The Law of Innocence Read online

  “Cool down, Edgar,” I said. “You asked me to look at your file and that’s all I’m doing. I’m not your lawyer. You should really talk to him about—”

  “I can’t go to him,” Quesada said. “Haller, you don’t know shit!”

  I stared at him and finally understood. His lawyer was controlled by the very people he would need to inform on: White Fence. Going to him would almost assuredly result in a Mexican Mafia–engineered snitch shanking, whether he was in the high-power module or not. It was said that the eMe, as it was more informally known, could get to anybody anywhere in a California lockdown.

  I was literally saved by the bell. The five-minute warning horn before bed check sounded. Quesada reached across the table and roughly grabbed up his documents. He was through with me. He got up while still smoothing all the loose pages into a neat stack. Without a Thank you or a Fuck you, he headed off to his cell.

  And I headed to mine.

  3

  At 8 p.m. the steel door of my cell automatically slid closed with a metallic bang that jolted my entire being. Every night it went through me like a train. I had been in lockup for five weeks now and it was something I couldn’t and didn’t ever want to get used to. I sat down on the three-inch-thin mattress and closed my eyes. I knew the overhead light would stay on another hour and I needed to use that time, but this was my ritual. To try to blank out all the harsh sounds and fears. To remind myself of who I still was. A father, a lawyer—but not a murderer.

  “You got Q all hot and bothered out there.”

  I opened my eyes. It was Bishop in the next cell. There was a grated air vent high up on the wall that separated our cells.

  “Didn’t mean to,” I said. “I guess next time somebody needs a jailhouse lawyer in here I’ll just pass.”

  “Good plan,” Bishop said.

  “And where were you, by the way? It was about to become kill-the-messenger time with him. I looked around, no Bishop.”

  “Don’t worry, homes, I had you covered. I was watching from up on the rail. I had your back.”

  I was paying Bishop four hundred a week for protection, the payment delivered in cash to his girlfriend and mother of his son in Inglewood. His protection extended throughout the quarter of the high-power octagon where we were housed: two tiers, twenty-four single cells, with twenty-two other inmates presenting varying levels of known and unknown threat to me.

  On my first night, Bishop had offered to protect me or hurt me. I didn’t negotiate. He usually stuck close when I was in the dayroom but I had not seen him on the second-tier walkway rail when I gave Quesada the bad news about his case. I knew very little about Bishop, because you didn’t ask questions in jail. His dark black skin hid tattoos to the point of making me wonder why he even got them. But I had been able to make out the words Crip Life inked across the knuckles of both his hands.

  I reached under the bed for the cardboard file box that held my own case docs. I checked the rubber bands first. I had wrapped each of the four stacks of documents with two bands each, horizontal and vertical, with the bands crossing at distinct spots on the top sheet. This told me if Bishop or anyone else had snuck in and gone through my stuff. I had a client once who almost went down on a first-degree murder because a jailhouse snitch had gotten to the files in his cell and read enough discovery material to concoct a convincing but phony confession he claimed my client had made to him. Lesson learned. I set rubber-band traps and would know if someone had looked through my paperwork.

  I was now facing a first-degree murder charge myself and was going pro se—defending myself. I know what Lincoln said and probably many wise men before him and since. Maybe I did have a fool for a client, but I couldn’t see putting my future in any hands other than my own. So, in the matter of The State of California versus J. Michael Haller, the defense’s war room was cell 13, level K-10 at Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

  I pulled my motions packet out of the box and snapped off the rubber bands after confirming that the documents had not been tampered with. A motions hearing was scheduled for the following morning and I wanted to prep. I had three requests before the court, beginning with a motion to lower bail. It had been set at my arraignment at $5 million, with the prosecution successfully arguing that I was not only a flight risk but a threat to witnesses in the case because I knew the inner workings of the local justice system like the back of my hand. It didn’t help that the judge handling the arraignment was the Honorable Richard Rollins Hagan, whose rulings in prior cases I had twice gotten overturned on appeal. He got some payback on me, agreeing with the prosecution’s request to more than double down on the schedule that recommended a $2 million bail for first-degree murder.

  At the time, the difference between $2 million and $5 million didn’t matter. I had to decide if I wanted to put everything I had into my freedom or into my defense. I decided on the latter and took up residence in Twin Towers, qualifying for keep-away status as an officer of the court who had potential enemies in all of the gen-pop dorms.

  But tomorrow I would stand before a different judge—one I believed I had never crossed—and ask for a reduction in bail. I had two other motions as well and now reviewed my notes so I could stand and argue before the judge instead of read.

  More important than the bail motion was the discovery motion that accused the prosecution of withholding information and evidence I was entitled to, and the challenge to the probable cause of the police stop that led to my arrest.

  I had to assume that Judge Violet Warfield, who had drawn the case on rotation, would put a time cap on arguments on all the motions. I would need to be ready, succinct, and on point.

  “Hey, Bishop?” I said. “You still awake?”

  “I’m awake,” Bishop said. “What’s up?”

  “I want to practice on you.”

  “Practice what?”

  “My arguments, Bishop.”

