The Cutting Room. Jilliane Hoffman

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      5

      By 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, the criminal courthouse in downtown Miami was relatively quiet. The frenzied morning calendars had finally been cleared and the defendants, victims, witnesses, family members, defense attorneys, prosecutors and cops were long gone — their cases arraigned, continued, pled-out or set-over for motions or trials on another day. The hallways that had been clogged a few hours earlier were now deserted. Most of the building’s courtrooms were empty and locked, their judges either still at lunch or in recess till the following morning. The courtrooms that were open were either in trial or hearing motions.

      Assistant State Attorney Daria DeBianchi pushed open the heavy doors of 4-10 and made her way into the one courtroom in the building that was still a beehive of activity. On the other side of the railing that partitioned the lawyers from the general audience, an invisible line separated prosecutors from defense attorneys, like a boy/girl middle school dance. Correction officers manned the exits and flanked the jury box, which was also filled with bodies, except they weren’t jurors, they were defendants — all dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, chained together at the wrists and shackled at the ankles. Filling the pews on the ‘state’s side’ of the gallery were detectives and cops. For the defense, it was friends and family. The judge hadn’t yet taken the bench and the courtroom sounded like a playground at recess. Seated at a desk in front of the bench was the judge’s judicial assistant, checking in a line of attorneys while simultaneously digging for gold inside her ear with a curved, glossy black fingernail. Daria took one look at the printed court calendar on top of the podium and sighed heavily. It was over two inches thick. She was gonna be here till friggin’ Christmas …

      Standing four-foot-eleven and three-quarters, and weighing 94 pounds, with wavy auburn hair, blue eyes and skin so fair she broke out in freckles when she was next to an oven, everyone liked to tell Daria that: #1 — she didn’t look Italian, and #2 — she definitely didn’t look like a prosecutor. The Italian thing was understandable, she supposed. Every one of her relatives, including her nonna, was tan, dark-eyed, and blanketed in coarse, black hair all over their stocky, thick bodies. Daria got called ‘mick’ more often than she did ‘guinea’. As for the comments on her non-prosecutorial appearance, she wasn’t sure if those were intended as compliments or condolences, but since she was still getting them five years into her career, she figured the job had neither aged nor hardened her. To compensate for the fact that she wasn’t an Amazon who could arm wrestle an AK47 out of a defendant’s hands before carrying him up the river, she made sure she always wore heels — the higher, the better. And red lipstick — the redder, the better. She’d read in Vogue once that red lipstick made people think you were in control. For the most part it worked. Most defendants weren’t sure whether they should flirt with her or send over a death threat.

      The majestically intimidating, wood-paneled courtroom was standing-room only. In the afternoons 4-10 was reserved solely for Arthur Hearings — bond hearings for badass defendants charged with non-bondable, badass offenses like kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder. On a good day with a good judge, they were no big deal — a ten or twenty-minute defense fishing expedition that usually ended like it started, with a dangerous defendant denied bond and remanded to the county jail pending trial. But on Tuesdays Arthurs were presided over by Judge Werner Steyn, a former public defender who leaned so far to the left he had trouble standing up straight. That made him the natural favorite of defense attorneys everywhere, who all pushed to have their Arthurs set before him. With Monday’s Memorial Day holiday shortening the work-week, and Steyn dependably late taking the bench, Christmas might actually come and go before she returned to the mess that waited СКАЧАТЬ