"Have compassion!" Michelle reminded
me on my way out the door.
This particular morning, I was
reporting to the county courts for jury selection. This duty is one of the fringe
benefits of being a registered voter, so I show up at the civic center theater at
pretty regular six-month intervals.
I've never actually had to sit on a
jury, though. There are a number of reasons for this; for one thing, I generally
tell the judge in a marijuana possession case that I have problems with the law
which could interfere with my rendering an impartial verdict. Besides, Lord knows,
that could be any number of my friends up there in the dock...
More often, I suspect, it's because I
was a television reporter for five years at El Paso's CBS affiliate -- KDBC,
Channel 4, the Big Four News Team. There's just something about a journalist
which seems to make lawyers leery of us during jury selection. In addition, I had
the courthouse beat for a few years, which means I probably was chummy with the
prosecutor or his adversary, or both.
I landed a job with the Big Four
fresh out of college, and my facility with the equipment amazed my colleagues. Or,
as they remarked, "Most of the graduates who come in here, they can't write, they
can't shoot, they can't edit. But, Richard, they can drive."
My courthouse days began the night we
had a tip phoned in that a former county judge was being booked downtown for DWI. I
rushed my gear down to the courthouse, ran down to the booking desk in the basement,
and got plenty of shots of His Honor, grinning and winking at the camera and
generally having a whale of a time.
Several years later, when the judge
passed on, our staff was frantically searching through our archives looking for file
footage, and this ended up being the only tape they could find on him. Be that as
it may, I found myself soon after pounding the judicial beat.
The Federal and County Courthouses are
across the street from one another in El Paso; despite this wealth of jurisdictions,
there's not always anything newsworthy happening. Newsworthy, according to Channel
Four, being anything involving a murder or public officials. Both, if we could
swing it.
Sometimes our own colleagues were
tossed into the brew. The El Paso Times had to fend off a couple of libel suits,
and we got a lot of mileage out of each one. One was brought by John Kerr, a U.S.
Attorney who had survived an assassination attempt in San Antonio, shortly after a
federal judge was gunned down in the same town. Kerr, who was in hiding under the
Federal Witness Protection Program (yet still managing somehow to work as a
prosecutor) contended that he and the judge were shot at because they had a
reputation for being tough on drug dealers. And how did drug dealers know this?
Well, they must have read about it in the paper, of course...
A jury actually decided in Kerr's
favor on this one (another reason I'd hate to ever go in front of a jury), but a
higher court reversed the verdict. Another libel suit was brought by a former mayor
and his old buddy, a real estate developer. It seems our City Hall, which was
planned to be situated next door to the federal and county buildings, somehow wound
up instead on the outskirts of downtown, on land owned by the mayor's developer
friend. The Times got to thinking out loud whether any "hanky-panky" was involved,
and the resulting lawsuit dragged on for months. The reporter who had covered the
story was called in to testify; he had since resigned and joined a monastery in New
Mexico.
Channel Four narrowly avoided lawsuits
from time to time. I was covering a child custody case, distinguished by the
father's awaiting trial for murdering the mother. His in-laws were suing for
custody, but it was widely recognized that the defense was indulging in a little
fishing expedition to find out what the prosecution had in store. Unfortunately, I
was off when the verdict was handed down, and one of our, uh, less acute reporters
called the judge to find out what went down.
"Well," said the judge, "based on the
preponderance of the evidence, I'm awarding custody to the in-laws."
So, on that night's newscast, our
reporter stood on camera and said, "The judge said the preponderance of the evidence
showed [the defendant] murdered his wife."
She lost her job over that one.
She's now working in a bigger market, but that's another story.
In one murder trial, the defense tried
the time-honored ploy of shifting suspicion onto a friend of the accused. For this
purpose, they enlisted the services of Jay J. Armes, renowned double-amputee private
eye. Jay wired another friend of the accused's for sound, sent him to the door of
their pigeon, and listened in while one tried to elicit a confession from the other.
