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It was something that saddened and even frightened me. The idea that someone who had done nothing wrong could be yanked from his or her home, charged with a crime, and sent to prison for years—even life—sent chills down my spine. It smacked of Nazism, innocent people being dragged off into the night. I think this frightened me because I knew that if it could happen to one, it could happen to all.
My fear was theoretical in nature, back then. I couldn’t have known that one day it would happen to me. Unless, of course, it’s true that we come in “knowing” at some level what our life will be—thus explaining, for some, the kind of choices we make.
It was the advent of DNA as a means of identification in criminal cases that finally freed me of some of those fears. DNA had been discovered in 1870 by a chemistry student named Friederich Miescher, but no one realized its full potential back then. It wasn’t until the 1950s that deoxyribonucleic acid was discovered to carry genetic material from one generation to the next. Now, as everyone knows who watched the O.J. trial, it’s commonly used in criminal cases, much like fingerprints, to prove a person guilty or not. It can be obtained from something as simple as a swab of fluid from inside a cheek, or a hunk of hair.
Any prison inmate who’s been jailed wrongly can afford a lock of hair. What most can’t afford is a lawyer to fight the good fight. Someone needs to get a new trial going. Tests must be run, and DNA experts persuaded to testify pro bono—free of charge. Sometimes agencies such as the American Civil Liberties Union will help with the cost. However it’s done, it must be proved that the killer’s or rapist’s DNA, found on or near the victim, in no way matches the client’s—the wrongly accused perpetrator of the crime.
The plight of these wrongly accused became a moral crusade for me. During my last year of law school, I made the decision to shun the big fees my father assured me I could be making within a few years at Sloan and Barber. Instead—I announced with all the exuberance of naive youth—I would defend the poor and downtrodden.
Little did I know that within fifteen years, I’d be one of Seattle’s poor and downtrodden.
An exaggeration, of course. I tend to do that on days like today when everything seems so black. Still, when I was brought up on charges five months ago, I lost my job, and it looked for a while as if I’d be joining my clients on the streets. If my father hadn’t died of a heart attack, leaving me a modest inheritance, and if my mother hadn’t moved to Florida, leaving her house vacant, that’s precisely what might have occurred.
And there again we have one of life’s little tricks—it takes away the people you love, and replaces them with assets.
So what do you do? Do you say, “Go away, Life, I don’t want your filthy lucre”? I think not. Not, at least, when the meter reader is at one’s door.
So I moved into my parents’ house shortly after the arrest. Then last month, in April, out on bail, I went to Thornberry along with five other women who were invited there, just like me. We were all potential but as yet unpublished authors, and I suspected from the first that each of the others was running from something—also like me.
No one admitted to that, of course. Not at first. It took the quake to make us trust each other enough to share our stories. By then, it was far too late.
Because the time sequence of the two events that changed my life this past year can become confusing, I am writing them down here in much the way I write my notes for a legal brief. Much the way, in fact, that I’m writing the notes for my upcoming trial.
It is early May now. Last January I’d taken on the case of a woman arrested for prostitution. She was middle-aged, black, not particularly attractive—in other words, a piece of meat, nothing more, to the five Neanderthal cops on duty at the jail that night.
The woman was released when the morning shift came on. Five cops from the night shift followed her into an alley and gang-raped her for more than an hour. They used everything on her—nightsticks, guns, themselves. When it was over, Lonnie Mae Brown had just enough strength left to check herself into a hospital, before falling unconscious. When she came to, she refused to report the incident to the cops.
She also refused all tests. She was afraid of retaliation—and I couldn’t dismiss her fears. The rape of women in jail has been common in recent times, as has punishment for anyone who talks. Though Lonnie Mae’s rape had occurred outside in an alley, public outrage about renegade cops was high on the totem pole of police reform. The stakes, for the cops, were high. For that reason, if no other, they tried to make the victim look guilty.
A young, black doctor I knew sized up the situation and called me, thinking that, as a lawyer, I might be able to tell Lonnie Mae what her options were.
Not that she had many, so far as I could see. I was there in the hospital when she woke from a sedative, and the first thing she did was shoot up straight into the air, her eyes wide and on the hunt for tormentors, hands flailing at invisible ghosts.
The most I could do for her was to be honest, since she was refusing the rape tests. I told her as gently as possible that without them, there wouldn’t be enough evidence for the Prosecuting Attorney to press charges. I said if she needed to talk, though, to call me.
I fully expected never to hear from her again. But three days later, I did. She had decided to file a complaint, she said. Would I go to the station with her?
I was surprised, and I didn’t think it would do her any good. But I agreed. I picked Lonnie Mae up, and stood by her side while the cop taking her complaint had a chuckle or two over her story. He clearly didn’t believe it. Nor did he like the fact that I’d come in with her.
“Look, Counselor,” he said sarcastically, “if this really happened, how come your client didn’t get tested in the hospital?”
“She’s not my client,” I said sharply. “She’s my friend. You just make sure that complaint gets into the right hands.”
I was so angered by his attitude, I took Lonnie Mae home and sat with her, as she cried and wrung her hands.
“I just never thought it would do any good to have them tests,” she said, over and over.
Privately, I thought she’d been in too much shock to make that decision in the hospital. But it was too late for that now, and all I could do was try to comfort her. She seemed to need to lean on me, despite the fact that she hardly knew me. I felt bad for her, and distressed that I couldn’t do more for her. So I made myself available.
Lonnie Mae’s apartment was comprised of two rooms, a miserable little place in the worst part of town. The halls were filled with bums, crack addicts, pimps and rats. In the living room, on a packing crate that had become an end table, were crumpled, un-framed snapshots of a baby and two toddlers. She had lost touch with them over the years, she said wearily. “Social Services took ’em away long ago, and I ain’t seen ’em since then. I signed the papers, you know, for adoption. I figure that’s best. Ain’t no kind of life, livin’ with me.”
Silently, I agreed with her, but it wasn’t my job to judge her worth as a mother. Something in her defeated tone sparked my anger again, however, and with that, I thought of something I stupidly hadn’t considered before.
“Lonnie Mae,” I asked, “where are the clothes you wore during the rape that night?”
“Oh, they’s in the closet, over there,” she said tiredly. “The hospital put them in a bag.”
“May I see them?”
She nodded, and I crossed over to the closet. Opening it, a whiff of cheap, heavy perfume hit my nostrils, almost gagging me. Beneath it was a scent of sweat, a leftover, I assumed, of long nights on the streets, hustling johns in cars and in broken-down hotels.
There was gold in that closet, though.