The Trial's Over

Jan 16, 2005

The trial that I was part of as juror number three has come to an end. It began on December 8th of last year and ended this year on Friday, January 14. There was a holdover during the holidays of several weeks and then we continued on January 3rd.

For me this was not an oppressive ordeal although it was certainly long and difficult. Being retired removes from you the discipline that work imposes. It was not an unpleasant task because I wanted to be on a jury in the first place. And that's why I did not postpone it when I received my summons in the mail. Indeed, I found it extremely rewarding. To be sure, one does get tired, day in and day out. It's not a physical tiredness but, rather, emotional exhaustion that sets in. The climax of that fatigue came with the delivery of the verdict. More about that, but later.

This trial was an age-old tale of temptation and greed. The charge was embezzlement, defined as the fraudulent appropriation of funds or property entrusted to your care but actually owned by someone else. In this case a lawyer and her partner were entrusted with a great sum of money, (more than $600,000), by a Kuwaiti family who wanted to shield the money from possible seizure by the Kuwaiti government. The lawyer had represented the family when they immigrated to the United States. But her legal assistance was to no avail. After several years of appeals, the patriarch of the family was deported and then imprisoned in Kuwait. The mother and her five children remained here. The family savings, in a scheme devised by the lawyer and her partner, was to be sheltered by transferring the money from the Kuwaiti account to the lawyer's trust account. From there she set up a corporation that would supposedly invest it, buy a building or buildings and provide for the "present and future care" of the minor children, according to a contract drawn up between the parties.

But to be invisible to possible seizure by the Kuwaiti authorities the corporation was chartered only in the name of the lawyer and her partner. The Kuwaiti and his wife's name appeared nowhere in the listing of the corporation and its accounts. But why not? After all, they trusted their lawyer to proceed in good faith and to defend their interests. After all, she had done yeoman work in trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to prevent her client's deportation. Their faith was misplaced. Trust was nowhere to be found.

Thus began a long and diabolical process of methodically draining the assets of this dummy corporation. First a building was purchased in downtown Brooklyn. A business, an internet cafe, was established in the ground floor. The second floor was rented to a bail bondsman. The third and fourth floors were, on and off, rented to residential tenants. Loans were taken on top of the monies that were in the account, using the very assets as collateral. The defense tried to present this as a "business deal gone bad." And sloppy business is not a crime", they opined.


The trial focused on this building in downtown Brooklyn.

But in the several years that ensued, hardly a penny of the monies was dispensed to this woman and her five children, the rightful owners. I guess the defendants assumed that their client had placed her faith in them, that she spoke not a word of English, that she was all alone, that she feared the authorities, having already done battle with them in her own country and then with new governmental forces upon arriving here. I guess they presumed she would not dare complain or go to the police. Don't assume. Becuase she finally did and the District Attorney brought these charges of grand larceny on which we were being called to ajudicate.

We were very careful to follow the judge's charge to the jury. We bent over backwards to presume innocence. And we were determined to pore through the voluminous documentary evidence - piles of bank statements, copies of checks, contracts, retainers, etc. I'm proud of the way we worked because no one on that jury relished the thought of possibly sending two individuals to prison and ending a person's hard won law career.

The evidence, however, would not leave us (or our presumption of evidence) alone. The paper work was so terribly sloppy or missing altogether that it became increasingly hard to explain it as "bad business" practices. Loans were taken when they were not needed and the money so-gained was spent away as well. The defendants, themselves, moved into one of the apartments in the purchased building and lived their rent free for years! Even while the Kuwaiti woman and her five children, the genuine owners of the property, were left unattended to fend for themselves. Examining the bank records, we saw countless debit transactions that were made for several trips to Europe, Las Vegas, the Carolinas and Atlantic City. There were many purchases that were made for restaurant meals, men's clothing, toys and many other items that had nothing to do with running the business that had been set up. Checks in ten and fifteen thousand dollar denominations were written by the defendants to the defendants.

The jury got angrier and angrier as this evidence was pored through and the truth became clearer and clearer that this was not sloppy business but, more properly, monkey business. The utter lack of concern for their clients, their treatment of the arrangement they had devised, as the D.A. put it, as a "money printing machine" ... all of this slowly but inevitably pushed us jurors to finally, after two long days of deliberation, deliver a unanimous verdict of guilty.

I was struck by the democratic aspect of being a juror. Perhaps there is no other institution in our society and government that is quite as democratic as the jury system. (It hasn't always been that way; witness the lily-white juries of the South, which, for years, were rigged against African-American citizens). That was a great advance in human civilization when society freed itself from the whims of the ruling establishment and decided that you are to be judged by a jury of twelve of your peers. Of course, I'm not naive to believe that there are still not gross inequalities in the system of justice in our country. This regards the ability of wealth to buy the most skillfull and persuasive lawyers, class and racial bias in the way laws are written and enforced, etc. But I still believe that the jury system is fundamentally a democratic and progressive aspect that must be preserved. And sitting upon a jury would serve to reinforce that feeling. I urge my friends and BLOGgards not to hesitate if the opportunity comes their way.

The jury I sat on was a microcosm of Brooklyn. There were men and women, Black, Latino and white. Poor and not-so-poor. Educated and not. We worked together as a cohesive group. There was no animosity or elitism. But there certainly was a wonderful bonding as we hammered out a verdict. And we all acknowledged, sadly, the difficulty of entering a guilty plea. This was evidenced by the demeanor of the forewoman, a Black woman, who stood to announce our decision. The moment was filled with electricity as she stood and faced the judge to pronounce, in a trembling voice, the defendants guilty. Should she look at the defendants or avert her eyes? Each and everyone of us had to make the same decision as the individual jurors were polled. It's not an easy moment.

We were all very impressed with the judge who treated the jury throughout the trial with great respect and deference. On the wall behind the jury box was a photo of Paul Robeson. On the back wall of the courtroom, a print of striking coal miners. This was a guy with a social conscience, I thought to myself. And he conducted the trial in a like manor. Over and over he stressed to us that we were to consider the defendants innocent until the very end when we would deliberate. He spoke to us about the history of that concept and how it stands at the bedrock of our democracy.

So the trial is over. I don't know what the sentence is for the charge involved but it probably involves a prison sentence. What motivated this young lawyer, whose earlier years were filled with idealistic and altruistic activities (she defended the People's Firehouse (a protest to the closing of firehouses in poor neighborhoods in Brooklyn), worked on cases defending immigrants' rights and homeless, etc.) to mire herself in this web of deceit? How could she turn her back on her client, on a woman and a family that needed her help and, instead, descend into the murky depths of greed and thievery? I had been impressed by her testimony. Sometimes you have a gut impression abut a person and I did with this defendant. She was appealing to me. I liked her manner and the way she spoke (softly). I admired her history and, being a Black, woman lawyer also spoke volumes: here was a woman who had to fight and struggle to become a lawyer. And somehow, it seems, she stumbled, succumbed to temptation and now, so sadly, has thrown it all away. (I subsequently learned that she had been disbarred from practicing law in New York). What a tragic ending.