  “That ain’t part of our deal, man.”

  “I know but the lights are about to go out and I’m not ready. I want you to listen and tell me what you think.”

  At that moment the lights on the tier went out.

  “Okay,” Bishop said. “Let’s hear it. But you pay extra for this.”

  4

  Monday, December 2

  In the morning, I was on the first bus to the courthouse, having dined on a baloney sandwich and a bruised red apple for breakfast. It was the same breakfast every morning and it was served again at lunch for good measure. In my five weeks here we caught a break from it on Thanksgiving only, when the baloney was replaced with a slice of pressed turkey and served at all three meals. I was long past any revulsion with the food at Twin Towers. It was the routine and now I put it away quickly and easily every breakfast and every lunch. Still, I estimated that I had already lost between ten and twenty pounds during my incarceration and I looked at it as getting down to fighting weight for what would surely be the bout of my life.

  On the bus, I was with thirty-nine other inmates, most of whom were heading to morning arraignment court. As a lawyer, I had seen the wide-eyed look of fear in clients when I met them for initial consultation at first appearances. But that was always in court and always with me calming and preparing them for what lay ahead. On the buses, I was surrounded by it. Men facing their first experience of incarceration. Men who had been in lockup many times before. Rookie or recidivist, there was a palpable sense of desperation coming from all of them.

  I found the bus rides to and from court to be my own moments of biggest fear. It was random selection when you were loaded on. I had no Bishop, no bodyguard. Should anything happen to me, the deputies were behind an iron grate at the front: the driver and so-called safety deputy. Their role would be simply to sort out the dead and dying when whatever happened was over. They weren’t there to protect and serve, just to move people along in the underbelly of the justice system.

  This time it was one of the modern buses with compartmentalized seating, the sight o
f which filled me with even more dread. The newer fleet was designed after there had been full-scale riots on buses that had raged out of control. With the Sheriff’s Department responsible for the safety of inmates, the riots resulted in scores of lawsuits against the agency for failure to protect those who had been injured and killed. I had lodged a couple of those lawsuits myself and so was aware of the weaknesses of the old and new designs.

  The new buses were sectioned off by steel fencing into seating compartments of eight inmates each. This way, if a fight broke out, it was contained to a maximum of eight combatants. The buses had five such compartments and were loaded back to front, filling the seats in the rear section first and so on. The prisoners were cuffed together four to a chain, with one group on either side of the aisle in each compartment.

  This design also was the blueprint for a significant problem. Should the bus be in transit and a fight break out in the rear compartment, the unarmed safety deputy must unlock and move through five doors and four compartments—four tight spaces filled with inmates accused in some cases of violent crimes—to break up a fight in the fifth. The idea was preposterous, and to my thinking, the department’s solution had actually doubled down on the problem. Fights in the rear compartments were allowed to play out until the bus got to its destination. Those who could walk off did and those who couldn’t were tended to.

  The bus pulled into the cavernous garage beneath the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center and we were off-loaded and escorted into the building’s vertical maze of holding cells that served its twenty-four different courtrooms.

  As a pro se, I was entitled to some legal niceties not afforded most of the men and women who came off the buses. I was led to a private holding cell where I could confer with my investigator and stand-in attorney—the lawyer assigned as my backup to handle the printing, filing, and in some cases fine-tuning of motions and other documents produced as part of the case. My investigator was Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski and the stand-in was my law partner, Jennifer Aronson.

  Everything moves slowly in incarceration. My 4 a.m. wake-up at Twin Towers resulted in me getting to my private conference room at 8:40 a.m., a total travel distance of four blocks. I had brought one rubber-banded stack of documents with me—the motions—and was spreading them on the metal table when my team was shown in by a detention deputy at nine sharp.

  Cisco and Jennifer were required to sit across the table from me. No handshakes or hugs. The meeting fell under attorney-client privilege and was private. But there was a camera in one corner of the ceiling. We would be watched, but the camera carried no audio back to the deputy who monitored it—or so it was claimed. I didn’t fully believe this, and during prior team meetings I had occasionally made a remark or issued an order designed to send the prosecution off on a wild-goose chase if they happened to be illegally listening in. I used the code word Baja in each statement to alert my team to the ruse.

  I was in dark blue scrubs with LAC DETENTION stenciled across the front and back of my shirt. Like Edgar Quesada the evening before, I wore long johns underneath. I had learned quickly during my stay with the county that the early-morning bus rides and courthouse holding cells were unheated, and I dressed accordingly.

  Jennifer was dressed for court in a charcoal-gray suit and cream-colored blouse. Cisco, as was his routine, was dressed for a sunset ride down the Pacific Coast Highway on his classic Harley Panhead, Cody Jinks blasting on his helmet stereo: black jeans, boots, and T-shirt. It appeared that his skin was impervious to the cold, damp air of the conference cell. That he was originally from Wisconsin might have had something to do with that.

  “How’s my team this fine morning?” I said cheerily.

  Although I was the one incarcerated and wearing the jailhouse scrubs, I knew it was important to keep my people engaged and not worried about my predicament. Act like a winner and you’ll become a winner—as David “Legal” Siegel, my father’s partner and the man who mentored me in the law, used to say.

