Brandon Glenn was a premed student at Pace University’s Manhattan campus when he was charged with murdering his biology professor. The professor, Samuel Moss, was openly gay, and witnesses attested that he’d made overt sexual advances on Brandon in the months preceding his death. Witnesses further stated that the advances infuriated Brandon, who was a homophobic marine reserve born and raised in the Bible Belt. The professor was found dead on Valentine’s Day in his East Village apartment with a screwdriver embedded in his throat.
Milt Cashman was conflicted out of the case, having represented the victim on previous marijuana charges. Of course, his past representation of the victim wouldn’t have adversely affected his representation of Brandon Glenn, but no assistant DA in Manhattan wanted to lock horns with Not Guilty Milty, so the office zealously moved the court to have Milt removed from the case. The DA’s office succeeded and the result was my first stint defending a high-profile accused killer.
Brandon had been in the professor’s home, there was no doubt of that. His fingerprints were found on a light switch, on a doorknob, and on a glass coffee table in the living room. Carpet fibers from the professor’s apartment were on Brandon’s clothes when he was arrested, and likewise, fibers from Brandon’s clothes were found in the professor’s humble abode.
Science isn’t sexy, doesn’t get the adrenaline pumping, and isn’t something I realized I was signing on for when I first decided to defend criminals for a living. During the trial I found myself feeling like a fraud, wishing I had paid at least some attention to my professor when I took a forensic-science class in college.
Brandon didn’t take the stand. He didn’t tell the jury what he told me: that he went to the professor’s apartment to threaten him with an administrative complaint if the sexual advances didn’t immediately cease. I knew it was a lie, but that isn’t why I refused to put Brandon on the stand. I refused to allow him to testify because it was a lie that the jury wouldn’t believe.
I dismissed Brandon’s protests of innocence and attacked the case on the assumption that he was as guilty as hell, just like the rest of my clients. The assistant DA presented a strong case, hitting us steadily with a fierce series of punches, a left jab of motive here, a right hook of opportunity there. I tried to put their case down with a single punch. And I missed.
The professor’s ex-boyfriend, Carson Reese, had both motive and opportunity and thus was dubbed around the office as our Reasonable Doubt Fairy. I had interviewed Reese and I was convinced he wasn’t the killer. Yet his being dateless on Valentine’s Day gave my client a chance at freedom, and me a chance at a dramatic victory that would adorn the covers of every major newspaper in New York.
I was playing for the press. With the media decorating the front row I posed for the courtroom sketches and concerned myself more with making the defense dramatic than with making it effective. After I put on what the Daily News called a “brilliant defense,” the assistant DA called a rebuttal witness, a priest of all things, who testified that he was with Carson Reese on the night of the murder and he had the used condoms to prove it. Father Thomas White hadn’t come forward earlier for obvious reasons, and of course because no one had asked him to. The priest put the final nail in my client’s coffin when he testified that my client was romantically involved with the victim, that he had seen them kissing in Central Park. Yes, his testimony buried my client. And I had handed him the shovel.
It took the jury less than an hour to return the guilty verdict. Father White had been on the prosecution’s lengthy witness list, I assumed as a smoke screen, and I’d never bothered to interview him. I was too busy deciding which tie would look best in a black-and-white photograph.
Thirty minutes after the verdict was read, Brandon Glenn confessed to me. He was having an affair with Professor Moss. He was at the professor’s apartment often, but Brandon insisted he was not at the professor’s apartment on the day he was murdered. He would rather let the world think him a killer, he said, than know he was as queer as an $8 bill.
The day after the verdict I got just what I wished for. My face was plastered on the front page of the Post, along with the headline he blows it! and an inset photograph of Father White positioned conveniently by my crotch.
Five days after the sentencing, I received a telephone call from Rikers Island. Brandon Glenn had been raped and murdered while in general population awaiting transfer to an upstate facility.
I didn’t leave the office for the following three days. I decorated the conference room with the Brandon Glenn file as if I were preparing for trial and pored through every piece of evidence I had to assure myself of his guilt. Alone in my office I prosecuted him again posthumously to unburden myself of the overwhelming guilt I felt over his death.
After those three days I received a telephone call that convinced me I needn’t continue. It was the assistant district attorney who had prosecuted Brandon Glenn’s case. A Bronx man charged with multiple murders on the Lower East Side had confessed to the killing of Professor Samuel Moss.
The media circus reopened and pitched its big-top tent right in front of my office. Milt was none too pleased anymore at being labeled my mentor and put some distance between us. New clients stopped calling, and the clients I did have watched me with a wary eye, as though I were the criminal. All I thought about was Brandon and how I’d failed him. I didn’t force the truth, not even from Brandon himself. I looked innocence in the eye and blinked. I didn’t recognize it, and an innocent man was dead for my shortcomings. Had I believed in his innocence, I might have looked a bit harder. I might have been able to convince the jury, if only I were able to convince myself. But I was a liar, a fraud, and I’d just figured everyone else was, too.
