Free The Reform Artists: A Legal Suspense, Spy Thriller (The Reform Artists Series Book 1) by Jon Reisfeld Page B

personal level. Her passionate, warped perspective made her actions highly unpredictable and, on occasion, genuinely unprofessional. That, in turn, made her extremely dangerous in the courtroom. Whereas Swindell could deal with Beverly West, he had no idea how to read or strategize effectively against someone operating on Gloria Cheswick’s private wavelength.
    Gradually, things were starting to make sense to Swindell. He felt he was beginning to understand what it was about Martin that initially had awakened his sympathies. It was a combination of Martin’s inherent decency and naïveté, coupled with Swindell’s growing awareness of the size, scope and intensity of the hidden forces aligning themselves against his client. On reflection, Swindell thought Martin’s situation was beginning to resemble that of a young buck suddenly caught in the glare of an onrushing tractor-trailer’s headlights.
    He realized Martin could have no more idea of the true nature of the legal juggernaut tearing his way than a deer would have had of the sophisticated mechanics propelling a Mack truck toward it at sixty-five miles an hour. Both would remain ignorant right up to the point of impact, when the fender and grille would crush and flatten them into fresh road kill.
    Swindell could clearly see that truck bearing down on his client with a malevolent inevitability that was painful to watch. He could see diesel smoke coughing up out of the exhaust pipe above the cab and the cold, harsh headlights locking in on their prey. Meanwhile, Martin just stood there, alone, in the middle of the road, in his dark business suit, freshly pressed shirt, and power tie, his face frozen in dumb terror and framed by a full head of salt-and-pepper hair.
    Unlike Martin, Swindell also could discern the four, bold letters painted straight and tall on the side of that truck. He knew what the “V-A-W-A” stood for. They were the initials of the “Violence against Women Act.”
    Congress had passed the Violence against Women Act back in 1994, and President Bill Clinton immediately signed it into law. On its face, the VAWA was supposed to protect women against a broad range of legitimate threats, including violent spousal abuse. But the law’s vast, overreaching nature and its general disregard for due process and men’s civil rights quickly turned it into something altogether different: It became enabling legislation for the radical feminist movement’s takeover of the family law courts.
    Swindell initially watched with alarm as the VAWA, backed by relentless lobbying from lawyers with the National Organization for Women, overturned centuries of carefully crafted common-law and due-process protections. It achieved this, primarily, by allowing women to bypass the criminal courts altogether to bring what were essentially criminal actions against their husbands. In the Civil Court, which tried these cases, both the legal protections for the accused and the standard of proof demanded of the accusers were far weaker. Swindell felt a great many of these cases were highly suspect, to say the least.
    In civil court, under the VAWA, women could now level charges of “assault, aggravated assault and battery” against their unsuspecting husbands through one-sided, and secret, ex-parte proceedings that were not even permitted in true criminal cases. A Civil Court petitioner only needed to show the judge a “preponderance of the evidence” to prove a case, while Criminal Court demanded proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
    In civil court, the alleged guilty parties had to provide, and pay for, their own counsel. They were not entitled, as they are, in criminal cases, to free legal representation from the Public Defender’s Office, and this held true even if they had no money. Meanwhile, the term ‘alleged’ was never used, in the text of the VAWA, to refer to an “abuser.” The law repeatedly referred, indirectly, to women as the ‘victims’ and to men as the