Sally pretended to sleep, her mind racing. Just as Shapiro could not understand his wife’s rejection of him, she could not understand how a man who had not been inside a synagogue in ten years, a man who knew maybe six words of Yiddish, a man who laughed at her when she’d suggested they vacation in Israel rather than go on a bicycle trip in Scotland, as he planned, how that man all of a sudden became the Head Jew leading a crusade.
After so many years of marriage, they now seemed so wrong for each other. Thinking back to her college years, she wondered whether her friends were right when they warned her he was too different, that it could not work in the long run. Sally remembered how popular she’d been in college until she became inseparable from Ben Shapiro. How different my life would have been if I’d never met him, if I’d ended up with somebody more like me… I never signed up to be a Jew. Or to have my son treated like a Jew.
Shapiro had made one more effort to talk with Sally earlier that evening, leading to a discussion that ended after five minutes with her swearing at him for the first time in perhaps a decade, after he’d asked her to join him in going to Washington for the huge march.
“No, absolutely not. There is only one fucking Jew in this family,” she shouted, leaping to her feet. “And it certainly is not me, and neither is it Adam.”
She thundered up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door. He’d been surprised to find it ajar later.
Shapiro’s problems at home mirrored his problems with the two cases dominating his work life. The good news was that by the time Shapiro located Aaron Hocksberg, still his only client from among the local Jews arrested at their homes the night of the roundup, Hocksberg had been taken before a federal magistrate, charged with harboring fugitives and released on his own recognizance. All that happened before Shapiro could even meet with his client. The chief judge decided it took less resources for the six federal magistrates, who handled such minor criminal matters as arraignments of arrested persons, to be shuttled from county jail to county jail than it did to transport all the defendants to the federal courthouse.
US Attorney Anderson’s press conference, announcing that all of those arrested would be charged with harboring fugitives and in return for guilty pleas his office would request fines and suspended jail sentences, went a long way toward defusing what had the potential to be an explosive situation in Massachusetts.
Attorney General McQueeney’s judgment on that issue proved correct. Despite early threats from defense attorneys to fight every arrest, it appeared that all those charged would escape jail sentences and would have to pay a not-too-significant fine. Samuel Cohn, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, immediately wrote a million-dollar check to the United States Treasury to pay all the fines.
“These people are heroes,” Cohn said. “Given the opportunity, I would have done just what they did. Doing the right thing shouldn’t cost them a penny.”
Shapiro was not so lucky with his other client, the one charged with state criminal violations. Howie Mandelbaum remained the only person from the two ships taken into custody by state law enforcement officials rather than the feds. Patrick McDonough, Suffolk County district attorney, was infuriated that the US Attorney had wimped out.
McDonough was a proud son of South Boston. He could smell the waterfront from his boyhood home. The idea that foreign forces sank military vessels, even if they were just Coast Guard, and killed military people, including that poor girl, within sight of his own mother’s living room window drove McDonough nearly crazy. He didn’t care what the feds were doing. He had one Jew in his custody and he intended to throw the book at the young man.
Shapiro returned to his office from a meeting with McDonough gravely concerned for his client. He had assured Mandelbaum’s father, who seemed to have something technical to do with stock trading in New York as far as Shapiro could quickly determine, that the feds would take over all the cases and the state charges were likely to be dropped.
Now he’d have to call the senior Mandelbaum and admit he’d been wrong. The only plan Shapiro could come up with was to slow the criminal process and hope public opinion would ease and McDonough would back down.
The Camp Edwards detainees were the third hot potato Shapiro was juggling. He’d enthusiastically volunteered to head the legal defense committee for those detainees, a decision he was beginning to regret. The defense committee was being coordinated through the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League. Dozens of lawyers—not all of them Jewish, Shapiro was pleased to see—volunteered to represent individual detainees. The ADL set up what they hoped was a secure extranet website to coordinate the cases that were soon to be filed. The website included a list server that allowed each participating attorney to send and receive confidential emails. Guantanamo defense attorneys had used a similar arrangement.
Shapiro’s inbox was flooded with back-and-forth emails among lawyers on the defense team and new lawyers joining up, it seemed, by the hour. It would be a full-time job just reading all the email. One stood out, though, with a subject header in all capital letters saying EVERYBODY READ THIS ONE.
It was from Shapiro’s client, Aaron Hocksberg. He was incensed by the arrests in general and by his arrest in particular. The partners in his primarily Jewish law firm voted to devote a don’t-worry-about-the-budget effort to representing detainees. The email contained a draft of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus that the firm prepared as a model for all the cases. It was twenty-five pages long.
This is good, Shapiro thought, this is very good. I wouldn’t want to guess how many associates have been awake for the past couple of nights pounding this out.
The petition traced the history of the writ of habeas corpus back past the founding of the United States and through English history. It referred to a case brought in 1627 by Englishmen jailed by King Charles I. The king locked them up without charge for failing to assist England’s war against France and Spain. The prisoners sought writs of habeas corpus, arguing that without specific charges, they should not be imprisoned. The king’s attorney general replied that the Crown’s interest in protecting the realm justified suspending the ordinary judicial process. The king prevailed, but there was such outrage that Parliament responded with the Petition of Right in 1628, which prohibited imprisonment without formal charges. The petition said that Parliament next passed the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which required the government to bring formal criminal charges against any person held in custody within three months of his arrest, bringing to an end the process of arresting people and holding them indefinitely without criminal charges.
That’s what they are doing with our detainees, Shapiro thought.
The petition then crossed the Atlantic and emphasized that the only individual right included in the original United States Constitution, even before the Bill of Rights added the first ten amendments, was the right to petition a court for a writ of habeas corpus. The petition pointed out that all other individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion and the right not to be deprived of life or property without due process of law, were all added later, starting with the Bill of Rights. The Founders felt that only the right to habeas corpus was vital enough to be included in the body of the original constitution.
This is powerful legal argument, Shapiro thought. Fundamental to our rights as a free nation.
Shapiro read the remainder of the petition, which read like a historical tour through colonial and Civil War America. He skipped to the bottom line, to the Relief Requested portion.