out all of our evidence (the pornographic images) because, he alleges, his client’s rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution have been violated. Specifically, Fudge is arguing that David Dillinger illegally searched Carver’s computer, thereby requiring the court to exclude the evidence he found and subsequently turned over to Pedofind.

Were David Dillinger a police officer, Kay’s argument would have legs. But Dillinger is a private citizen who took it upon himself to intervene in a situation that offended him personally. The guarantees under the Fourth Amendment don’t extend to searches conducted by private individuals—only to searches conducted by agents of the government. Fudge is arguing that because Dillinger contacted authorities as soon as he found the pornographic material and sought to have Carver prosecuted, he was acting as an agent of the government and was therefore required to obtain a warrant before searching the files of Carver’s computer. Fudge is wrong, but that doesn’t mean a thing.

“Cross, Mr. Kay?” Judge Green asks, and Kay gets up. He’s short and pudgy. His brown hair is matted and looks as though he just got out of bed.

“Mr. Dillinger,” Kay says as he waddles around the table toward the lectern, “why did you attach this virus to this particular kind of material?”

“Because it offends me.”

“How did you know where to find it?”

“Excuse me?”

I’m watching Dillinger intently. He sits on his hands and his face flushes. He’s already becoming flustered, so I stand.

“Objection, relevance,” I say. “How Mr. Dillinger originally found the material has nothing to do with whether Mr. Carver downloaded it to his computer.”

“Overruled,” Judge Green snarls. “Sit down, Mr. Dillard.”

“Here’s the thing, Mr. Dillinger,” Kay says. “I wouldn’t know how to find child porn if I wanted to, and I’m guessing everyone else in this courtroom is the same way. I mean, you don’t just log on to Google and type in ‘child pornography,’ do you? That seems like a surefire way to get a visit from the feds. So how did you know where to find it so you could attach your virus to it?”

“It isn’t that difficult,” Dillinger says.

“Explain it to us.”

Dillinger looks at me for help, but the judge has already made his feelings known on the objection. Dillinger has inserted himself into this situation, and Judge Green and William Kay are making sure he has to live with the consequences.

“People find it through chat rooms, mostly,” Dillinger says reluctantly.

“And you have personal experience with this?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Are you some kind of pervert?”

I could stand and voice the objection of badgering or argumentative, but I don’t want Dillinger to come across as being spineless. I decide to let him handle it himself. His eyes tighten, and he leans forward.

“I believe your client is the pervert in this room,” he says angrily.
Attaboy. Don’t let him intimidate you.

Kay looks immediately to the judge. “Will the court instruct the witness to answer the question, please?”

“Answer the question,” Green says curtly.

“I don’t remember the question,” Dillinger snaps.

“The question is why,” Kay says, starting to re-frame the query. “Why do you know how to locate child pornography on the Internet?”

Dillinger pauses, and I feel for him. I’ve asked him the same question, of course, during our preparation for the hearing. It initially seemed as odd to me as it does to Kay, but once I heard the answer, I understood. Kay should have learned the answer himself before he asked such a dangerous question. The word
why
can be a powder keg in the courtroom.

“I know how to locate it because I was raped as a child by a man who showed me the same kind of smut that your client downloaded onto his computer.”

Dillinger’s tone is one of indignation and disgust. He lifts his chin and folds his arms, glaring at Kay, who is surprised but manages to recover quickly.

“So what you’re telling me is that your motivation in finding child pornography on the Internet and attaching this virus to it is anger, correct?” Kay says.

“I don’t know.”

“Anger, and maybe revenge? You regard yourself as a cyber vigilante of some sort?”

“I don’t regard myself as anything. I just find the perverts and report them.”

“So you’ve done this before? How many times?”

“I don’t know exactly. A few.”

“Would a few be more than ten?”

“Not that many.”