A Naked Singularity: A Novel (30 page)

“Such as.”

“Well for one thing I was new to the New York system so I had to do research in order to gain the extreme familiarity demanded by perfection. I researched the DA. I posed as a journalist doing an article on how moral DAs are or something and as such I interviewed her colleagues both former and current.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I ordered all the minutes of any trial or hearing she had ever done to pick up tendencies in her arguments et cetera. I had long telephone conversations with her which I later transcribed and had analyzed by a prominent psychiatrist whose work I then corrected. I had her handwriting analyzed by a complete clod who was simultaneously the foremost expert in the field. Despite all that, by the time the case went to trial I knew her intimately.”

“You don’t mean?”

“No, but we were friends and I had her convinced I hated my client, thought he had no chance to win, and would not be putting forth a great deal of effort during the trial. Since people inevitably perform to the level of their competition, and since what most motivates them is the fear of losing to someone they dislike, this tactic led to a predictably subpar performance from her and she was not without talent. I also researched the judge in essentially the same manner. Of course, while I knew the DA I was dealing with would be the one to ultimately try the case I couldn’t be sure that the judge who was handling the case would eventually keep it when it came time to conduct the trial. As a result I had to research every possible judge the case could get sent to so I could know their relevant tendencies. Under various guises, I interviewed countless judges, attorneys, and all other forms of court personnel such as court reporters and court officers. I got a hold of all the statistics showing which parts were the most amenable to acquittals. I analyzed these statistics endlessly looking for statistically significant differences. I made up color coded graphs based on respective probabilities.”

“You putting me on?”

“During the course of this research, I determined that the judge currently handling the case would not be the best judge for me to try to get an acquittal in front of given my type of case. I analyzed the statistics and profiles and identified who the ideal judge to try the case would be. I then figured out what days one was most likely to get sent to that judge by an expediter. Then I manipulated the current judge into thinking she didn’t want to try the case because I would be a pain in the ass. This was difficult to do while maintaining the DA’s illusion that I would be a pushover at trial but I did it and after some cajoling of the expediter I got sent to my first choice, Judge Teal.

You get the idea as to the lengths I went, but let’s get to your question regarding the crack. As you know, from a defense standpoint all cases basically fall into one of two categories,
I.D. cases
and
what happened cases
. Conceivably this case could have been either but given Barnes’s statement, the ashtray, which the DA and my own investigation led me to conclude would be identified as being from the apartment, and other factors, I decided it was a what-happened case and one where Barnes would have to testify. I had interviewed and taken extensive statements from every witness that would appear on behalf of the State. Yes, the cops talked to me. I had written out, in mind-numbing detail, every possible course the People’s evidence could take along with the consequent directions my case would take. However, in a case where the defendant testifies his testimony obviously becomes the single most crucial factor in the trial. I had to prepare Barnes to testify better than any defendant had ever been prepped. I had to prep him perfectly.

This was probably the most difficult thing I had to do. I wasn’t content to surrender to the inherent vagaries of my client’s performance. Here was an individual who had never gone to trial, who was facing double digit years in jail, and who was aware that his performance on the witness stand would to a large extent determine his fate. Under this pressure, this unintelligent, uneducated individual would have to testify skillfully. Throw in the overwhelming probability that he would not be telling the truth a substantial portion of the time.