A firm believer in running away from my problems, I sold my practice for practically nothing, tucked my tail between my legs, and headed as far west as I could without sacrificing my ability to practice law, which translates into my ability to pay my student loans.
“That’s some story, son,” Jake says, removing his feet from the desk. “Are you gonna continue practicing criminal law?”
“Yeah. But I’m sticking to misdemeanors. No more rapes, no more murders. The stakes are much too high and I don’t want that kind of responsibility anymore. Any client whose case might pique the media’s interest is walking right back out my door and finding another attorney. I intend to refer all felony cases elsewhere.”
“Well, son, we’ll see about that.” Jake lifts himself off the chair and places the flask back home in its drawer. “C’mon. Let me show you around your new office.”
Jake leads me to the large empty space across the hall and I feel a twinge of excitement, that short-lived high that comes with something new. A new car, a new home, a new girl. He points toward the colossal window centered on the back wall.
“You have a mauka view,” he says. “Means your office looks out on the mountains. It’s a stunning view, even when the clouds gather over them. You’ll see more rainbows than you can count.”
“The only rainbows I ever saw in New York were in puddles, right before a taxi would plow through and splash my suit pants on the way to court.”
“You’re in a different world now, son,” he says, resting a hand on my shoulder. “My office has a makai view. I considered turning my desk around to take advantage of the view of the Pacific.”
“Too awkward for you to have your back to the door?”
“Nah, I just figured I’d daydream all day while my clients sat in jail exchanging cigarettes for blow jobs. By the way, did you bring a girlfriend with you here to the islands?”
I give him a slight shake of the head and a look that lets him know I’m uncomfortable with the subject. I have commitment issues, deep-seated difficulties in sustaining relationships for longer than a couple of weeks. Once that new-girl smell is gone, so are they. I move on. I’m not proud of it, and my shrink and I were working on it when I left New York. I have found, however, that the mechanisms of psychotherapy can turn as slowly as the wheels of justice.
“How about you, Jake? Are you married?”
“Nah. There are very few women, especially in Houston, who fancy a man who comes home from work late every night, mad and frustrated as hell because he can’t keep his clients alive. A man that spends his life fighting losing battles for shit pay, all the while getting criticized by yellow journalists who wouldn’t know a lethal injection from a blood test even if they had a front-row seat.”
Outside my new office window is a picture-postcard view. Rolling green mountains kissing soft, white clouds. I press my nose up against the glass and know that I’ll never again stand in awe of the New York City skyline, or anything else man-made for that matter.
“C’mon,” says Jake, peeling me away from the glass. “Let me introduce you to Hoshi, our beautiful, young, brilliant, bilingual receptionist.”
After introductions are made, Hoshi leaves us in the conference room, an immense space lined with five-foot-high windows, the length of two walls. Jake points out a few landmark buildings but my eyes focus on the natural beauty behind them all.
Jake sits down and motions for me to do the same. I look at my watch, but a different body language is spoken here, so I sit.
“These islands,” Jake says, “are populated with thousands of people who came here to escape something on the mainland. Some came to escape their stressful jobs, some their overbearing families, some their abusive spouses. Some created worlds for themselves on the mainland that they could just no longer bear to live in. Some made mistakes larger than those mountains that cast shadows so far, the only land they felt they could stand tall on was here on the most remote archipelago in the world. Many of my clients escaped from their home states on the continental U.S. figuring the law would never catch up to them here. And most of them were right. The problem was that they repeated their mistakes and ended up in jail having to pay my fees.
“So the first thing I tell people who just moved here is to make it a point not to repeat the mistakes that led them here to begin with, and to avoid at all costs placing themselves in that same kind of situation they escaped from on the mainland. For me, that was easy, since Hawaii is enlightened enough not to have the death penalty.
“The second thing I tell them is to make sure whatever they escaped from doesn’t follow them to the islands. For example, the DEA or that abusive spouse, or that fucking mother-in-law they left in Scottsdale.
“The third and most important thing I tell them is to constantly remind themselves that we are malihini, newcomers to these islands. Don’t be misled. We use U.S. currency and have American laws. English is the primary language. Still, we live in a world very foreign to mainlanders. Be conscious and considerate of where you are. We’re not in Houston. We’re not in Manhattan. We live in a tropical paradise, but don’t allow that to lull you into a false sense of invincibility. Sometimes bad things happen on these islands, which is lucky for us or we’d be out of work.
“Now, I have to make one quick phone call, son. Then what do you say we grab Hoshi and the three of us head over to the Sand Bar for some mai tais?”