“Scoot over, Alex.”
I looked up to see Eric Segal, who represented the accused rapist in my case, motioning to me to make room for him to sit beside me.
“What’s up? Ready to drop the charges against my guy?”
“Not quite there yet. I hate to do that when they’re guilty, Eric.”
“How about a deal? Sweeten the pot a tad and maybe I’ll tell him to take it,” Segal said with a smile, lifting my right hand to peek at the notes I had made. He’d been a supervisor at Legal Aid for years, a good lawyer with a sharp sense of humor and a relentless style of cross-examination.
“No deal for Willie B. I’m hoping his parole officer on this case hasn’t even been born yet.”
“Tough talk for a weak case, Alex,” he said, tracing the shorthand I used to make my points. “Hieroglyphics. That’s all you’ve got on your pad, a bunch of hieroglyphics. You think you’re going to whip my ass with those sorry points?”
Heller banged his gavel against his desktop and scanned the gallery for offenders, most of them farther up front than Eric and I.
“No talking in my courtroom. No talking unless you’re addressing me, do you understand? And you, Mr. Pintaro, go to the restroom and pull up your pants so that the belt encircles your waist. I am not the least bit interested in seeing your butt cheeks every time you turn to your lawyer. 2:15 P.M. for a second call on this case. Show some respect for this court, Mr. Pintaro, or you’ll be held in contempt.”
The captain called the next case, and people waiting on the hard wooden benches shuffled positions. Segal’s client, Willie Buskins, was across the aisle, two rows ahead of us. When he spotted me, he began a stare-down-his typical attempt at unnerving me-narrowing his eyes and glaring at me in what he thought was his fiercest pose.
I glared back at him while I whispered to Segal. “Willie’s not a candidate for a pass, Eric. He might as well have RECIDIVIST branded on his forehead.”
Segal pointed his finger at Buskins and then waved it in a circle. Reluctantly, his client unlocked his eyes from mine and faced the front of the room.
“Don’t you believe in reform, Alex? Willie’s changed his ways. You going to ruin my whole summer with a trial?”
“Just half your summer. Heller will move this one along like a high-speed train.”
Marvin Heller adjourned the parties in front of him for another month, and the captain announced our case.
“Meet at Forlini’s at 6:30?” Segal said, rising to his feet and stepping back to let me out of the row. His wife had left him several months ago, and after making his way through half the young bunnies at Legal Aid, he reset his sights on the DA’s office. “Cocktails on me.”
“Rain check, Eric. I’m flying up to the Vineyard for the weekend.”
I walked forward toward the waist-high wooden gate that separated the spectators from the well of the courtroom. Usually a court officer manned it to admit the lawyers when an unjailed defendant was present, but Heller had ordered one of the men into his chambers to refresh his water pitcher.
I stepped toward it and got ready to push it open, but Willie Buskins spun around and grabbed the gate with his left hand-a courtesy to me. As I passed in front of him, his back to the judge, he lowered his head and spoke the word “bitch,” almost in my ear. The motley assemblage of thieves and assailants in the front rows heard Willie as clearly as I had and found the label much more amusing than I did. Marvin Heller would have had the officers walk Buskins back into the holding pen had he been aware of his remark.
“State your appearances for the record.”
“Alexandra Cooper, for the People.”
“Eric Segal, Legal Aid Society, for Mr. Willie Buskins.”
“Be seated, both of you,” Heller said. “I assume you two settled this matter during your little tête-à-tête in the back row, while I was trying to conduct business?”
Segal spoke over my apology to the court. “Always working for my clients, Your Honor. Rumor has it that Ms. Cooper actually has a chink in that armor she wears in court. I was just trying to find it before she tried to razzle-dazzle you with the law.”
“I’m more easily razzled than dazzled, Mr. Segal. Is there anything to discuss?” the judge asked. Marvin Heller was about sixty years old, with thinning gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses worn low on his nose, and black robes that he carried with great dignity. “Or are we here to pick a date for trial?”
Eric Segal stood up. He smoothed his neon-striped tie inside his navy-blue suit jacket and then placed his hand on Buskins’s shoulder. “I understand Ms. Cooper, whose case is hanging by a shoestring, plans to introduce some new forensic technique, Your Honor. I’d like to oppose that testimony before we open to a jury, sir. I’d like to request a Frye hearing.”
Heller squinted and looked back at the notes he regularly kept in an oversized leather-bound ledger. “I thought this matter involved some sort of DNA identification of Mr. Buskins’s, whose profile is well-known in the databank of convicted offenders.”
Buskins grunted and started mumbling under his breath. He was thirty-six years old with a rap sheet that stretched back to his teens, and was recently released from prison after serving nine years for the rape of a neighbor in the Taft housing project.
“It is a DNA identification, Judge,” Segal said, “but-”
“That battle’s been over for almost a quarter of a century, Mr. Segal. What date suits you for trial?”
The Frye standard evolved from a 1923 Supreme Court opinion that limited the admissibility of scientific evidence to methods that have been generally accepted as reliable in the professional community, beyond what the justices called a “twilight zone” between experimental stages and well-recognized principles. The lawyers in my own office had fought and won that groundbreaking struggle to use DNA technology in 1989, opening the way for genetic profiling, which continues to revolutionize criminal justice to this day.
“May I be heard, Your Honor?” I asked. Eric Segal took his seat as I rose to my feet. He leaned over to Willie Buskins, probably urging him to keep his mouth shut.
“Something new, Ms. Cooper?”
“Actually, yes, sir. I’m planning to elicit testimony from a biologist at OCME,” I said, referring to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, “about a new technique called the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST.”
Heller squinted at me over his glasses, trying to write at the same time. “Another acronym, of course. Soon there’ll be nothing left to the law but acronyms, DNA swabs, and every man’s right to claim an exoneration the moment after he’s convicted. We can just set up computers or lottery machines to make all the decisions. Judges will be irrelevant, won’t they?”
Segal was quick to cut in. “There are those who say-mostly on the DA’s side, Your Honor-that that day has already come and gone.”
“Save the humor for your mates, Mr. Segal,” the judge said. “Exactly what have you got, Ms. Cooper?”
“I’d prefer not to tip my hand in its entirety right now.”
“Then a hypothetical. Can you give me that?”
“Certainly.” As I began to speak, Willie Buskins turned his chair away from me and put his left elbow on the counsel table, resting his head on his arm. “Suppose the perpetrator of a crime is alleged to have used a knife to subdue his victim, Your Honor-although that’s not the claim here. And suppose a knife was recovered near the crime scene and analyzed at the lab.”
“So far I’m with you.”
“When tested for DNA, the knife handle yielded a mixture of DNA.”
“A mixture?”
“Yes, judge. Suggesting that not surprisingly, over time, the DNA of several individuals was deposited on the knife. Until recently, it had been impossible to determine whether the DNA of a specific person was part of that mixture because the sample amounts of skin cells scraped off the knife were so very small.”