To prep him I had to know him. I had to know what his life was like, had to know what it was like to go through the world as Barnes. When we prepare somebody to testify we try to eliminate the unknown for them right? We ask a colleague to listen to the client’s expected direct then mock cross-examine them. Then we gauge the client’s response to this fake cross on the theory that we can thereby predict how they will perform on the stand. Well that’s fine for your average case but the limitations of that practice are unacceptable within the context of perfect representation. To be perfect I needed to do more. What this method of preparation can’t fully predict is how the individual will respond to the pressures of the real thing. This was the great unknown hanging over the case and threatening to fuck with my perfection. Of course trying to predict how a human will react to a novel situation is always a tricky thing. But in thinking about this problem, which I did constantly, the thought occurred to me that if I had to pick someone and try to predict their future behavior I would pick myself. After all I know myself best. Failing that option I would pick some other person whose conduct, attitudes, and other variables I was very familiar with. I thus set out to know Barnes as well as I could in order to gain insight into what his testimonial performance was likely to be.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time with Barnes. He was in my office every other day at first. We would talk for hours on the pretext of preparing for the case but in fact I was studying him. I didn’t kid myself though. I knew I wasn’t interacting with Barnes. I was interacting with the person Barnes creates when he’s at his lawyer’s office talking about his pending criminal case. This was useful to be sure but to know Barnes the way I wanted to know him I had to be exposed to the Barnes that existed at other times. I went to his home and visited with him there. I surreptitiously followed him around and observed him in other settings interacting with other people.

I then took it even further. I knew all the objective facts about his life from our extensive conversations. I started keeping a diary from Barnes’s point of view like actors sometimes do. I got an apartment in his neighborhood and lived there for a couple of weeks without going to work. To simulate Barnes’s existence, I gave myself a meager allowance for those weeks. I would wake up each day in this putrid apartment with like twelve bucks in my pocket. Then I would just drink all day and like hang out. But I knew I had to do more. Barnes smoked crack. He was high on crack the day he went into that apartment. I started smoking crack.”

“What do you mean you started smoking crack?”

“What’s vague about that?”

“There’s nothing vague about it, it’s just incredibly bizarre don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Well where’d you get the crack from?”

“I bought it, on the street. Where I was living there was no shortage of places.”

“You could’ve been arrested! Your career would have been over. Not to mention the embarrassment. Everyone would’ve thought you were a crackhead.”

“As far as my career goes I can scarcely think of anything I attach less importance to, with the possible exception of my concern for how others view me. The very reason I was buying and smoking crack was to prove these same people wrong. They say perfection in human endeavors is impossible. I say they’re partly right. It
is
impossible, for them, but not for me or a select few others. Besides the risk is minimal if you take precautions.”

“So what happened?”

“I put it in my pipe and smoked it.”

“How many times?”

“Several”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did it feel like?”

“Pleasure. Extreme pleasure in a way that makes everything else irrelevant. At first, it seemed like all other pleasures like sex and good food were merely facets of this larger pleasure.”

“Have you smoked any since?”

“No.”

“Weren’t you worried you might become addicted? Did you at any point feel it becoming addictive, feel it becoming a need?”

“It was more like an objective realization that if I had nothing else going on, if I didn’t have sufficient access to other pleasures, I could see myself wanting to do nothing else. It was another challenge because there’s a weakness involved with addiction. But please kids, don’t try it at home. Anyway, the crack wasn’t the point. Perfection was and the drug use was done solely in service of that goal. The end result was that those weeks allowed me to prep Barnes perfectly to testify because I had a special insight into what form this individual’s testimony would take.”

“So it went to trial?”

“It did, which introduced the most important party to any trial, the jury. I thought a lot about jurors and the expectations and biases they bring to the process. I feel that defense attorneys ignore the role of mass media in shaping juror attitudes to their extreme detriment. As research, I read or watched every single popular depiction of our criminal justice system. This included reading fictional legal thrillers for example. This was no small sacrifice as these books are uniformly and horribly bad. They all have these galactically idiotic names like
Proof of Service
or
Notice of Appeal
too. Nonetheless, they
are
extremely popular so I read them and in the process gained insight into the layman’s hack warped view.

