Just Us
I decided it would help my case if I went on
down to the courthouse and sat in on some other cases. Maybe I’d
learn something. Maybe I could turn things around.
I got off BART at the Civic Center, walked down
7th Street, past the jail, to the Hall of Justice at
850 Bryant Street. Once through the front door, there were metal
detectors and officers checking through purses and bags. On one
trip to the courthouse I saw a Sheriff’s bus pulling out of the
jail parking lot, belching smoke, filled with men, bars on the
windows. On the back of the bus was an ad: “Career
Opportunities. Call the Sheriff’s Department
I took an elevator to the second floor. I walked
down a corridor and poked my head into a few courtrooms before
finding one with a jury seated and listening. The chairs for the
audience were empty. I took a seat. I took out a pad of a paper
and a pen. An attorney was walking back and forth talking to the
jurors.
Slowly, after the prosecutor finished making her
closing argument and the defense attorney spoke fifteen minutes
or so, I started to understand what had happened. A young black
man (the defendant, who was sitting up at one of the lawyer’s
tables) had been standing at a pay phone in the Mission District
of San Francisco a few weeks back, trying to call his new lover.
A white undercover policeman happened to be in a parked car
watching him. The young man, who hadn’t noticed the undercover
policeman, got angry because his lover refused to take his call.
He sent his water bottle flying toward the street. Completely by
accident, the bottle hit the bumper of the undercover policeman.
The bottle broke and splashed the bumper but did no harm. At
that point the officer jumped out, showed his gun and badge
under his coat, and told the young black man to pick the water
bottle up or he’d charge him with a felony. He didn’t arrest the
young man but told him to go sit down on the sidewalk by the
wall. The policeman went to his car to call for uniformed
officers.
Meanwhile, the young man fled down the street in
a panic, knocking on doors and trying to get help because he was
frightened. He tried to tell several people that someone was
going to shoot him and to please help. The young man thought he
might be gunned down in cold blood. Eventually he was
apprehended and charged with a felony. Several uniformed police
dealt with him roughly, banging his head as they put him into
the police car. He was taken to Mission Police Station where, in
the holding cell, he was handcuffed to a pole with his hands
behind his back and not told what he was being charged with or
read his Miranda rights. He said many angry things and vented
his frustration, which led to a new charge being put on him for
interfering with the duty of an officer of the law. The woman
police officer who charged him with that was across the room
behind a small window in the booking office.
So these were the charges that the jury was
solemnly considering. When the court took an afternoon break and
the young black man, the defendant, walked past, I wanted to say
to him in some way, “I can’t believe all these people are
serious. I can’t believe this is all about a water bottle.”
I couldn’t express my idea in time. But as he
walked past me (maybe because I was the only person in the
audience to watch all this) he gave a nod. It was so quick and
so simple but contained the most astonishing amount of
self-dignity. It was as if he had said, “You just deal with it,
Mr. White Guy. You deal with it. As my people have in this
country for 400 years.”
I returned a few days later and found another
trial to observe. This was the situation: A thin middle-aged
white woman had been making a wax sculpture. She used several
lit candles and at one point left the bedroom, returning
sometime later to find half her bedroom on fire. Trapped on a
balcony, she yelled for help. She took much of her clothing off
and suffered burns to her back and singed hair when a fire
worker rescued her by pulling her off the balcony and onto a
neighboring house.
It turned out that the woman lived alone. Her
mother had died not long before. This woman was known by her
neighbors to have serious emotional problems. She had spent time
in mental hospitals. When fire investigators inspected the
house, they found she had filled the oven with old newspapers
and painted things on the walls. Generally they found all sorts
of odd and unusual things throughout the house. So they decided
to charge her with arson. Immediately after her arrest, she was
acting so troubled that the jail transferred her to the mental
hospital ward. But at the trial expert witnesses were prepared
to testify the fire was an accident. The frail woman with gray
hair sat up at the defense table. She had been in custody a year
and three months.
A number of courtrooms I went into were engaged
in ceaseless details of long lists of cases. I would quietly
walk back out and try to find a courtroom with a trial in
progress.
