Due Process (Joe Dillard #9)(18)
“Now ask me if I look at a black man or woman I don’t know and automatically love them. The answer is no, I don’t. Do I even trust them? To a certain degree, I suppose I do. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, although I admit it’s difficult after you’ve been in my profession for as long as I have. But I can’t sit here and tell you that I love everyone, because I don’t. That doesn’t make me a racist, does it?
“What I can tell you is that race will become a part of this case if your son winds up being arrested and charged with sexually assaulting or raping or kidnapping a white woman, even if she was a stripper. Racism and hatred are as alive and well here in Northeast Tennessee as anywhere else. I’m sure you heard about the incident last year at the Black Lives Matter rally on the ETSU campus where the white kid showed up in a gorilla mask. He had bananas dangling from strings and a burlap sack with a confederate flag and a marijuana leaf on it. He was offering bananas to the black protestors. The police arrested him and charged him with civil rights intimidation, and he’ll probably be convicted, but it’ll be reversed on appeal. Was he trying to provoke them? Sure. Intimidate them to keep them from doing something? No. He probably had as much right to be there as they did, gorilla mask and all, under the first amendment. But because what he did probably wasn’t illegal didn’t make it right. He was an ignorant kid promoting hatred and bigotry. It’s a shame. It really is.
“Let me give you one more example of what you’ll be up against if Kevin gets charged and we wind up going to trial. I was trying a crack cocaine case a few years back. I was appointed to represent a black man with a couple of prior drug convictions who had done ten years in the penitentiary. He wasn’t on parole—he’d flattened his sentence—but there was a drug task force agent in Johnson City who hated him and wanted him back in prison. My client’s name was Freddie. Freddie didn’t sell any crack cocaine the night he was arrested, and he didn’t have any in his possession. He’d smoked some earlier in the night, but this cop didn’t know that. What the cop did was get one of his scumbag informants to call Freddie and ask him to help the informant find a hundred-dollars-worth of crack. The drug agent paid his informant fifty dollars to make the call. My client, who had known the informant for a long time, agreed to help the guy find a few rocks. He took him to a park and pointed out a dealer. He wasn’t involved in the transaction, didn’t get any drugs. But Freddy facilitated it, so they charged him with conspiracy to sell and distribute. He was a multiple offender, so he was looking at twelve years. We walk into the courtroom for jury selection and I look around the room. Not a black face in the crowd. The black population in the county is only around three percent, and I guess the Criminal Court Clerk just didn’t bother making sure any black jurors got summoned for jury duty. We start questioning the potential jurors, and I tell them my client is scared. I tell them he’s scared because he’s the only black man in the courtroom. The judge absolutely went off on me. He’s retired now, but he was an idiot. His name was Ivan Glass, and he made a speech about racism being a thing of the past, that Jim Crow was over and that the civil rights movement had done away with racism in the United States and that white people could judge black people without any bias whatsoever. I told him he was a fool and almost went to jail for contempt. But I have to tell you, that attitude is still prevalent with some of the judges. They don’t think racism exists. They just don’t get it.”
“They’re wrong,” Gerome said. “It’s getting worse by the day. What happened to Freddy?”
“The jury nullified. I showed them the rocks. They were tiny. The informant admitted he sought Freddie out and talked him into helping him find a dealer—it was all on tape. But Freddie didn’t get anything out of the deal. Under a strict interpretation of the law, Freddy was guilty, but they found him not guilty and let him go. The judge gave me another speech afterward saying the verdict proved his point, but Freddy didn’t walk because there weren’t any racists on the jury. He walked because I was able to convince them how stupid and unfair the entire prosecution was. He should never have been arrested.”
“Kevin made a mistake,” Gerome said. “Hiring the stripper was a mistake. You have a son, Mr. Dillard, I talked with him on the phone yesterday. Has he ever made a mistake?”
I started to say something about Jack never having hired a stripper, but did I really know that? He’d played Division I baseball with a bunch of alpha males for years. He’d played in the minor leagues. He was an alpha himself. I was sure he hadn’t told me everything he’d done while he was out on his own, and if I was truly honest with myself, I didn’t want to know.
“I’m sure he’s made mistakes,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s done anything that could land him in the penitentiary for thirty or forty years.”
I turned back to Kevin and said, “You haven’t been charged yet, but I assume they took DNA from you, correct?”
Kevin nodded. “They had a warrant for DNA samples from me and the other two guys who live in the house. They swabbed the inside of our mouths first thing.”
“If they find your DNA in her or on her, you’re in for a difficult time.”
“They won’t find anything.”
“Did you touch her?”
“No.”