Over the objections of the prosecution, the tape recording was played in the
courtroom, and turned out to be totally innocuous.
Jay sneaked us an old photo of the
deceased, so I should be kind to him, but truth is, he's a major flake. He lost
both hands in a childhood accident, and the resulting settlement allowed him to set
himself up as a self-styled James Bond. His office is set off the street by a
barricade of pointed rocks -- to discourage truck-bomb drivers -- and the first
thing one sees when the elevator doors open is a mannequin of Jay sitting on a couch,
to throw off would-be assassins. His home, featuring a bronze statue of Jay on the
porch, is set amidst a private menagerie, a helicopter landing pad, and an artificial
lake. After years of running unsuccessfully for public office, Jay managed to get
himself elected to city council, so the whole city can realize just what a flake he
really is.
Murder cases were often the most
interesting, of course. Our district attorney, Steve Simmons, wanted to bring a
case against Henry Lee Lucas, the one-eyed drifter who confessed to hundreds of
killings across the nation and later recanted. Lucas had come to El Paso to confess
to the rape-murder of an elderly woman in the Lower Valley. Steve felt he could get
an ironclad conviction -- which wouldn't hurt his political aspirations -- and
subsequently the county spent a small fortune preparing the case. Unfortunately,
little discrepancies began to plague the case, such as eyewitnesses who placed Lucas
on the other side of Texas on the night of the crime. Blood and semen samples
recovered from the victim failed to match Lucas's type. It also developed that the
investigating officer was a nephew of the deceased, a clear violation of police
department policy, especially since several other relatives were suspects. The
Juarez police said the family gardener had admitted to the crime; the officer in
charge on our side of the bridge discounted the confession, saying he saw it
extracted with a cattle prod. A disgusted county judge finally threw out the
case.
Simmons put on quite a show in another
case, where he was questioning the father of a murder victim. He wanted the father
to re-enact the discovery of the son's body, so he took on the part of the
corpse.
"Now, how was he lying when you found
him?"
"Uh, face down."
"Okay. Now, when you came upon his
body, what did you do?"
"I ran my hands through his scalp,
looking for wounds."
"Well, go on, then."
Mostly, our job consisted of running
down the corridors, chasing camera-shy suspects in order to get some video for the
evening newscast. At the trial I just mentioned, I asked my cameraman if he got any
shots of the father entering or leaving the courtroom.
"No," he said, "but it's okay -- I
shot some pictures of him through the window in the door."
Naturally, I was aghast, as shooting
in this particular courtroom was verboten. I thought we'd get away with it, though,
until we got onto the same elevator with the judge hearing the case. Looking at no
one in particular, he opined that anyone caught taking pictures of his courtroom
would see his ass in stir.
As a rule, federal court didn't lend
itself to theatrics; most of the cases involved drug runners apprehended at the
border. U.S. Attorney Michael McDonald distinguished himself in one case, however,
beginning his summation by casting a baleful eye over the defendant and declaring,
"There is evil in this courtroom today."
I ran into Mike one night at my
favorite watering hole, where he and his staff were entertaining some colleagues
from Midland who were in town on a change of venue. They were also entertaining my
friend Jean-Marie, who was perched atop Mike's lap.
"Richard," she inquired, "do you know
who these guys are?"
"These gentlemen are prosecutors from
the U.S. Attorney's office," I answered.
She threw me an exasperated look.
"They told me they were gynecologists in town for a convention!"
Later, Steve Fisher, a defense
attorney we know, stopped by our table. Steve was all irate that his client, an
Army nurse, had just been convicted on a drug charge, while he was convinced of her
innocence.
"She didn't do anything, and she's
getting five years! I've defended burglars and rapists and murderers and gotten
them off -- and they were guilty!"
Jean-Marie turned to me and confided,
"Only Steve's innocent clients go to jail."
My favorite courtroom performance came
in a manslaughter case involving a drunken driver who ran into a girl on a bicycle.
