On a normal morning it took only twenty minutes to drive over the hill from Magens Bay to the office down on the bay front. Dalton shook his head when he recalled some of the drives he had to make during his first stop out in the hinterlands. This wasn’t totally different than what most federal prosecutors had to do, but in Dalton’s first office, one of the slowest in all of the Department of Justice with one of the lightest caseloads, he often drove hundreds of miles just for arraignments and motions hearings over banal and unimportant issues, through three stoplight towns on one-lane state highways, dotted with the obligatory Sonic Drive-Ins, McDonalds, and Subways inside gas stations.
That first district covered the entire western side of the state, running from the northern to the southern borders, and included thirty-five separate counties. There were only three decent-sized cities — if you could use that word to describe their 20 or 30,000 populations — in the district; the rest of the area was rural. Outside these three relative metropolises, the state was still so sparsely populated that the elected district attorneys were little more than glorified police chiefs, and if something happened in their counties they deemed “big,” they called the Feds about it, always wanting to dump the courtroom work on Dalton or someone else in his office.
In subsequent stops at bigger and busier offices, these types of shenanigans were aggressively and firmly held in check; the bigger offices had neither the time nor the desire to take cases from the state simply because the state was too lazy to do their job. For instance, one of his subsequent offices wouldn’t touch a fraud case unless the loss was over a million dollars and also wouldn’t take certain drug cases unless someone got caught with a load weighing in at several hundred pounds, if not thousands. Cases that fell below these guidelines were all kicked back to the local DAs, whether they liked it or not.
But his first office hadn’t operated that way. There was no screening, only pacification and indulgence. Dalton could never figure out the criminal division chief’s inability to tell the state DAs no.
And therein lay the reason that he would find himself on random Sunday nights in some town that still had an operating federal courthouse when it had long ago ceased needing one, sitting at the small table in a room at the Hampton or Holiday Inn, the very best hotel in town that also gave him the federal government rate, going over his witness and evidence lists and his opening statement, for another low-level trial over some more low-level charges that some local DA’s office didn’t want to deal with.
Dalton chuckled ruefully at the memories. How had it come to that after everything he had accomplished and done in his military career? It was almost as if he were starting his career all over again at the very beginning after he got all of law school, and although he carried the credentials of a line federal prosecutor — an “Assistant United States Attorney,” hired by the presidentially-appointed United States Attorney and appointed himself by the Attorney General of the United States — he still felt like a glorified assistant county district attorney in one of the thirty five rural counties inside his federal district.
And he felt this way not because he was in another random room in another random hotel in another random town, eating another Subway six-inch club on white, going over the aforementioned paperwork. No, he had been there before, on military deployments, on various military bases here and there getting ready for a court-martial, or down at Guantanamo, stuffed into some trailer room or office space where the air conditioning sometimes worked. No, he felt like he did not because he thought he was “too good” for all of that; he felt the way he did because this time, he wasn’t getting ready to prosecute a terrorist. Far from it, as most of his cases in those days were.
This time, he was getting ready to prosecute a guy who someone else in the office had indicted and then dumped, another thing that never happened in any other office Dalton would work in later. The guy was leaving for another job and apparently just didn’t want to deal with the case or the defense attorney, so the crim chief had let the guy drop his pack[1] and then reassigned the case to Dalton. In fact, he had reassigned it to Dalton and another assistant in the office, but that guy had jumped ship a month before trial, telling the crim chief he was “too busy.” And this excuse actually flew.
It was mind-boggling to Dalton. What the original prosecutor who indicted the case and the other new guy had done was flat out unprofessional and lazy actually. It was not how Dalton had come up, and had he ever once told a superior in the military that he was just “too busy” to do his duty, he couldn’t imagine what the reaction would’ve been. It was chickenshit. Why the crim chief tolerated it was a mystery. But there it was. That’s how it always was in that first office.
And so, here Dalton was, ironically, back in the town where his parents had been born and raised, where Dalton as a child had spent so many fun times at both grandparents’ homes, visiting aunts and uncles and playing with his cousins; wonderful memories that time and events could never take away, but which were now, today, simply that: memories. He should’ve been happier about it he mused, but for what reason exactly? That was another time; another era it seemed. His grandparents had long ago passed away. The aunts, uncles, and cousins had moved. No one on either side of the family lived there anymore. His grandparents’ houses in which his parents had been raised weren’t even standing anymore, having been torn down to make way for something bigger and better. The past was literally gone.