Then one day I found a jury trial with a man
accused of domestic violence. This was the type of trial I had
been looking for. I sat and listened to a witness being
questioned. For the longest time I had no idea what was going
on. The lawyer seemed to be asking one question after another,
revealing the details at a snail’s pace. Lawyers are paid a lot
to go so slowly. Imagine a taxi driver who won’t go over seven
miles an hour. But it was worth the wait because gradually a
picture materialized. A bizarre sad picture.
Imagine a married couple. Both are Jewish. When
they first were married, the man was not particularly devout.
Then years into the marriage, after they had a son, he
“converted” to a very stringent, orthodox form of his religion.
Yes, this reminded me very much of my wife. There comes a point
where this kind of religion is not a passion but an obsession.
The man was a nice man and he tried in various ways to tug his
wife into the more involved rituals and practices he found so
meaningful. But she simply wanted no part of it. She did not
accept what her role was to be as wife and woman in her
husband’s orthodox practice. She cherished her freedom. She does
not want to become ultra-orthodox as he was. So their
relationship became a living hell for both of them, but for
opposite reasons. They might have just separated but they
didn’t. Meanwhile, their son increasingly became the source of
their civil war.
Then one day there was an incident. The wife
accused her husband of throwing her against a wall, slapping her
ten times violently, shoving her around, pushing her down,
making a series of violent threats, choking her, and so on. The
difficulty was that upon cross-examination she confused all the
details, repeatedly contradicted herself, and couldn’t seem to
credibly testify that any physical abuse had actually happened.
She had called the police but there were no marks where she said
her husband had slapped her on the face so violently. In fact
she didn’t even mention the slapping to the police until several
days after the incident. Meanwhile she had gotten full custody
of her son and possession of the house. She had filed for
divorce.
I will be truthful: I did not see this trial
from start to finish and listen to each witness but when I left
the courtroom that afternoon, nothing would have caused me to
think the man was guilty. Yet what of the year and a half of
pure hell the woman endured because he’d taken the turn into
such devout practice? Hadn’t he essentially deserted her? What
about her son? It seemed to me the woman too had suffered a lot.
Maybe her husband had told her, “I will keep my son and get rid
of you with my lawyers!”
In another courtroom I did finally see someone
who appeared to be guilty as hell (at last!). The man was
charged with writing bad checks. He had a heroin habit and went
into big department stores buying armfuls of things. Using bad
checks. The store security watched him on camera as he picked
out several items without seeming to care about size, price, or
how they looked on him. He’d gotten someone's name and bank
account number and had checks printed up to match some fake ID’s
he had.
The security guards stopped him out in the
parking lot. He begged them to let him go. Said he was a drug
user. Said he’d give them money. Said he’d never come back.
Looked to me like he wasn’t going to go back for several years
whether he liked it or not. He looked like he’d already been in
a few times.
I haven’t watched television for about ten
years. I do watch a bit when I’m traveling and at a hotel, but
even then I get so infuriated by the commercials that I usually
flip it off and read a book. At the end of the summer I went to
visit my mom up near Seattle for a few days. She enjoys
television, so for several nights we watched “Cops” and other
law-and-order shows. I saw how the police got the bad guys and
always managed to perform a number of public services.
The universe of television seems exactly upside
down from the world I’ve been in. Compassionate, humanitarian
lawyers. Fair and even-handed justice. Good and bad. Black and
white. All things clean, arranged, and sorted in the shoebox.
But when I step into one of the courtrooms and sit and watch, it
seems something is terribly terribly wrong. It seems the only
thing our system wants to do is grind people up. Fairness,
kindness, and real justice have no part of the ballgame. It
seems prosecutors have become the new Roman gladiators. Why in
Japan do they have only one person in custody for every
seventeen we have per capita?
There is a downtrodden man, probably around
sixty years old, who has been coming into my bookstore since it
opened nearly ten years ago. He is the editor, publisher,
distributor, artist, photographer, and sole writer for a daily
paper. It is one Xeroxed page filled with drawings and typed
messages, often with urgent small scribbling running up and down
the edges. He thinks he is the Messiah. For nearly twenty years
he has been giving copies of his one-page paper out to anyone
who will take them. I’ve seen him walk up to fire trucks and
hand them to the firefighters. I’ve seen him hand them to police
officers and tourists, homeless people and dishwashers.
