Without a Doubt - [6]

I was assigned to the Juvenile Division, where, early on, I volunteered for the “county run.” That meant traveling an exhausting circuit of county juvenile court offices, some of them in neighborhoods so dangerous no one even went out for lunch. The advantage of the “run,” however, was that it allowed me to try one juvy case after another. In juvenile cases, unlike regular trials, the defendant almost always testifies. For the most part the defendants are kids pumped up on ego. They love the attention they get by simply taking the witness stand. It would have been sad, except that the juvy penalties aren’t terribly severe. Generally the kids get HOP, home on probation. So I logged in a lot of time cross-examining the accused. By the time I was finally transferred Downtown to Central Trials in 1984, I had a reputation as a hard charger.

Anyway, in 1984, the year I turned thirty, the district attorney, Ira Reiner, made it a policy to scout out the rising stars and apprentice them to veteran prosecutors. I was one of those who came to his attention. Reiner brought me over to the CCB and assigned me to a man I revered: Harvey Giss. Harvey was a courthouse legend. He was so handsome that women jurors swooned during his final arguments. He was also brilliant, irreverent, and one great trial attorney. To this day Harvey Giss remains the only prosecutor in L.A. County who has ever gotten a death-penalty conviction against a client of Leslie Abramson, the lawyer who would later mount the successful, if unorthodox, defense of Erik Menendez.

But a trial lawyer has only so many of those big cases in him. By the time I moved my files into the windowless office, hardly bigger than a utility closet, across from Harvey’s, he confessed to me that these cases were wearing him out. Harvey had been going through the wringer with a defendant named James Hawkins, a tough man to prosecute because his neighbors considered him a good Samaritan. One day, outside his father’s grocery store, Hawkins had shot a man who was supposedly trying to rob a local woman. Upon closer investigation, it turned out that our “hero” had gunned down his victim long after the woman had left the scene. That wasn’t all. Detectives looking into the murders of two drug dealers developed evidence that led to none other than James Hawkins. Harvey had fought like hell and won a conviction on the grocery store shooting; he’d just received that second case for filing. By the time I moved my files and scrawny potted philodendron into the CCB, the double homicide was nearing its trial date.

Harvey assigned me the ballistics part of the case. Every night I hauled home volumes of arcane texts on firearms, studying them until my eyes blurred. Eventually I gained such expertise that I could have passed the qualifying tests given to police firearms experts. As far as the Hawkins case was concerned, however, this was academic: we hadn’t found a murder weapon. A search warrant served on Hawkins’s home had turned up several different guns, but none capable of firing the bullets found in the bodies of our victims. Then, in one of several bizarre turns in this case, Hawkins escaped from a holding cell in the CCB and went on the lam.

In the wake of that escape, both Harvey and I were assigned around-the-clock security. For myself, I frankly thought this was overkill; the defendant had always been rather cordial to me. But Harvey, I knew, might well have been in danger. Hawkins blamed him personally for destroying his local-hero rep. Several weeks later, during a wild shoot-out, the fugitive was finally caught. The search of his car turned up two more guns-and they were the same make and caliber as the weapons used in the double homicide.

Hawkins had taken a metal file to the inside of both barrels, trying to obliterate the fine stria that leave their imprint on bullets. It wasn’t easy to tell if the guns had fired any rounds, let alone the ones that killed those drug dealers. But I finally got to put all my ballistics knowledge to use. Working with Sergeant Lou Barry of the Sheriffs Department, I was able to match the bullet from one of the victims’ bodies with the bullet Hawkins had fired into a wall during a random robbery. It was a coup, and it made me the deputy darling of the moment.

That trial was almost two years of pure hell. Hawkins’s attorney was a crafty, tenacious brawler named Barry Levin who made us fight for every motion. It took eight months to pick the jury and another excruciating thirteen months to try this monster. But I watched everything Harvey did, and I learned from him. I learned how to organize a big case, one with forty or fifty witnesses. I learned where you object and where you don’t. I learned how to keep my head up and take the hits.

I also learned how to hold up in the face of a difficult judge. Ours, Marsha Revel, was a former prosecutor, and like a lot of old D.A.s who’ve gone on to the bench, she seemed intent upon demonstrating her impartiality by favoring the defense. She lost no opportunity to discredit us. Harvey’s objections were overruled so frequently that I had to count paper clips to distract myself from the pain of it all. The worst came during closing arguments, when the defense objected over and over again, intent on throwing Harvey off stride. Though this is regarded as a bush-league tactic and most judges won’t tolerate it, Revel refused to intervene. The objections increased to the point that Harvey couldn’t utter three consecutive words without getting cut off. The judge called for a recess and Harvey returned to his seat. He looked beaten.