No Way Out

‘This time we’ve got a witness,’ said Lieutenant Kropf.

‘Who?’ asked Alex.

‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

Alex had flown down to Los Angeles from San Francisco as soon as he heard of Claymore’s second arrest, having told his client not to say a word until he got there. He knew that the cops would try their usual tricks – telling the suspect that they were more likely to believe him if he spoke freely on the record, without getting all ‘lawyered up.’ But Alex had been firm.

‘Don’t fall for it,’ he had warned. ‘The issue is not whether they believe you, but whether they’ve got a case. They’re capable of talking themselves into anything. You just stay cool and hang on till I get there. If they’ve got no case, they can’t act. If they think they’ve already got one, then nothing you can say will make any difference.’

‘What exactly did this witness see?’ Alex assumed that someone hadn’t just stood there watching a rape and doing nothing about it.

‘He saw your client running away from the crime scene,’ said Kropf, regretting it a moment later.

He.

Alex picked up on it. So the witness was a man…or a boy. And he had only seen Claymore allegedly running away from the crime scene, not the rape. That was a very different thing.

And Kropf had also let slip that an ID had already been made.

‘Wait a minute, you put my client in a line-up when I wasn’t there?’

‘We didn’t need to,’ said the lieutenant. ‘He recognized him from the news reports.’

They hadn’t said anything about a witness at the time of Claymore’s first arrest. And even if he was right about the identity of the man running away, how did he know that it was from the scene of a rape? If he had known at the time, would he not have stayed to help the victim? Or given his name to the police? And would they not have said something about a witness at the time of the first arrest? And put Claymore in a line-up? But now they were saying that this man had recognized Claymore from the news reports. That meant that he didn’t stick around at the time.

Why not? Had he been afraid? Why would he be afraid if the rapist had run away? Was he afraid to get involved? Was he afraid of the police? Was he a criminal himself? Had he really seen something? Had he even been there? Or was he one of the legion of freeloaders who come out of the woodwork in high profile cases, looking to make a quick buck?

‘Can I see his statement?’ asked Alex.

At a certain point, if they decided to proceed against Claymore, they’d have no alternative but to show him the statement. However at this stage, they owed him nothing, not even the name of the witness.

‘You’ll get it from the D.A. with the rest of the discovery material.’

That sounded ominous, like they had already made up their minds to charge Claymore.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like to give my client an opportunity to explain what he was doing there?’

‘What, you mean why he was at a crime scene at the time of the crime when he had previously claimed to be at home? No, as a matter of fact, we wouldn’t.’

Alex realized that he was in a tight spot. The police were under no obligation to give Claymore a chance to explain himself, now that they had a witness to put him at the crime scene. They could do so, if they wanted to. But they didn’t have to. If they decided to go to trial, Claymore would have to take his chances with a jury.

The door opened and Bridget entered. She signaled the lieutenant over and whispered in his ear while showing him a piece of paper. The lieutenant was nodding seriously and the expression on his face looked grave. Alex suspected that this scene was being staged. He had seen this sort of thing dozens of times before.

The lieutenant came back to the table. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked Alex.

‘Just cut the crap and spit it out,’ said Alex.

‘We just got back the results of the DNA test.’

Alex suspected that they already had the results before rearresting Claymore. They wouldn’t have arrested him on the strength of the witness’s ID alone, when the test results were still pending.

‘And?’ asked the lawyer tensely.

‘We didn’t have any DNA in the vaginal swab because the rapist used a condom. But the victim scratched the rapist’s face and so we were able to get a good DNA sample from under her fingernails. Want to know what the results were?’

‘Spill it,’ said Alex, realizing where this was going.

The lieutenant handed the fax over to Alex, watching his face for a reaction with a growing sense of excitement. But when Alex perused it, the emotion he felt was anger – not towards Kropf, but towards his own client. And when he showed it to his client, the look on Claymore’s face was one of confusion…and fear.

