45

By the time I arrived back at the office, I had just enough time to grab my files and make it to court for the afternoon docket. I had been too nervous to eat much breakfast before the Supreme Court hearing, and now I’d skipped lunch. My mind was a million miles away from Milton County Superior Court. I needed to prove Caleb Tate wrong about my father.

The claim that my father had been bribing or extorting Judge Snowden was laughable. It cut against everything I knew about his character. But Caleb Tate had asserted his claim with such confidence, challenging me to check the records myself, that he had managed to germinate the tiniest seed of doubt. And that seed had now sprouted into a hundred what-if questions.

What if my father’s record in front of Snowden was inexplicably good, even if he hadn’t done anything illegal? What if Tate was telling the truth about his former client Rafael Rivera? What if—and I couldn’t believe I was even asking this—my father had something on Judge Snowden? What if all of that became public? Would Antoine Marshall get a new trial? And if so, how could we possibly get a conviction now that my father, the only eyewitness to the crime, was dead?

These questions ate at me as Judge Pipes, a substitute judge who had been pulled out of retirement to help due to the plea-bargaining crisis, gaveled the afternoon session to order. I had about fifteen files stacked on the prosecutor’s table. They were all probation violations and bond revocations—the types of things the court normally processed with utmost efficiency.

Defendants who had violated probation would come in and plead with the court for one more chance. I would express the state’s frustration with a convict who had been given a second chance and thumbed his nose at the court. The judges would typically hand out whatever sentence I asked for and throw in a harsh lecture for free.

But that afternoon, Judge Pipes, who had been one of the tougher judges on the bench when he was active, was giving out light sentences and setting low bonds. My recommendations for tough love were ignored.

Halfway through the afternoon, I started arguing more forcefully and cross-examined the defendants at length to show their blatant disregard for the law. But none of this seemed to affect Pipes. By the time the day was over, I realized that a new kind of normal had been established in Milton County. Instead of judges listening to prosecutors, they were going light on nonviolent offenders, freeing up jail space for the hard-core felons.

I returned to the office at five and compared notes with other prosecutors. They had experienced the same thing. It was like the judges had gotten together and decided to change the sentencing guidelines. If word got out, Milton County would become the place for drug gangs.

We had lost round one.

I called both Bill Masterson and Regina Granger but got their voice mails. I shut myself in my office, checked my e-mail messages, and played around on the Internet. I was trying to get up the nerve to check our database to test Caleb Tate’s claims.

After procrastinating for half an hour, I entered my father’s name in the defense attorney field and searched the criminal cases in the Milton County DA’s data bank. I started ten years before my mother’s death and looked at every case my father had handled in front of Snowden and every other judge in the county. I took notes and categorized the results. After two hours of skimming through more than three hundred files, I calculated the results and stared at the paper in disbelief. My stomach ached as the reality began to sink in. The results jumped out at me, mocking my hope that Caleb Tate had exaggerated my dad’s success.

As prosecutors, we normally win about 90 percent of our cases. In general, my dad did better than most defense attorneys, winning not just 10 percent of the time but nearly 30 percent of the time. But of the forty cases in Judge Snowden’s courtroom, he had won twenty-nine—better than 70 percent. Worse, about half of those were decided on motions to suppress or other hearings where the judge played a critical role. It was exactly the way Caleb Tate suggested it would be.

I felt sick as I tried to formulate scenarios that could explain the results. Perhaps my father just understood the way Judge Snowden thought, the same way I had achieved better grades with some teachers than with others. Perhaps Snowden had a great deal of respect for my father and subconsciously gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Okay, so maybe the judge played favorites. Did that make her corrupt? Or maybe she just liked the defense lawyers who were better prepared than the others. None of these reasons would mean that my father or Judge Snowden had done anything wrong.

But as a thorough lawyer, I couldn’t ignore the cold, hard facts. My father had won 72 percent of his cases in front of Judge Snowden and only 30 percent in front of other judges. In no other single judge’s courtroom had he won even half of his cases. If he was just better prepared than other defense attorneys or quicker on his feet or got the breaks because of his reputation, then why didn’t it apply with judges other than Snowden? Not only that, but my father seemed to have more cases go to trial in front of Snowden than with any other judge.

I also looked up the results for the other lawyers on Caleb Tate’s list. They too won roughly 70 percent of their cases in front of Snowden. I ran a search for cases presided over by Snowden in general. Her overall conviction rate was about 90 percent. What could account for the fact that the three lawyers on Tate’s list won 70 percent of the time in front of Snowden while other defense attorneys won only 10 percent?

By the time I finished, it was nearly midnight. I hadn’t gotten up from my computer for at least three hours. Poor Justice was probably prancing around the house, his bladder ready to burst. But I was almost paralyzed, too crestfallen to move from in front of my screen as the stark reality of this data sank in. Whether or not my father and Snowden had done anything illegal was almost beside the point. This data alone would give Mace James something new to scream about. Snowden had ruled against Antoine Marshall on almost every major evidentiary motion and had even asked some questions to rehabilitate my father’s testimony after Tate’s cross-examination. People would jump to conclusions. Where there’s smoke, they would claim, there must also be fire. My father’s reputation would be trashed. And if Mace James got lucky, my mother’s killer would walk out of jail a free man.

My only alternative—one that seemed equally abhorrent—was to dismiss the case against Caleb Tate. That way this data would never come to light. Tate would be compelled by the rules of ethics not to repeat anything Rafael Rivera had told him unless Rivera took the stand to testify against him. But how could I turn a killer like Tate free just to protect my father’s reputation?

I had become a prosecutor because I believed in the justice system. Prosecutors were on the side of the angels. Yet suddenly everything was murky and unclear. Through no fault of my own, fate had conspired against me.

I shut down my computer and forced myself to leave the office at 12:08. Some nights I hated being a prosecutor.