Knowledge of what jurors bring with them and what they expect when they come into a courtroom to sit on a case is the single most important area of knowledge to have if you’re trying to get an acquittal. Jurors are conditioned to expect and want dramatic performances but at the same time, for a particular kind of juror that we encounter often in Manhattan, their ego can’t help but be implicated. As a result, although it is probably true that the more smooth and polished you are the more persuasive you’ll be, I believe this is only true to a point. If you cross that point you now implicate the juror’s ego and he becomes cognizant of not wanting to feel he’s been hoodwinked by a silver-tongued salesman. If you think I’m wrong ask yourself this. How many times following an acquittal have you spoken to the jurors? What you find invariably is that a substantial portion of them will be falling all over themselves in their rush to tell you what you did wrong and how it wasn’t really your arguments that led them to vote not guilty but rather something that they thought of on their own once they started deliberating. This is a juror who most likely went against every preconception she had when she entered the courtroom and voted to acquit but before she goes home she wants to convince herself that she did so based on objective facts and not your performance. Seems to me it stands to reason that this popular emotion can often be an impediment to acquittals.

Because of this, a bit of intentional fumbling or display of nerves can be useful in creating the perception in these jurors that to the extent they find an attorney’s argument compelling they do so not as a result of any skillful, read deceptive, oratory by that attorney, but rather due to the argument’s logical appeal stemming from its relationship to the truth. With that in mind, during the trial I had to skillfully negotiate the line between a
perfect
performance, which one instinctively feels should be highly polished, and a
truly perfect
performance which includes some appearance of imperfection in order to create a more acquittal-friendly atmosphere.

The trial lasted about a week. My performance was perfect. Perfect pretrial legal arguments and perfect voir dire rounds followed by perfect selections then a perfect opening. Of course those things were under a great deal of my control so I was never really concerned. The people’s witnesses were a greater challenge since I was then being asked to achieve the perfect in conjunction with an openly antagonistic party. Well I did it. Perfect crosses of the kind usually reserved for the stupid movies.

Then Barnes testified. I directed him perfectly and he held up beautifully under cross thanks to the perfect preparation. All that was left was for me to give a perfect summation and then get an acquittal of course. If I did that I would have achieved my goal; a goal I had worked tirelessly at for five months. I had overnight to work on the summation. I had written it months ago and it required little revision. I spent my time the night before reflecting. I had no doubts about the upcoming acquittal. The DA was a beaten shell who if given a vote probably would herself have cast it to acquit. The jurors had set aside their poker faces and seemed to be openly rooting for my success. They were in the presence of a progressing perfection and they seemed to recognize this. They seemed to understand that a meaningless criminal case paled in comparison to what was being achieved before their very disbelieving eyes and with their near-compulsory complicity.

In the morning I would deliver this perfectly-reasoned, perfectly argued, and perfectly-rhetorically-pitched speech. I would do so without notes, which wouldn’t be necessary since by that point the summation was as much a part of me as my nose. I would deliver it with the perfect tone for the situation and then I would be done. Perfection would become a part of my being. For the rest of my life I would know what I had always suspected, that I was not bound by the limitations of the average person. I was better, and better in a way that couldn’t be quantified. I would stand alone in my perfection. I would be greater than God. God is perfect merely by definition. And it is his tautological perfection, not his own will, that makes his every deed perfect. I on the other hand would have created perfection out of imperfection, an altogether greater achievement.

The next morning I stood up prepared to take my rightfully lofty place in the universe of mortal achievement. The whole thing would take twenty-two minutes. Twenty-odd minutes and I would float out of that courtroom to compose my resignation and start looking for other fields to conquer. And so it went, with everything proceeding as planned until I neared a dramatic pause I had installed near the end. I’d decided that the pause would go on just a little too long to be comfortable in order to create some of the purposeful imperfection I spoke of earlier. The problem was that when it came time to come out of the pause I couldn’t fucking remember what came next! I stood there looking at these fucking jurors knowing that every second that passed my dream—the word dream is woefully inadequate here, it was a fucking obsession, a life and death
need
—was slipping away. When too much time had passed for me to possibly reconcile I felt my actual heart being squeezed and lost my breath. Then I slammed my hand down on the podium screamed damnation and sat the hell down.”