Free The Good Lawyer: A Novel by Thomas Benigno Page B

plea in the People v. Raymond Jackson , his honor was in an unusually jocular mood—unusual for Graham, especially on a Monday morning.
    The cold weather had fogged up the courtroom’s windows, while radiators beneath them hissed and clanged as a hard rain fell outside. Three out of six overhead globe lights were out. When thunder started to roll out over the building, and the day darkened and lightning cracked the sky, the atmosphere inside the courtroom became surreal.
    With my client standing at my side, Graham ordered the assistant D.A. and me to approach the bench. He told us that my client had written him a letter, congenial, courteous and respectful as it was, pleading for leniency. Evidently Graham was moved by it. Unfortunately it would do Raymond Jackson no good.
    Jackson was a predicate felon caught with a loaded revolver (the case now before Graham) while attempting to beat a subway fare by jumping a turnstile. Less than ten years earlier he’d been arrested and convicted for robbing a Bronx bodega with two others. Jackson was merely the lookout. His court-appointed lawyer took an open plea, which meant, within sentencing guidelines, his fate was totally up to the judge.
    In my entire career as a criminal defense lawyer—and I’m sure this is true of many able minded attorneys—I never took an open plea in state court. It’s just not done. You either make a deal you’re satisfied with, or go to trial—the risk of leaving sentencing to the broad discretion of the judge, an unwise gamble.
    Jackson’s open plea was entered only one month after his arrest—at his first appearance in Bronx Supreme Court moments after his arraignment on the indictment. His attorney had been Charlie Farkas, known otherwise around the Bronx Criminal Courts as “bleed ‘em and plead ‘em” Farkas.
    I had always heard of ambulance chasers in personal injury cases. But I never saw a courthouse shyster work a hallway like Farkas. Working out of a storefront office on Sheridan Avenue, directly across from the Bronx Criminal Court, for just a hundred or two, he’d take a case. Then, commanding thousands, he’d collect whatever he could, and when the money ran out, so would his effort (as limited as it was to begin with). A guilty plea was sure to follow.
    And he got away with it, time and again.
    Raymond Jackson did not deserve to go to jail for jumping a turnstile, loaded gun or not, for no less than two, and no more than four years—the mandatory minimum for a predicate felon in 1982.
    Three witnesses saw Jackson scale that turnstile: the token booth clerk, a retired postal worker on his way across town to do volunteer hospital work, and one of New York’s finest. When searched, a .32 caliber pistol was found in Jackson’s waistband, along with a phony Toys ‘R Us police badge and whistle. Jackson was a wannabe cop, who, because of his prior felony conviction, was ineligible to join the force. He had jumped that turnstile after receiving a 911 beep from his girlfriend signaling she was in labor and about to give birth to their second child. But that wasn’t all there was to Raymond Jackson’s story.
    On weekends Jackson, along with half a dozen other volunteers, patrolled his neighborhood in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Their primary goal was to ward off street crime, particularly the corner-drug trafficking trade endemic to almost every South Bronx neighborhood.
    Raymond Jackson was doing his part, and more, to make his world, and the world of his neighbors, friends and family, a better place. And I couldn’t do a damn thing to help him.
    In a political climate of one-year mandatory jail time for first offense loaded gun possession, for a predicate felon like Jackson, the gun charge would stand. And as a predicate felon, he could only plea down to an E felony with a minimum indeterminate sentence of two to four years.
    I wanted to strangle Charlie Farkas.
    Raymond Jackson, two heads taller than me and black as a