A Really Good Day(23)
The AUSA said, “Plead now, tonight, and you can have your two phone counts.”
I said, “Did I say two? I meant one.”
“I’ll give you two. Take it or leave it.”
I faced a terrible dilemma. If I won at trial, my client would not go to prison. If I lost, he’d spend at least fifteen years in jail, and perhaps closer to twenty. Moreover, even if I won, he would still be facing detention and deportation for entering the country illegally. He could even have been prosecuted for that offense. The AUSA was offering my client eight years. After eight years, you have something of a life left to you. Your children are still children. After fifteen or twenty years? What and who remains?
Today, with the benefit of age and experience, I wish I had refused the deal. But I was young, I was scared, this was Orange County, and my client was an undocumented Mexican immigrant. Juries from notoriously conservative Orange County were not sympathetic to the people they called “illegals.” It was, of course, my client’s decision, but his intellectual capacity was profoundly diminished. He would do whatever I told him to do.
It was evening by the time I made my decision. The judge had stayed at work late to hear the plea. We stood in the temporary quarters of the Federal District Court, a grim, windowless, modular portable. The judge began the plea colloquy. She asked me if I had represented my client to the best of my ability, if I supported his decision to take the plea, if the law supported the plea. My voice shook as I affirmed each element, and I started to cry. By the end I could barely speak. My client put his arm around my shoulders. Facing eight years in prison, he comforted me.
Afterward, as I walked through the dark night to the parking lot, a car pulled up next to me. The window glided down. From inside, the judge called my name.
“There’s something I want you to know,” she said.
Having just been yelled at by my boss for breaking down in court, I braced myself for more criticism.
“There are some things,” she said, “that are worth crying about.”
Her window slid up and she rolled away.
* * *
*1 ?As anyone who’s seen coverage of a Donald Trump rally can attest.
*2 ?See http://www.naacp.org/?pages/?criminal-justice-fact-sheet. Another shocking statistic from the NAACP: “African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.”
*3 ?In some jurisdictions, including the one in which I practiced, a literal wheel was spun to determine court assignments.
Day 9
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Calm and content.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Decent night’s sleep.
Work: Productive.
Pain: Minor.
My husband comes home today, finally. I’ve been missing him terribly. To pass the time until his plane landed, I went out to his studio to work.
We live in a house built in 1907 by a Berkeley physician who practiced in a miniature consulting room on the first floor. My husband renovated a derelict shed in the yard as his idiosyncratic studio, with a desk tucked into a dark, windowless nook, the light blocked by a tall bookcase. For a while, I worked in Dr. Schaeffer’s former office, my desk abutting the hand-washing sink, my ink cartridges and red pencils in the long instrument drawers. The room was dark; its windows were hidden beneath eaves. Wainscoting, stained nearly black, crawled up the walls. A heavy bookshelf ran the entire circumference of the ceiling, a leather strap keeping the books in place. Very cool. I hated it.
From the moment I moved into that office, I loathed the gloom, the dark wood, the heavy window shades, the decrepit, original, Victorian-style light fixtures. I couldn’t bear to work in there, but neither could I bring myself to spend money renovating the space. I had sold my first book, and two more in the same mystery series; I taught a seminar every year at the law school and did consulting work; but even so I earned a fraction of what I had as an attorney. Though I never articulated the feeling, or even really recognized it, I didn’t believe that the approximation of a career I had cobbled together justified the expense of a renovation.
Then my husband began traveling more for work, and the business of his business, which I had always handled in order to feel I was participating in the economic life of our family beyond the pittance I earned, became too much for me to manage on my own. He hired a part-time assistant to help book his travel, deal with his correspondence, and do all the things that were taking up the hours of my day that I was supposed to spend writing. I happily turned Dr. Schaeffer’s dreary consulting room over to the assistant, and wandered with my laptop out to cafés, to work surrounded by people and pastry—an ideal environment, I insisted, for an extrovert with an addiction to sugar.
This lasted until my wrists and elbows started to ache. I needed a more ergonomic arrangement than Starbucks could provide. My husband invited me to set up a desk in a corner of his studio in the backyard. This system, though not ideal, worked for years. He keeps vampire’s hours, sitting down to work at around eleven at night and working until dawn burns out his eyeballs and sets his heart aflame. I work in the mornings, once the kids leave for school. On the rare occasions when we were both in the studio at the same time, we enjoyed one another’s company. We sat back-to-back, each listening to the other clicking away on the keys. My husband claimed he could tell from the tempo of my tapping whether I was working or surfing the Internet, and thus he kept me disciplined.