  “All good, boss,” Cisco said.

  “How are you doing?” Jennifer asked.

  “Better to be in the courthouse than the jail,” I said. “Which suit did Lorna pick out?”

  Lorna Taylor was my case manager as well as my sartorial consultant. This second duty extended from when she was my wife—my second wife, in a union that lasted only a year and preceded her marriage to Cisco. Though I would not be appearing this day before a jury, I had previously secured Judge Warfield’s approval of a motion allowing me to dress in my professional clothes during all appearances in open court. My case had drawn considerable attention from the media and I didn’t want a photo of me in convict garb going viral. The world outside the courthouse was a jury pool from which twelve people would be drawn to judge me. I didn’t want them, whoever they were, to have already seen me in jailhouse blues. My carefully curated selection of European suits also added to my confidence when I stood before the court to argue my case.

  “The blue Hugo Boss with pink shirt and gray tie,” Jennifer said. “The courtroom deputy has it.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Cisco rolled his eyes at my vanity. I ignored it.

  “What about the time?” I asked. “You talk to the clerk?”

  “Yes, the judge slotted an hour,” Jennifer said. “Will that be enough?”

  “Probably not, with argument from Dana. I might have to drop something if Warfield sticks to the schedule.”

  Dana was Dana Berg, the Major Crimes Unit star prosecutor assigned to convicting me and sending me off to prison for the rest of my life. Among members of the downtown defense bar, she was known as Death Row Dana because of her propensity to seek maximum penalties, or, alternately, as Iceberg because of her demeanor when it came to negotiating pleas. The fact was that her resolve couldn’t be melted and she was most often assigned cases where trial was inevitable.

  And that was the situation with me. The day after my arrest, I had put out a media statement through Jennifer that forcefully denied the allegations against me and promised vindication at trial. It was most likely that statement that got the case assigned to Dana Berg.

  “Then what do we drop?” Jennifer asked.

  “Let’s put bail on the back burner,” I said.

  “Wait, no,” Cisco said.

  “What? I wanted to go with that right out of the gate,” Jennifer said. “We need to get you out of there and into unrestricted strategy sessions in an office, not a cell.”

  Jennifer raised her hands to take in the space where we were sitting. I knew that they would both protest my decision on bail. But I intended to make better use of today’s time in front of the judge.

  “Look, it’s not like I’m having a great time at Twin Towers,” I said. “It’s not the Ritz. But there are things that are more important to accomplish today. I want to get a full hearing on the probable-cause challenge. That’s number one. And then I want to argue the discovery issues. You ready on that, Bullocks?”

  It had been a long time since I had called Jennifer by her baby-lawyer nickname. I had hired her right out of Southwestern Law School, which was housed in a former Bullock’s department store. I had wanted somebody with a working-class law degree and an underdog’s drive and fierceness. In the years since, she had proved me a genius, rising from associate counsel to whom I handed off low-money cases to full partner and trusted confidante who could hold her own and win in any courtroom in the county. I wasn’t interested in using her as a mere filer of documents. I wanted her going toe to toe with Dana Berg on the prosecution’s delays in discovery. This was the most important case of my career and I wanted her side by side with me at the defense table.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “But I’m also ready to argue bail. You need to be out so you can prepare for trial without needing a bodyguard watching your back while you’re eating baloney fucking sandwiches.”

  I laughed. I guessed I had complained a little too often about the Twin Tower
s menu.

  “Look, I get that,” I said. “And I don’t mean to laugh. But I need to keep payroll going and I just don’t want to come out of this thing bankrupt and with nothing left for my daughter. Somebody’s got to pay for law school, and it’s not going to be Maggie McFierce.”

  My first ex-wife and the mother of my child was a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office. Real name: Maggie McPherson. She made a comfortable living and had raised our daughter, Hayley, in a safe neighborhood in Sherman Oaks—not counting a two-year stint in Ventura County, where she went to work for the D.A. while waiting for a political fire to burn itself out down here. I had paid for private schools all the way and now Hayley was 1L at USC after graduating from Chapman in May. That carried a steep price tag that fell solely to me to pay. I had planned for it and had it covered in savings, but not if I pulled the cash and put it into a nonrefundable bond just to spring myself loose to prep for trial.

  I had done the math and it wasn’t worth it. Even if we persuaded Judge Warfield to cut bail in half, I was still looking at needing $250,000 to buy a bond that really only amounted to three months of freedom. After all, I had refused to waive my right to a speedy trial and had the state on a clock—sixty court days within which to put me on trial. This meant that the trial was only two months away, in February, and the verdict would either give me back my freedom or permanently suspend it. On many previous occasions, I had counseled clients to save their bond money and nut it out in Twin Towers.

  Usually that was to make sure they had money to pay me. But now, that was the counsel I gave myself.

  “Have you talked to Maggie about this?” Jennifer asked. “Has she even visited you over there yet?”

  “Yes, she’s visited and, yes, we’ve talked,” I said. “She says the same thing you say, and I don’t disagree it would be better. But it’s about priorities. Case priorities.”