Black's Law: A Criminal Lawyer Reveals His Defense Strategies in Four Cliffhanger Cases - Softcover

Black, Roy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684863065 ISBN 13: 9780684863061

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

In Black's Law, one of America's toughest and shrewdest criminal defense lawyers shows us the life-and-death struggles that occur every day in our criminal courts. This book takes us behind the scenes of four difficult and dangerous cases to reveal the legal strategies, no-holds-barred tactics, and courtroom psychology Roy Black used to make sure his clients received every protection promised by the law.
Black demonstrates in riveting detail how a defense attorney must investigate criminal cases by sifting through evidence and preparing for trial. (It's like preparing for war.) He shows us how the principles of law, cross-examination, and evidence -- as well as careful jury selection and skillful use of expert witnesses -- can level the playing field to counter the enormous resources that state and federal prosecutors have at their disposal.
Black's Law makes resoundingly clear the crucial role that criminal defense lawyers play in safeguarding the basic right to a fair trial for all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roy Black is one of America's most famous and respected criminal defense lawyers. A former public defender and a professor at the University of Miami Law School, he appears frequently on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and CNN. He lives in Miami, Florida.

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From Chapter One: Alvarez

December 28, 1982. The trigger engaged the hammer, pushing the firing pin into the base of the cartridge. The ensuing explosion blew the 158-grain, pure-lead hollow-point bullet out of the barrel at 950 feet per second, mushrooming as it punched into the bony forehead. I was fifteen miles away enjoying a plate of jumbo stone crabs dipped in mustard, with a side of hash browns, at Joe's in South Beach. The riot broke out as I was digging into one of Joe's celebrated key lime pies.

Fifteen minutes later I drove my elderly Mercedes 190 north on Alton Road, past the Miami Beach marina, and on to MacArthur Causeway. The concrete parkway rises over Biscayne Bay, then slices into the heart of downtown Miami. To my left was the vast port of Miami, a steel-and-glass island city, with sleek white cruise ships docked end to end along a two-mile-long wharf. To my right were the celebrity mansions of Star Island and, next door on Palm Island, the fortified mansion Al Capone lounged in during the St. Valentine's Day massacre.

I rode past Watson Island and on to the labyrinth of expressways, raised on tall concrete columns, that bridges drivers safely over crime-infested streets and the crumbling housing projects of Miami's oldest black ghetto, Overtown. The transportation system was an expensive conspiracy to shield our eyes from unsightly poverty and disease in one of the world's richest playgrounds.

I was reminded of what lay below when I saw the Twelfth Avenue exit ramp blocked by police cars, blue-and-red lights flashing. I turned on the radio to WIOD 610, an all-night news station. "A cop just shot a black youth in a video arcade on Third Avenue," a street reporter yelled. "Police cars are rushing to the scene." A mob was bombing passing cars with rocks and bottles. Police cars and garbage dumpsters had been set on fire. Snipers were reported to be shooting at cars on the expressway. The frantic reporter warned drivers to stay out of the central city. I had just passed within a few yards of the arcade. Too close for comfort.

The rioting lasted three days. Two persons died. Another twenty-five, including two police officers, were injured. Property damage was in the millions. The networks showed helmeted riot police with plastic shields and batons battling rock-throwing black youths and looters toting television sets and cases of beer and groceries out of broken storefront windows against a backdrop of bright yellow fires and columns of black smoke.

Civic leaders were particularly disturbed because the shooting occurred three days before the Orange Bowl festival, Miami's premier tourist attraction. Extra security had to be brought in for the Orange Bowl parade and the football game, both sited near the edge of Overtown. Commentators gave breathless, detailed descriptions of the riots before a national television audience. The "Magic City," as the tourism people like to call it, was back in the news.

