Final Appeal. Lisa Scottoline

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СКАЧАТЬ a conservative organization, Grace. Of which I was an officer in law school, as a matter of fact.”

      Suddenly, the door to Armen’s office opens and men talk in low, governmental tones as Armen walks them to the main door of chambers. Artie strains to listen and Ben inhales what’s left of his coffee. Eletha turns around just in time to catch Bernice.

      “Roarf! Roarf!” Bernice, a huge Bernese mountain dog, bounds through the door. Yes, Armen brings his shaggy black doggie to work, all hundred pounds of her. He’s the chief judge, so who’s gonna tell him he can’t? Me? You? “Roarf!”

      “No! Don’t jump up!” Eletha barks back. The sharp noise stops Bernice in her tracks. Her bushy black tail, white at the tip, switches back and forth; she sneezes with the vigor of a Clydesdale.

      “Sit, Bernice. Sit!” Armen says, coming up behind the dog.

      Bernice wiggles her wavy hindquarters in response. Her eyes roll around in a white mask that ends in rust-colored markings on her muzzle. Bushy rust eyebrows give her a permanently confused look; appearances are not always deceiving.

      “She never sits, Armen,” Eletha says. “I don’t know why you even bother.”

      “She used to, she just forgets,” Armen says. “Right, girl?” He scratches the plume of raggy hair behind Bernice’s ears and looks at Artie. “So, Weiss, you shitting bricks?”

      Artie sets the Eight Ball down. “Enough to build a house, coach. I’m really sorry.”

      “Can’t you grovel better than that? I’m disappointed.”

      “Really sorry, coach. I am not worthy.” Artie bends over and touches his forehead to the briefs on his desk. “It’ll never happen again,” he says, his voice muffled.

      Armen smiles. “Good enough. Shake and Bake can come to the games, but he has to stay away from the courthouse. If he doesn’t, the marshals will shoot him on sight. Plus I got you out of jail free, so you owe me a beer.”

      Artie looks up, relieved. “After the game next week. At Keeton’s.”

      “Fine.” Armen’s gaze falls on the papers in Eletha’s hands and his smile fades. “Is that Hightower?”

      “Yes.”

      He takes the papers and begins to read the first page. His brow wrinkles deeply; I notice that the dark wells under his eyes look even darker today. He’s given to occasional black moods; something will set him off and he’ll brood for a day. It makes you want to comfort him. In bed.

      “Chief,” Ben says, “the defendant killed two sisters.”

      Armen seems not to hear him. His broad shoulders slump slightly as he reads.

      “One was a little girl and one was a teenager, very popular in the town.”

      Armen looks up from the memo and his eyes find me. “It’s yours, lady,” he says.

      I hear myself suck wind. “Mine?”

      “You’re Grace Rossi, right? It’s got your name all over it.”

      “Me, on a death penalty case? But I’m part-time.”

      “I’ll give you time off later, and don’t whine.”

      “But I don’t want to get involved,” I whine.

      He half smiles. “Get involved. Somebody’s life is at stake.”

      “But why me?”

      “I need a lawyer on this one.”

      Sarah freezes as she looks at Armen. I can almost hear the squeak of a hinge as her perfect mouth drops open.

3

      Empty coffee cups dot the surface of Armen’s conference table, along with sheaves of curly faxes, photocopied cases, and trial transcripts from the Hightower record. We worked straight through dinner and into the night, reading cases and talking through the opinion. Then Armen began to tap out an outline on his laptop and I picked up the habeas petition to check our facts.

      It says that Thomas Hightower was seventeen when he cut school to go drinking with a fast crowd, which got him drunk and dared him to kiss the prettiest girl in school. Hightower went to her farm, where he found Sherri Gilpin in the shed. He asked her out, and she laughed at him.

      “Date a nigger?” she said. Allegedly.

      In a drunken rage, Hightower slapped her and she fell off balance, cracking her skull against a tractor. He tried to give her CPR, at which point her little sister Sally came in and began to cry. Hightower says he panicked. He couldn’t leave witnesses; it would have killed his mother. So he throttled the child, then, full of shame, he got back into his car and drove himself into a tree. Enter the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which saved his life, reserving for itself the honor of putting him on trial. For death.

      Hightower couldn’t afford a lawyer, not that one in the small coal-mining town would represent him anyway. The county judge appointed a kid barely out of night law school to the case, and the jury convicted Hightower of capital murder. During the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides life or death, Hightower’s lawyer argued from the wrong death penalty statute, one that had been ruled unconstitutional three years earlier by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Somehow he had missed that.

      The obsolete death statute, the only one presented to this predominantly white jury, said nothing about the fact that a jury could consider Hightower’s youth, his diminished capacity because of alcohol, his lack of a prior criminal record, and the remorse that he demonstrated by his suicide attempt as “mitigating circumstances” in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. The jury took only fifteen minutes to reach its decision. Death.

      I set the papers down and look out the huge windows that make up the fourth wall of the office. It’s the dead of night. Orangey street-lamps stretch toward the Delaware River in ribbons. White lights dot the suspension cables on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Traffic signals blink on and off: red, yellow, green. The lights remind me of jewels, twinkling in the black night. I watch them shimmer outside the window and turn the legal issues over in my mind.

      The question is whether Hightower’s lawyer was so ineffective that the trial was unfair. Strictly as a legal matter, Hightower probably deserves a new trial; what he deserves as a matter of justice is another matter. This is why I practiced commercial litigation. It has nothing to do with life or death; the questions are black and white, and the right answer is always green.

      “Well,” Armen says to himself. “Well, well, well.” He stops typing and reads the last page of his draft. The office is quiet now that Bernice has stopped snoring. I feel like we’re the only people awake, high in the night sky over the twinkly city.

      “Well what?”

      “I think we’re going to save this kid’s life. What do you think?”

      The question takes me aback. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way.”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