Free Salvation Boulevard by Larry Beinhart Page A

overturned the Constitution. Right down to its socks and underwear. Call somebody a terrorist, even an American citizen, like Ahmad Nazami, and he can, under the law, be taken off the streets or out of his own bedroom, like Ahmad was, and hauled off to a secret place.

    â€œThey can do it to people who don’t have Arab names too. They can do it to you”—he poked me in the chest—“with your ‘we were here even before the English’ Dutch name. They can do it to me. And that same fucking law says that we don’t have the right to come into this court and challenge it. You don’t even get a chance to say, Hey you got the wrong guy. You were supposed to arrest Manfred Goldfarb, not Emmanuel Goldfarb. Let alone have a trial and make them prove I actually did something.
    â€œSo, come on, my friend.” He put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Let us do our best, just in case these are the last days of the Republic.”
    Â 
    Arraignments are simple.
    The judge reads the charges to the defendant. He asks the defendant if he has a lawyer. If he needs one and can’t afford it, they assign one. Then he asks for a plea. The attorney answers guilty, not guilty, or, very infrequently, nolo contendere, no contest.
    Then the judge sets a court date for sentencing if the plea is guilty, for trial if it is not guilty.
    Judicial appointments in our state are for life. So our chief judge, the Honorable Darren Spoon, in his wisdom, uses the arraignment court as a place to put judges like Frederick Olsen Watkins, who is a drunk.
    Watkins naturally does not think of himself as a drunk, or even as someone with a drinking problem, because he never has a drink before noon. As a result, there are two Watkins: the morning one and the afternoon one. The morning one is rather irritable, even cranky. He wants attorneys to speak softly but very clearly. He wants things to move briskly. And he utters his own statements with a cottonmouth sound and drinks constantly from a glass of water, which, in the morning, actually is water and nothing but water. We know this because many people have bet on it over the years and so, intermittently, the pitcher is taken during the lunch recess and tested in front of witnesses.

    After lunch is, of course, a different matter, and entirely unpredictable. Courthouse legend has it that if he has two drinks, he’s friendly and affable; if he has three, he’s somewhat emotional; coming back from four drinks, the emotions grow larger, verging on the operatic; if he has five drinks, he’s asleep by three.
    It was the afternoon, and we had Watkins.
    We also had the DA’s most aggressive assistant, if not his best, Danny DeStefano. Tightly muscled and tightly wound, he bounced on the balls of his feet, convincing juries that he was working hard, hard, hard to personally rid their streets of crime and protect them, and the faster they decided to put this creep away, the faster he could get to the next one, thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury and madam forewoman.
    Danny had company—another lawyer who looked vaguely familiar from years ago. If memory served, he’d been in private practice but not particularly distinguished. I would have guessed that he was a new hire from the DA’s office, but he looked too old and was being way too self-important.
    Prisoners are almost always transported with shackles on. Nothing personal. It’s safer that way. They’re taken to a holding cell, and their shackles are removed before they’re brought in front of the judge.
    But Ahmad had not been given that courtesy. He came in with all his chains on. He had to do the humble shuffle, moving his feet no more than six inches at a time. His chains rattled softly with each step or gesture.
    They had done something else, something I had never seen before. They’d put black-out goggles on him. He was effectively blind.
    He was guarded by four