The prosecutor, Bill Moody, contended the defendant was driving 80 miles an hour in
a residential zone. The defense's expert witness, called upon to determine the
defendant's speed by examining the crime scene, was with Sandia National
Laboratories. His experience consisted of crashing trucks and freight cars into
cement walls, to see what impacts could be withstood by vehicles carrying radioactive
materials.
At one point, the defense attorney
asked his expert what could be concluded about the speed of the car judging by the
distance the victim's body was thrown. Moody promptly objected, on the grounds the
witness lacked sufficient expertise.
"Your Honor," the defense countered,
"this witness has over fifteen years' experience judging the impact of vehicles into
objects."
Moody stared at him in disbelief.
"Into human bodies!?"
The judge allowed as, yeah, he'd have
to sustain that one.
Bill Moody is a judge himself now.
As for me, I got transferred off of the courthouse beat onto a desk job, when our
weekend assignments editor developed ulcers. The weekend desk is a prime location
for burnout, which is precisely what happened to me after a couple of years at it.
As glamorous as the news business must seem to you, I found the allure didn't
necessarily compensate for the pressures, and after working my way up to weekend
producer, I quit for greener pastures. (Didn't join any monasteries, though.)
Not that I don't keep up with the
courts still. You never know what's going to come up -- such as the case of actress
Tracy Scoggins, in town to host the Miss U.S.A. Pageant, who was assailed by a
would-be rapist at her hotel. The culprit was taken to night court, where he gave
the magistrate a fake name, address, and place of employment. After this was
discovered, it also came out that the public defender was an old buddy of his -- and
the magistrate on duty was the defender's law partner.
After this display of our legal
system in action, an embittered Tracy Scoggins held a press conference to explain
that she wasn't going to bother coming to El Paso to testify -- which forced the
prosecutor to drop charges. She was, however, suing the city and the Pageant for
$14 million, claiming her assailant singled her out because the Pageant had
given her a car with the Miss U.S.A. logo on the side.
As long as he isn't being prosecuted,
her alleged attacker is countersuing her for defaming his good name.
Like I said, I still enjoy following
the courts; I'm just glad it's not my job to make sense of them
anymore.
- - - - - - - - - -
Mimosa 9, when it appeared in December 1990, was proof that we survived our
European Worldcon adventure. The lead article was our seven-page trip report titled
"Across Europe on Rail and Plastic," a reference to the number of train rides we had
during the trip (as you can tell from the illustration to the right) and how we paid
most of our expenses. Our week after the convention took us from The Hague first to
Brussels, then briefly to Vienna, then to Prague (just nine months after the Velvet
Revolution of 1989), and then to Berlin before returning to Amsterdam for the flight
home. Many other fans who went over to The Hague and Confiction did the same sort
of thing -- visiting places like Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, and Italy -- and
it was fascinating in the months following the convention to hear about their
adventures. At any rate, Mimosa 9 also featured a new 'Serious Scientific
Speech' by Bob Shaw (one that he gave at Confiction, in fact), and another
worldcon-related article by Dave Kyle, this time about the 1956 New York Worldcon
and an incident at its banquet that was the origin of the familiar fannish
catchphrase, "Dave Kyle says you can't sit here."
The only non-worldcon related article
in the issue perhaps wasn't even an article at all -- it was a collection of
different forms of verse by Australian fan Dave Luckett about the antics of his
(then) young son, Evan. And now, nearly twelve years later, Dave provides us this
update: "It might be of interest to relate that Evan at 15 years of age is now 6' 2",
built along the lines of a brick shipyard, and has just spent a week on the State
Training Vessel ‘Leuwin', a 600 tonne barquentine -- square rig on the fore, main
gaff, lovely thing -- and is a suitable person for playing lock forward for the
State Rugby under-17s. That would be something like the same as being selected as
nose tackle for the All-state High School Football Team for a pretty decent U.S.
state. Suffice it to say that I do not argue with him unless the matter is
serious." Such is the passage of time.
Bottom illustration by Alan Hutchinson
All other illustrations by Teddy Harvia
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