A shroud of melancholy engulfed him now as he looked back on it all. All that survived now was a wistful sense of nostalgia, and it slowly faded into the stark reality as he made his way around town, because it just wasn’t the same place anymore. An economically thriving oil and gas boom town when his parents were born and grew up in the 40s and 50s, it was now a shell of its former self, with an aging population that had dropped all the way to about 18,000.
He could’ve simply focused on the great memories of all that he had experienced there before. But that just wasn’t what he was feeling at the moment. No, the night before he was supposed to go into court in the morning and give his opening statement, in the town where all this good had taken place, his main thoughts as he drifted off into what would be a fitful sleep, were, “What am I doing here?”
He got up, completed his morning routine, put on the dark navy monkey suit with the burgundy tie, and left the hotel, headed for the only place in town that served a good cup of coffee. The coffee shop was just around the square from the federal courthouse, and he had plenty of time, so he would take it slowly this morning.
He hated sitting around the courthouse at times like this. He was ready; going over there too early would just get him pulled this way and that by agents, officers, deputy marshals, court clerks, and the like. He sipped the coconut dark roast and perused his email. He was surprised his cell wasn’t blowing up, the agents wondering why he wasn’t over there yet. No doubt the courthouse would be bustling right now as the unlucky sixty folks who had jury duty were assembling. It had never been a good set up and parking was scarce. It was a madhouse on Monday mornings.
He would wait until the last minute on this one because he could afford to. He had the guy on video doing five separate controlled buys with a CI.[2] It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And this was another thing that annoyed Dalton on this sunny, late spring morning; why the hell wouldn’t this guy plead? Maybe it was the defense attorney. One of the guys who had bailed on the case warned him she was reckless and a case of IAC[3] just waiting to happen. Dalton had tried more cases than he could recall at this point and felt no personal need to put another mark on his holster. If a defendant wanted to take responsibility for what he had done, Dalton never stood in the way and usually went to bat for him with the judge to the extent he could.
But it didn’t look like that was going to happen today. Dalton would likely only have a few witnesses and might even finish his case in one day: the DEA case agent, the CI, the guy from the lab who tested the meth, and perhaps a few other law enforcement witnesses to round it out. He just couldn’t figure the defense out; he had the guy dead to rights. It was him, on each of the five videos recorded on a small camera inside the CI’s jacket, handing the CI a little bag filled with a white, crystalline-like substance, and smiling ear to ear when the CI handed over 800 dollars each time. It was also him on the other five videos, taken from the surveillance vehicles to rebut any argument that the CI had next gone somewhere else before he hand-delivered the bags to the lead DEA case agents establishing an airtight chain of custody.
The defendant had no way out. So why was Dalton trying this case? It was the drug task force’s bread and butter, the good old “controlled buy.” Five different times, five separate counts. What was he missing? He sighed, finished the coffee, and left, walking across the square toward the courthouse.
He walked through security and up to the third floor, entering the courtroom. The sixty prospective jurors were almost seated, a few still milling around with bored looks on their faces. He put his bag on the table and started to open his laptop, getting things all set up the way he always did it. The judge’s clerk walked over and started to tell Dalton and the defense counsel the judge would see them now before they went on the record to empanel the jury, but the defense attorney interrupted the clerk. “My client wants to speak with Mr. Dalton first, if we may.” The clerk looked at Dalton. “About what? He’s had plenty of time before now.” The defense attorney continued, “If you’ll just please hear him out.”
They walked out the door through the judge’s chambers, making their greetings and informing the judge that there would be one last minute meeting before they were ready. “Please make it brief,” the judge admonished. “Yes Your Honor,” Dalton replied, as they moved through a hall way that extended around the outside of the courtroom and back to the detention cell, where the defendant stood behind the bars, dressed in his own suit. He looked a lot better than he did on all the videos. But he also looked extremely nervous. The room was full of marshals and other law enforcement officers.
“Can we have some privacy here,” the defense attorney asked. Dalton nodded and asked everyone but one deputy marshal to leave. When everyone had exited, the room contained only Dalton, the defendant, his attorney and the marshal.
“What is it Eric?” Dalton asked, breaking the silence. He had learned long ago that if dropped the formality BS and spoke with people like he knew them, man to man, it broke through a lot of the posturing. “I just don’t understand why I have to do so much time if I plead guilty! I’ve been through this before and nobody ever made me do the time listed on the books. Can’t you do something for me?”
