Simple Case

ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY Dana Hargrove prepared her cases well, as much as her tight schedule and the inevitable surprises allowed. Senior members of her bureau were amused by her ardor, perhaps fondly remembering, but not admitting, their own enthusiasm from an earlier time.

She was an assembler of objective facts, whatever might lead her to the truth. Lies and things ignored or deliberately withheld only caused complications. She searched every set of events, every witness's statement, hungering for the crystal vision that life on city streets wouldn't yield.

Lofty ideals were rarely practical in the midst of chaos. At best, they simmered inside her conscience, perhaps too keenly felt, disturbing her preparations for trial. Only a year out of law school, class of '87, and nine months into the job, she was already unbearably overloaded, sharing a noisy office with three other rookies. The two metal file drawers reserved for her use were stuffed tight with misdemeanor cases, over two hundred of them, all with her name on the outside: ADA Hargrove.

In her profession, "garbage" was the generic term for these cases, given to first-year assistants for wetting their feet on the way to greater skill. Most of those slim manila file folders contained no more than a couple of pages: the complaint, the DA write-up, the defendant's yellow sheet. Representing no more than a speck of city crime, her cases nonetheless affected perhaps a thousand lives: the cops, the defendants, the victims, their families and friends. These faceless people vexed her soul, nettled her curiosity and aroused her sympathies in the way that names and epitaphs on tombstones always did.

ADA Hargrove's first trial had begun as a prosecution against three defendants, now down to one after two pled guilty. The defendants should have been charged with burglary—a felony. But lacking any direct evidence linking them to the break-in, the supervising ADA in the complaint room had charged them with a misdemeanor, criminal possession of stolen property. In that way, the case had begun its bumpy descent down the stairs of the system—a felony that became a misdemeanor that became "shit" (another term of art) after the suppression hearing.

Hargrove saw it coming midway and kicked herself later for not predicting it beforehand, wondering how she could have expected something different from the Honorable Brenda Johnson (known as "JJ" among Dana's colleagues in the DA's office), a former Legal Aid lawyer, veteran of the defense bar.

The ADA arrived in court for the hearing in her best-pressed state, barely rumpled from her burden of carrying too many file folders and a fat law book from her tenth floor office in the criminal courts building to the fifth floor courtroom, AP-5, the "All Purpose" part. In the hallway, the defendant, Tyson Handler, skulked in a corner about six paces from his court-appointed attorney, Paul Cortina, who shifted from one foot to the other, empty handed except for the nub of a burning cigarette between two fingers.

"Tell me when the judge comes in," Cortina told the prosecutor with a blasé nod, his diamond earring flashing. Hargrove regarded him with a nervous smile, glancing at him long enough to register a complete mental picture: the aging sport jacket, crooked tie, and curly hair brushing the top of his collar. Her adversary earned about as much as she—somewhere in the low thirties—but displayed his poverty openly in a studied concoction of hair, clothing and impudent swagger designed to characterize the underdog.

Hargrove pushed the swinging door of the courtroom with her backside and stepped in. The courtroom was a small makeshift one, formerly an office for court clerks who had been unceremoniously shunted into a corner of the basement in the name of budget cuts and the burgeoning court docket. Sitting on the sole bench reserved for the audience was Police Officer Dave MacMarney, her witness for the hearing. Further in, near a side door, sat a court officer with his crossed legs propped up on a table, head bent over a curled paperback.