006 – The Suffolk County Courthouse

I enter the Suffolk County Courthouse.  Court officers looking at women are lazily scanning the metal detector.  This is definitely not federal court.  The old courthouse is an absolutely amazing architectural structure and every time I walk into it I feel as sense of awe.  I know it’s corny, but I do.  The courtyard has the first fourteen amendments to the Constitution cemented into it as a walkway leading to the stairs leading to the entrance to the courthouse.  Big bronze Roman numerals are embedded in the concrete.  It is like the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. Sometimes I walk around them out of respect for the law, not wanting to trample the high and revered principles they espouse.  Other times I walk right across them.  Intentionally.  Sometimes I feel I am trampling on the law because it is so irrational and unjust.  At other times I feel the message and intent of the law being seared into the soles of my feet.  I am inhaling the law into my body.  From the roots to the brains, traversing my body like blood.

Paul Digiaccomo is one of the nicer court officers.  Can’t be more than five foot three inches tall.  Waddles when he walks.  Easily, or not so easily, weighs more than three hundred pounds.  Once I watched as he dieted for months down to a very reasonable one eighty.  It was amazing to see him shrinking before my eyes every day I came to court. He was on a liquid diet.  I remember him being so proud of himself.  And then in no time at all, literally no time, a month maybe, he was back up to three twenty.  Don’t ask me how it happened.  Too much pasta I suspect.  But Paulie’s smile is still real.  Every day it is real.  He’s not one of these “good morning, counselor” guys.  It’s “Hi, Todd, how ya doin’?”  Every day.  To everyone.

“Who’s in the First Session, Paulie?”

“Burns,” he says and he groans.

“She’s a piece of work now, isn’t she,” Digiacomo says, “a lesbian, which I don’t care about one way or the other, but man is she also not a very pleasant person, a down right ignorant person, if you ask me, can’t make her mind up half the time, I swear I don’t know how she gets dressed in the morning, and besides that she’s ugly, but hey, that’s just one man’s opinion.”

“Thanks for the encouraging words,” I say.

I sit in the jury box with the comfortable seats waiting for our case to be called.  Time passes.  Lots of time.  I schmooze with other attorneys who come in and out of the session on status conferences.  I read back copies of appellate court decisions.  I marvel at the stupendous waste of time, at the arcane process for the processing of criminal defendants through the system.  The wheels grind slowly and frankly only partially fine.

Yvonne comes up into the dock. I go to stand next to her.  Our case is called.  The prosecutor says the police responded to a shooting and found Vernald Jackson, aged twenty-two, sometimes pimp and full time punk dead in Yvonne’s apartment.  There are three bullet holes in poor Vernald’s back.  His sneakers are untied.  The homicide detectives at the scene think the loss of life is no big deal.  It is finding the preps, completing the puzzle, filling in the colors, that turns them on.  Find the bad guy.  Get more scum off the street.  Just doing their job.  All of this takes two minutes.  Yvonne pleads not guilty.  It is a capital case.  The defendant has a history of defaults.  Bail reduction is denied.  A pre trial conference date is set. The next case is called.