And he was right. Eric had been through this before. But not on the federal level. He had a record all right, but it was all state offenses and nothing that came close to what he had done here. He did have one felony conviction, but it was the lowest one in the state code, and it was for larceny, a non-violent, non-drug offense.
“Yeah, I know Eric. But that was all state stuff and it wasn’t anything like this.”
“But the prosecutor in each case gave me a deal the morning before trial!”
And then it hit Dalton; this guy thought that’s how it operated everywhere. He evidently thought Dalton was going to roll in and give him some kind of sweetheart deal at the very last minute. It was time to deliver some bad news.
“Eric, that might be the way they do it down there on the state level. Who knows? Maybe they’re just too damn busy. Maybe they were afraid to go into the courtroom. Maybe they just didn’t give a shit on that day. I don’t know. But it’s not my fault that you came in here thinking that applied in this case. I don’t give last minute sweetheart deals, and I’m not afraid to go in there and try the case. I already drove all the way down here and the jurors are out there and ready.”
Eric started to interrupt Dalton, but Dalton put up his right hand. “Hold on a minute. I’m not finished. Putting all that aside, this is a different system. I don’t have the discretion to play poker with you and just pull numbers out of the air. All I can do for you is offer you a deal, and if you take it, I’ll ask the court to give you the three points for acceptance of responsibility. That will knock about a year off your sentence, if the judge gives you a guidelines sentence, which I believe she will. But you’re still going to have to do about three years or so. It’s the same deal you would’ve gotten if you had come to me weeks ago, like you should have. The deal doesn’t get any better the longer you wait. That ain’t how it works.”
He seemed to ponder this for a few seconds, then smiled. “You’re just bluffing.”
“I’m just bluffing? Eric, I have you on five different videos from about one foot away handing over methamphetamine to my CI then taking 800 dollars from him and counting it as you smile that shit-eating grin of yours. What was it you say every time? ‘Good doin’ business with you,’ before you get out of the car and slap the roof twice before you walk away. In broad daylight, like you wanted to get caught. You thing these folks out here in the courtroom are going to like you? You think they know people are running around in their town selling this shit for more than they make in a week at their legitimate job? Because there’s a bunch of them out there and I can get at least a few of them on that jury. I don’t know what you’re going to tell them, but they’re not going to buy it. There is nothing in this case sympathetic about you. And when they convict you, you will do all of the time, the entire four or five years. You only get credit if you plead guilty.”
It was now silent in the room as he soaked in these things he evidently hadn’t considered. The smile was gone now. “So what do you want to do? The judge is waiting,” Dalton said.
“Okay, I’ll plead. I’ll take the deal.” He sat down, crumpled into his chair. It gave Dalton no joy. It never gave him any joy. Dalton had never won a jury trial that ever gave him one small measure of joy. Relief sometimes, but never joy.
They informed the judge. The judge sent the jurors home. As Dalton sat silently, Eric admitted his guilt on each count in the indictment and gave the judge a factual basis for each count. She accepted his pleas and pronounced him guilty. The judge scheduled sentencing for two months out. She adjourned court. The marshals cuffed Eric once again and walked him out of the courtroom. He looked over at Dalton and nodded on his way out, not a look of menace, or threat, or respect, or anything other than just plain resignation.
Dalton packed up his things and left the courthouse. He got into his car, drove back to hotel that he had reserved for two more nights, and checked out. It was now nearing lunch time, and although he wasn’t a lunch person, something took shape in his mind.
Where was that old place Mom and Dad used to go to when they were in high school and college? That place on main that has been there forever? Oh yeah. He remembered now. He looked at his watch. If he got over there right now, he might just beat the crowd.
After all, he had a four-hour drive back home. There wasn’t much to choose from if he got hungry on the way, interstates being rare in these parts and backroads the usual route. And one of those classic hamburgers he’d cherished as a kid, a basket of fries, and a large cherry Coke just might start him off right.
[1] In military parlance, dropping your pack means to quit giving your best effort, especially towards the end of a mission, tour, or enlistment. Dropping your pack also means that someone else has to make up for your lack of doing the job.
[2] Confidential Informant. Sometimes called a “CW” or cooperating witness.
[3] Ineffective assistance of counsel.
Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.
