“What time does it begin?”
“Nine.”
“Then there’s plenty of time. Stop looking at your watch every half minute.”
Around the house a frigid gale shook the windows. A wood fire burned on the hearth. Chisum measured out cognac and passed the goblets around; then he led the way into his parlor and seated Irene in an easy chair facing the television set. It was an antique console, a bulky block of walnut with a small screen set into it and a pair of tarnished rabbit ears perched on top.
Irene made a gesture toward Paul, lifting her glass an inch; he warmed to her private signals—he nodded and smiled before he tasted the brandy.
Chisum eased himself slowly into a wooden rocker. “How many did you have to turn loose this week?”
She was very dry: “It was a short week. We only inflicted half the usual dose on the public.”
“Something’s got your dander up, my dear.”
“Gehler sentenced one of my prosecutions to a six-months suspended. The man’s got an incredible record—he’s been up the river as many times as an anxious salmon, and this was an open-and-shut burglary. Red handed. But Gehler let him off with an SS.”
“It’s one of the things we’ve got to do, isn’t it?” Chisum said. “Take the discretionary power to set sentences out of the hands of the judges. It’s no good having one judge who regards robberies by poor people as legitimate readjustments of economic inequities, while another judge treats every crime as a grave threat to the stability of the society. To the one, any sentence is too heavy; to the other, most sentences are too light. How can we expect anything like ‘equal justice for all’ under those circumstances?”
The fire made a good smell. Paul relaxed on the leather couch: it was old leather, deep red gone almost black, the crow’s-feet of age creased into it. An office couch—likely it had come out of the professor’s law office when he’d retired. Chisum had run a vigorous criminal practice, he’d learned, before turning to writing and teaching. He’d been a prominent defense attorney for several years. Paul had been keenly surprised by that revelation. Now Chisum glanced at him and resumed the subject:
“You’re still baffled, aren’t you.”
“I confess I am. You don’t make noises like a civil libertarian.”
“I’m not. I believe in discipline. It’s the mortar that holds society together. Without discipline there’s chaos.” He smiled gently at Irene. “There was a time when this young lady thought me a fascist.”
Paul said, “How do you reconcile that with your record as a criminal lawyer?”
“Easily. I believe that for all its grievous faults, there’s no better juridical system than the adversary process where both sides are allowed to present their cases with the greatest vigor. There are dangers in it—chiefly the danger that the better of the two lawyers may win the case regardless of its justice—but in spite of those risks, I don’t know of any system in all history that’s proved better. If a fact is in dispute, you can only arrive at the truth by a vigorous examination of both sides of the story. That’s what our system was designed to do, and when it works properly it’s a splendid example of human achievement.”
“When it works properly,” Irene echoed, not without sarcasm.
“Every case brought before a criminal court deserves an intense prosecution,” Chisum said. “But it also deserves the best possible defense. Defense attorneys, after all, are officers of the court, the same as prosecutors and judges. They’re all components of one system, and the purpose of that system is to arrive at the truth of each case. If you don’t have first-rate defense lawyers you may as well not have a trial at all.”
“Forgive me if I’m impertinent,” Paul said, “but that sounds to me a lot like the kind of rationalization you hear from big-time shysters when they try to explain away the fact that they’re on some mobster’s payroll.”
“The argument’s a valid one, no matter who uses it in his own defense,” Chisum said. “It breaks down, of course, in cases where the mobster’s lawyer is himself a member of the mob and a party to its illegal acts. That kind of syndicate mouthpiece is common enough, I’m afraid, but his existence shouldn’t be used to try and discredit the whole fraternity.”
The old man began to move back and forth in the rocker. “Adversary law is workable, we’ve proved that. The trouble today is that it doesn’t apply in too many cases. The system to which we lawyers pledge our allegiance has become a shabby fiction. Most cases are decided by plea-bargaining, not by any genuine attempt to arrive at the truth. The guilty benefit while the innocent suffer, because a man who’s truly innocent is less likely to be willing to plead guilty to a reduced charge, while a guilty man is eager to do so. No, the problem we have in our courts isn’t the influence of defense lawyers. It’s the wholesale breakdown of the adversary system. What we need is a restoration of the adversary process, not a further erosion of it.”
“That means an enormous expansion of the system,” Paul said. “You’d have to quadruple the number of courts and judges just to begin carrying the load. I’d like to see it happen, but who’s going to pay for it?”
“We could afford it,” Chisum said. “That’s one of the points I’m trying to make in my book. Actually we’d save money, in the long run.”
“How?”
“By reducing the cost society pays for crime. If we can restore our legal structure to the point where it makes the risks of criminal behavior much greater, we’ll see a big reduction in crime. In the long run we should be able to reduce the size of the legal bureaucracy, but even before that happens we’ll save enormous sums simply by the fact that fewer crimes will be committed and less money will be lost. Not to mention the reduction in human suffering. To build the legal and penal structure up to the necessary size will require a considerable initial outlay of money, but that expense will be recouped very quickly.”
“Then what prevents us from doing it?”
“Politics, of course.”
Irene shot bolt upright in her chair. “My program!” She rushed across to the console. “How do you turn this damn thing on?”
“The left-hand knob. No, the one below the screen on the left…”
“I’ve got it.”
“Your watch is fast, my dear. It’s not nine yet.”
Paul heard a faint high-pitched whistle; at first he thought his ears were ringing. A dot of light appeared in the center of the screen; it became a tiny picture which slowly expanded into a wavering grey image of a newscaster speaking into the camera, reading his lines off a TelePrompter above the lens. The image lacked stability and the center of the newsman’s face kept slipping out to one side, distorting him like a funny-mirror in an amusement park. Gradually the sound system warmed up and the announcer’s voice became audible in mid-sentence:
“… up again for the month of November, according to figures released today in Washington. Wholesale prices increased another one and a half per cent, raising the index to thirteen percentage points above where it was a year ago at the same time. And finally, in local news, there was tragedy tonight in a West Side bakery when police responded to an alarm and found the owner and two saleswomen shot to death and a third saleswoman shot and wounded. According to the injured woman, who is listed in satisfactory condition in County Hospital, two armed men entered the bakery this afternoon and allegedly demanded all the money in the place. The owner of the bakery, Charles Liddell, allegedly drew a pistol from his belt and fired a shot at the intruders. The two robbers then allegedly opened fire at everything that moved, killing Liddell and two of his three employees, and injuring Mrs. Deborah Weinberg with two bullets in the hip and chest. The robbery suspects then fled on foot, and no money was taken. Mrs. Weinberg is reported as saying that Mr. Liddell had started carrying the pistol in his belt after hearing about the Chicago vigilante on radio news. And now, tonight’s forecast calls for snow continuing into morning with possible accumulations of up to six inches…”