Most of the city's leaders thought there was only one way to get rid of the problem: Blame Luis Alvarez, the young police officer who had shot the youth. Carrie Meek, then a state legislator, now a congresswoman, insisted that "justice be served" by convicting Alvarez and threatened that if it were not the city would burn. Five official agencies -- the Miami Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Dade County State Attorney's Office, the Miami city manager's office and something called the Community Relations Board -- held press conferences to announce that they were starting investigations. The elected officials of the Miami City Commission promised there would be "no whitewash" of its own investigation. An associate U.S. attorney general in Washington said that the federal government wanted to see if there had been "a deprivation of civil rights" of Nevell Johnson Jr., the twenty-year-old who had died twenty-four hours after being shot.

If anyone had doubts about who was victim and who was villain, they could turn to The Miami Herald, which featured side-by-side stories of the two main participants. The one about Nevell Johnson was topped by this headline: "Victim had good job record, respect of his co-workers, love of his family." Alvarez was portrayed less sympathetically: "Record of Officer who shot Johnson includes five departmental probes."

Johnson's story described a model citizen who worked as a courier at a county agency. His co-workers adored him. The story claimed he had no police record and was never a bother to anyone. "All our boys," Nevell Johnson Sr. said, "we raised them right. They're not bad boys."

Alvarez was portrayed by the Herald as a hot-tempered officer with an internal affairs file packed with citizen complaints. In this and subsequent stories, he was described as a macho cowboy. On the night of the shooting, police officials claimed, he had left his patrol zone without permission to roust the arcade. Eyewitnesses insisted he had stormed into the arcade cocking his gun. TV news shows starred Overtown residents describing Alvarez as throwing down a Saturday night special near Johnson's hand after the shooting, to make it look as if the youth had lost a shoot-out.

These stories and the opinion pieces that followed made out Alvarez as guilty. I remember thinking that if this cop thought the shoot-out was bad, just wait for the backlash from an establishment desperate to keep racial peace. Several days later Ron Cohen, a former student of mine who had become counsel to the Fraternal Order of Police, called and told me it was only a matter of time before Alvarez was indicted. Did I have the balls to take on his defense?

Without a second thought I said send him over. But as soon as I hung up, I felt a frisson of doubt. The local press smelled blood, and wouldn't turn its nose up at mine. One miscalculation, gleefully emblazoned on every TV show and in the Herald, and my fledgling career was history. Clients didn't stand in line to hire the lawyer who blew the biggest case of the year. Still, I had agreed to see him, so I did, late the next morning.

He was a handsome guy, with a sharply clipped Latino-style moustache. He had pale skin, curiously untanned for a cop, framed by black hair. He had sharp, suspicious eyes that perhaps had seen too many nights in a police cruiser. He was slim, too -- not one of those macho bodybuilder cops on steroids. He stood still as he scanned my office, which, as usual, was cluttered with shelves stuffed with books, a desk piled with unopened mail and old newspapers. It looked more like a used-book store than the cool minimalist office suites of the grand corporate law firms.

The way his eyes moved I could see he was tightly wound. But there was a dignity in his erect bearing, and I sensed a certain solidity in his demeanor that indicated, even as tense as he was, that he had an inner confidence that might carry him through the even more intense pressure that lay ahead.

I also sensed a wariness. Why should he open up and trust me? I wondered. I had just left the Public Defender's Office, where the street cops saw us as their sworn enemies, the hated opposition who put the scum back on the street.

To break the ice, I asked him how he was holding up. Sinking into a chair, he expressed shock that the police department had succumbed to political pressure. His bosses had yanked him from street patrol and put him behind a desk, doing nothing, making him look more guilty. "How can they abandon me? That man tried to kill me. When a young punk goes for his gun, the last thing I'm thinking about is his color."

Luis thought the media, particularly The Miami Herald, was generating all the hatred against him. "These stories are all garbage," he complained. "There isn't anything in them that's true." The newspaper was treating him like a mobster. For...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684863065
• ISBN 13: 9780684863061
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande