Free The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson

Vetch’s office by two state troopers, Officers Smith and Jones, and on their arrival he invited them to accompany him to the meeting. He took pleasure in the unhappiness evident in Vetch’s features when they entered. Without the cops the count was 3–1; with them it was 3–3 and his men were in uniform. The guns stayed.
    The federal attorneys had filled the county attorney’s office with placards using pie charts and bar graphs to prove a contention that one phone call to him, the judge, would have established in ten seconds: The marijuana business was big and getting bigger and in this part of the nation it was centered here, among the first hills south of the cities of the Midwest. Years ago the hillbillies made moonshine, one of the attorneys said, and now they were growing pot. The second attorney chimed in, noting that one of the biggest sources of the problem was the leniency of judges, who often looked the other way and sometimes had their hands in the till. “Which is why we chose you to meet with. You have a reputation for probity and we knew we could count on you to back us up.”
    “But I have no role in the courts, you know that. I’m only an administrator.”
    “And among the most respected and influential.” Vetch was speaking now. “You don’t conduct trials but people look to you for leadership.”
    The judge made a little accordion with his fingers, touching their tips and flexing them in and out. “Not so very long ago wehad a case where Miss Lucia Beene, resident poetess and somewhere on the full side of seventy, was convicted of growing pot on her sister’s sun porch and selling it through her Christian bookstore. Now it’s not six months later and you’re telling me you’re going to throw Miss Beene into the federal pen for fifteen years without possibility of parole.”
    “Twenty years, and we can confiscate her sister’s property whether or not her sister was aware of the crop.” This from the second attorney. “We put out the message of take-no-prisoners, slash-and-burn, mandatory sentences and people will get the point. This is a new ball game with new rules. We’ve got a federal forfeiture fund now. We confiscate a couple of farms of those guys who don’t know what’s going on, or who claim they don’t know, and we put fear in people’s hearts. And when we confiscate land people will figure out that we mean business. That’s what we want. We want the people down here to understand that this is the law that’s at stake. We flat-out take some property, break a few bones, and we’ll see who’s growing a year from now. Fear is the best means to power and surprise is the attacker’s most powerful weapon. We don’t
want
to give them warning, and we have no legal obligation to give them warning.”
    The judge rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “The next step from what you’re proposing is imprisonment without habeas corpus.”
    “Oh, please, Judge.” Vetch’s passion brought him forward in his seat. “There’s no point in using that kind of language. You’re an attorney. This is the United States. We don’t hold people in prison without probable cause. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right. If you could only hear yourself. You sound like an old man hanging on to old ways.”
    “That’s because I
am
an old man,” the judge said. He took another antacid.
    And now the feds and their placards were gone back to the city and the officers dismissed. The judge faced Vetch across an expanse of glass-topped desk empty except for a telephone and a computer.Behind the desk stood a brand-new grandfather clock, its pendulum chamber backed with a mirror. The clock was placed so that a client—sitting in the chair where the judge sat now—saw his own reflection, in a way that was profoundly discomfiting, as the eye invariably sought itself out while Vetch, his back to the mirror, talked on.
    The judge stood, shoved the chair a few inches to the right, and sat again. In the