The “insurance bill” had passed.
Not a single question was raised on the floor, not a peep. No one had even noticed the change in definition of “tree.”
Matt Leonard had been right all along. They didn’t even know what it meant.
Democracy at work. They just voted as they were told, like sheep.
Eugene hung up and walked to his window.
Through the slit between the drapes, he peered into the dark.
The Island coast was his.
23
Atlanta, Georgia
J IM TALLEY WAS STUNNED.
Until this moment, all had been right with the world.
It was Monday morning, seven thirty a.m. The sun rose on schedule, as predicted last night by the Weather Channel’s “on-camera meteorologists,” as they insisted on calling themselves. What a nerve.
His coffee brewed on cue by order of his imported coffeemaker’s built-in timing mechanism.
He arrived at the usual time at the State Judicial Building. His office, adjoining the Judge’s, was precisely as he had left it…carefully jacketed in hundreds of volumes of law books, each in their appointed location, exactly where he’d left them Friday afternoon.
Jim Talley had just listened to his voice mail.
C.C… reversing his opinion in a death penalty murder case?
And not just a murder case, a serial murder case. The serial murder case.
And not only did Judge C. want a reversal, with a new trial over some legal technicality, he wanted Cruise to walk free!
Not once in all the years C.C. had graced the bench had he ever, ever ruled anti-law and order, much less anti-death penalty.
Yet now, in one of the biggest cases ever tried in the largest metropolitan city south of the Mason-Dixon line, C.C. wanted to reverse his opinion? And based on a bunch of theoretical crap he rambled over a cell phone?
Jim could tell C.C. was soused when he left the message. His voice was slurred and Duane Allman was playing in the background.
Whenever the Judge had a snootful, he waxed eloquently about constitutionality, about which he knew nothing.
Jim was always astounded how a man who knew so little about the Constitution could actually bring himself to the brink of tears just talking about it. He did it every single summer at the State Bar Association meeting in Savannah, and then, just to top it off, forced everyone to suffer through a repeat performance at the law clerks’ annual Christmas party.
Last year, after two or three cocktails, C.C. had “gone constitutional” with a piece of Christmas tree tinsel stuck on top of his head. The Court personnel had been to afraid to ignore him, so they all listened, which only egged him on to even greater constitutional heights.
Now Jim would have to go door-to-door within the building and hand-deliver some type of memo explaining his change of position.
Then he’d have to comb the trial transcript and record to find an actual reason to reverse the damn thing. It would have to be one of the issues brought up by the defense on appeal. The Court just couldn’t-sua sponte-first raise and then sustain its own objection; the issues raised in the appellate briefs bound them.
Jim turned on his computer and waited for it to boot up. Hell, the judge might not even remember his drunken telephone monologue about how they were the gatekeepers to justice, blah, blah, and blah.
It wasn’t the first time C.C. had left a long, drunken rambling on his voice mail…far from it. But it was even worse when Jim actually picked up the phone and gave C.C. a captive audience. At least the voice mail only allowed four minutes before cutting him off.
There had to be some legitimate reason to reverse. Something the feds couldn’t argue with.
A death penalty case would normally head straight to the federal northern district courthouse for review. Jim considered federal judges truly the worst, all cut from the same cloth. Once they’d made it out of the trenches at the state court level and landed their lifetime appointments, they waited, obnoxiously looking down their noses, for every joyous opportunity to denounce their former colleagues and trash the lower courts.
The federal judges, though, absolutely loved to let killers walk, that was a known fact. But he had to come up with something legit, a solid reason to reverse. For Cruise to walk free there had to be prejudice. That would disallow the State from ever re-trying the case. Typically that only occurred when there was some sort of prosecutorial misconduct. Unlikely here. Hailey Dean was over the top, true, but misconduct? Doubtful.
Reversals were easy enough to engineer, but Dean was a good trial lawyer and very few of her cases were ever overturned. The defense lawyer, Leonard, was good, too. Jim doubted either had done anything reversible. Appeals were not mysterious. The case was tried before a judge and jury, and immediately after conviction came a notice of appeal outline, bare-bones, grounds for a new trial. When that was denied by the trial judge, the case headed up to a panel of nine judges, the Georgia Supreme Court, for review. They loved reversing death cases…especially four of the nine on the bench. All it took was one vote to swing the majority.
The guilty verdict and the death sentence were both up for grabs. Letting out a long breath, Jim pulled up the Cruise decision to see where it stood on the Court’s rotation and how the other justices had lined up.
After skimming a few lines, he froze.
Holy shit.
C.C.’s would be the swing-fricking-vote.
His one vote change would guarantee a serial killer’s death penalty reversal. And all because of one drunk drive up the interstate?
Did the Judge have any idea?
Shit.
For a moment, just a fleeting one, Jim thought back on the testimony at trial, the mauling the victims took before they felt fingers around their necks and an indescribable pain pierce their backs.
But to hell with them. They were dead.
More important, what would a reversal do to his own career? He couldn’t name one decent law firm that would be remotely interested in hiring the left-wing liberal wing-nut that crafted the decision to let a serial killer walk free.
He had to think…
Resigning himself to the possibility the Judge may actually remember Saturday’s phone call, Jim switched the computer over to the Lexis legal research feature to start scanning for new law in all eleven federal judicial circuits across the country covering the death penalty.
There was nothing else he could do now. The Judge wouldn’t show up for at least three more hours. C.C.’s ETA, estimated time of arrival as they called it at the Court, was never before 11 a.m. and he was always in a foul mood on Monday mornings. This would be no damn picnic.
Jim dug in and, four hours later, still no sign of the Judge and no decent grounds for reversal, except a weak argument that a separate warrant should have been obtained for DNA comparison for each of the eleven murder victims. There wasn’t even DNA on all the victims…so how could he conceivably reverse on DNA issues alone?
His eyes were tired and the words on the computer screen were getting blurry. Talley pushed back from his desk and put his feet up beside the keyboard for a moment, stretching out his limbs. He glanced up at the TV screen there on a shelf, sandwiched in between law books perfectly bookended with bronzed scales-of-justice figurines.
Headline News was on mute as usual and it was the bottom of the hour, time for the local cable news cut-in. The cut-in was usually just annoying, but this time the screen caught his attention. Three young men, hair cropped short, immaculately groomed and dressed in business suits, were being led out of a courtroom in handcuffs. They looked vaguely familiar.