He faxes his daily paper to the news services,
Time Magazine, the New York Times, the president, the mayor, and
both houses of Congress. As a young man he spent many years as a
paid newsman in the Midwest. He wrote for the wire services and
later worked at a small TV station. He indulged in psychedelic
drugs and pot a bit and it intensified his compassion for living
things, particularly for mice, birds, bugs, and spiders. It was
only a matter of time, I suppose, before he ended up in San
Francisco and changed his name to Swan.
A local poet told me that he had known Swan when
he still led a regular life. He was eccentric, independent
minded, and rode around town on a small motorcycle. Swan had a
girlfriend and was seen everywhere with her and her daughter.
Then one day she left him and Swan fell apart. He could not
relate to people anyone. He didn’t seem to want to. He trusted
bugs more then humans. He began relating mostly to birds, mice,
and bugs, feeding hundreds of birds every day on donated
birdseed.
Now he lives in doorways, looking like the last
bearded hippy from the 1960s, filthy but always cheerful. He
throws his daily paper through the gate at the bookstore if I’m
not open. If the store is open, he walks in, asking me for
donations or asking if I have any candy while handing me the
latest issue of his paper. Often he has a pigeon on his arm or
gently protected and tucked into a pocket. He has helped many
hurt birds recover and return to the rooftops. His daily
newspaper mixes the brilliance of William Blake with the redneck
narrow-minded bigotry of Rush Limbaugh. One paragraph is
exquisite, beside another that is totally repugnant. His
favorite themes are free pot and free rent for everyone. He is a
ceaseless champion of living things.
One day, a few years back, I convinced Swan to
sit for a tape-recorded interview. In that interview he said if
something exists here, then it will exist there, and if you see
it over there, it surely will be here too. Outside and inside,
“them” and “us” are not as different as they seem. I still think
of what he said. I think of the mess I’m in now; how utterly,
totally unable and unwilling the “system” has been to understand
what occurred between my wife and me. And how unwilling the
system is to ever listen to me because the people in it have
already made their decision of what occurred.
I wrote to so many people. I phoned so many
people. I met with people. I made it as clear as I possibly
could to the domestic violence councilor at King Center that I
was set up, and she just didn’t and wouldn’t hear it. She wasn’t
paid to listen to me. She was paid to conduct her version of
“dog training.” I wrote over and over to the police trying to
straighten the thing out. They were as receptive as phone poles.
I wrote to and spoke with the special domestic violence
detectives, whom I would have expected to know better. I spoke
with the probation department. And with the office for citizen
complaints. I got nowhere. It has caused me to wonder just how
much better we in the United States are than those in Pakistan,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or all the other places we love to be so
critical of. If it happens there…if it happens here…I can’t stop
myself from weighing the truth of this.
At the beginning of summer an attorney I knew
volunteered to assist me. He spent twenty hours writing up a
motion asking the court to allow me to withdraw my plea and
bring my case back to trial. He is a busy attorney; he was doing
this for me for free. He even asked a second attorney to assist
him. Together, in five court appearances, over three months, we
got nowhere. The motion was denied. We got caught in the spider
web of law. It took a huge amount of effort to move a couple
inches. Which brings me back to what Swan said. I suspect this
isn’t just happening to me. It is happening in all the courts
from Eureka to San Diego. And because the state system mirrors
the federal model, it’s happening from Maine to Homer, Alaska. A
spider web of law.
Law could, I honestly believe, be ten times more
streamlined. But it isn’t. Why? Because the more complex it is,
the more profitable it is for those who practice it. This is
probably a bitter simple-minded view but one I can’t seem to
shake. There also seems to be something more: the hunger of
governments to control everything. With more and more law, the
system acquires more and more ownership over all the individuals
in it. The lines are drawn everywhere. Step on one crack and
they take over your life. Or if you’re like me, you don’t need
to even step over a line or on a crack. One day they just come
and get you. Like the young man who tossed a water bottle onto
the wrong car.