Friday, 12 June 2009 – 14.30 (#ulink_27e19d94-bcac-5d8c-afa4-8b7376a4ce36)

‘Your Honor,’ Alex Sedaka’s voice rang out confidently, ‘although my client has a criminal record, his last criminal conviction was over twenty years ago.’

They were in Court 13 of the Ventura Courthouse, in the same building where Claymore was being detained. It was a crowded courtroom with backless spectators’ benches and a large cage for holding prisoners. Being based up north in the Bay area, Alex had never had to practice here before, but he knew that this was one of the busiest courts in the country, essentially a meat factory for arraignments, scheduling motions and defendants’ pleas. With 200 cases a day to process, user-comfort was a luxury that they couldn’t afford.

‘Mr Claymore has strong roots in the community,’ Alex continued. ‘And for the last ten years has been a model citizen.’

In truth, Alex was rather less confident than he sounded. The warrant for the second arrest had been a no-bail warrant, because of Claymore’s past, a powerful indicator of which way the judge’s thinking was heading. Alex would have liked to file for an interim appeal. But he knew that his grounds were weak to nonexistent. Denying bail to a man who had previously escaped from prison and stayed at liberty for several years was hardly unreasonable.

But his training and experience as a trial lawyer, permitted him to conceal the doubt – indeed required him to conceal it.

So it was with this turbulent mixture of emotions that Alex was addressing the judge. Except that he was all too aware that he wasn’t addressing only the judge. This was Claymore’s first appearance in court since his arrest and predictably enough it had attracted a lot of public attention. The courtroom was packed with reporters and Alex knew how important it was to get the message out there into the stream of news as quickly as possible, to counteract the negative effect of Claymore’s well-known past.

It was inevitable that the media would dredge up Claymore’s history; there would be no restrictions on public discussion of the facts of the case. Gag orders could be imposed at the judge’s discretion, but there was no automatic sub-judice rule.

As Alex sat down, a woman of about forty, of average height with neat, jet-black hair, rose from her chair to dispute the point. She was Sarah Jensen, the Assistant District Attorney who headed the domestic violence division of the D.A.’s office. Alex had never crossed swords with her before but he was well aware of her reputation. Some prosecutors are tough but not good. Others are good but not tough. Sarah Jensen was both tough and good.

‘Your Honor,’ there was an angry, almost contemptuous edge to the voice, ‘Elias Claymore’s record is well known and the defense counsel conveniently failed to mention that he not only raped six women in the past, but he also escaped from prison last time he was convicted and remained at liberty for several years. For this reason alone, he is a very serious flight risk.’

Alex was back on his feet. ‘Your Honor, the Assistant District Attorney seems to have conveniently forgotten that my client returned to America voluntarily to serve out his sentence.’

It was Alex who, as a young law graduate, still learning his craft, had negotiated the plea bargain.

‘And why should that outweigh the fact that he fled in the first place?’ asked the judge, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

The judge was an old man, close to retirement from the bench. He had seen and heard just about every piece of bullshit that lawyers were capable of throwing at him, and if there were any new tricks to be learned – even from a veteran like Alex – he would have been most surprised.

‘Because it’s a more recent event, Your Honor. And in judging a man’s character, the court should give more weight to his recent past than his distant past.’ He placed the emphasis on his key words, in the hope of neuro-linguistically programming the judge to respond as he wanted.

‘You mean the fact that he returned to the United States to serve out his sentence after he escaped?’

‘Precisely, Your Honor.’

The judge squirmed with mock embarrassment and scratched his head. ‘Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, Mr Sedaka, but he could hardly have done it before he escaped.’

The courtroom erupted with mirth at the judge’s wisecrack and Alex felt the frustration that goes with knowing that one faces an uphill struggle against a hostile judge – especially when the hostile judge has the law on his side.

The gallery, packed with journalists who had got wind of Claymore’s arrest, sensed that this was the beginning of another media event, like the O.J. Simpson trial.