Part Two
19
There were Superior Court judges Hardy liked a lot, and a very few that he’d prefer to avoid if at all possible, but only one he actively despised, and that was Marian Braun.
The history between the two of them was so extreme that it included a contempt violation and actual jail time for Hardy’s wife. He honestly believed that he might prevail on appeal, should it come to that, if he argued that Braun should have recused herself when she discovered that Hardy was going to be defending a murder suspect in her courtroom. Of course, the flip side of that was that if Hardy was worried about the impossibility of getting a fair trial from Braun, he could have exercised his 170.6.
That section of the California Code said that any lawyer assigned to trial could excuse one, but only one, judge, without giving any specific reason. The lawyer was sworn and simply declared under oath that he believed the judge to whom he’d been assigned was prejudiced against himself or the interests of his client to the point he thought he couldn’t get a fair trial.
That was it-no hearing, no evidence. The declaration itself caused the judge to be removed forever from the case. And challenges were reported to the judicial council. Obviously, a judge with too many challenges acquired the unfavorable attention of that supervisory body.
But the move had its price.
First, the courts hated challenges. They not only dinged one of their colleagues, however deservedly, but screwed up the scheduling for everyone else, because another judge had to take the case, and someone had to take their cases, and so on. And even if the judges personally despised the object of the challenge, they despised more the hubris of a mere lawyer who dared to suggest that one of their own tribe might not be fair.
So if Hardy exercised a challenge, he would likely immediately find himself in the courtroom of the most antidefense judge that the presiding judge could find available, and that judge would have an additional motive to make Hardy’s life as miserable as he or she possibly could. Hardy knew he challenged at his peril.
So Hardy elected to roll the dice with Braun. Call him superstitious or crazy-he’d also pulled Braun for his last murder trial, nearly four years before. She hadn’t liked him any better then, nor he her. And that trial had never been given over to the jury because a key prosecution witness had changed his testimony at the eleventh hour. Nevertheless, Hardy’s client had walked out a free woman, Braun or no Braun. He’d already proven that he could win in her courtroom, and if he could do it once, he could pull it off again.
Now, as he sat in Department 25 on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, waiting for his client’s appearance in the courtroom, Hardy found himself marveling anew at the thought that they were about to begin a full-blown murder trial. He felt vaguely responsible and not-so-vaguely incompetent that things had come to this point. Surely a better lawyer could have closed the case after the PX-the preliminary hearing-which they’d had a little over four months ago, within two weeks of Maya’s arrest.
At the end of that fiasco, Maya had been held to answer. In Superior Court he’d filed the pro forma 995, which called for the dismissal of the two first-degree murder charges against Maya on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to present even probable cause to suggest she’d committed these crimes.
Hardy had even permitted himself a flicker of optimism. There might have been technically enough evidence to justify a trial, but surely the court had to see the same weaknesses in the evidence that he himself saw. That was why Hardy had demanded, as Maya had a right to do, that the prelim take place within ten court days of her arrest. He had felt that on the evidence, he might win, and in any event, the case wasn’t going to get any better for the defense. But now, here he was in Braun’s court.
He’d been wrong.
The other, political, reason that he’d pressed for the speedy PX was that Maya’s arrest had set off a news frenzy in the city that Hardy thought could only get worse over time, and in this he was right. The secret grand jury investigation that Jerry Glass was conducting on the U.S.-attorney front, along with the public threats of forfeiture of the properties of one of the town’s major development and political families, had by now neatly dovetailed into a narrative that had captured the public’s imagination, as Hardy had suspected it would.
Knowing that the body politic of San Francisco in general, and probable members of jury pools specifically, tended to have little sympathy and lots of hostility and envy for the two aligned, and-in the public eye, generally malignant-classes of developers and politicians, Hardy had wanted to hurry up with a jury trial before every single person in San Francisco had been so exposed to innuendo, insinuation, and the venom of the press that they had all long since made up their minds. Juries didn’t always return verdicts based on the facts; sometimes they voted their prejudices. So, given the dearth of evidence for the actual murders, he’d believed back in October that a quick defense was his best chance to free his client and cut short the debate about the kinds of people the Townshends and other developers and power brokers must be.
And now, in late February, here they were, with Braun presiding, about to begin exactly what he’d strategized and labored to avoid and yet called down upon himself. He had demanded a speedy trial, and now he was going to get it.
Even moving as quickly as he could, he couldn’t avoid the collateral damage that continued to wreak its havoc on the extended Fisk/ Townshend/West families-Harlen’s, Maya’s, and the mayor, Kathy West’s. It appeared that the U.S. attorney’s power to subpoena-particularly financial records-in capable hands like those of Jerry Glass could be a blunt weapon indeed.
By the time the preliminary hearing had begun, Glass had barely had time to look into the Bay Beans West bookkeeping, much less Joel Townshend’s wider business affairs, and how, if at all, they might relate to one another. But since the marijuana connection with Dylan Vogler was intimately connected with BBW, and this was needed by the State to establish a purported motive for Maya to have killed him, Glass and his conduit Debra Schiff had obviously been supplying the prosecution with whatever they could in terms of questionable financial dealings between the coffee shop and the Townshend household.
This hadn’t hurt anyone too badly during the preliminary hearing-although the money laundering possibility had apparently been part of the court’s decision that a jury should weigh the evidence and reach its own conclusions in Maya’s case-but over the past months, and especially in the past couple of weeks, Glass’s investigators and accountants had finally unearthed what appeared to be a treasure trove of sophisticated financial relationships and arrangements that now appeared to implicate Townshend, Harlen, Kathy West, and some other large players in at the very least questionable, if not to say unethical or illegal, conduct.
Potential kickbacks, preferential treatment, undocumented meetings about matters of public interest in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance.
Very little, if any, of this had been proven yet, except that Glass had succeeded in crippling BBW, and the government was preliminarily close to attaching the entire building as the probable proceeds from a drug operation, although the place itself was still open day to day. Because Maya had a Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions in the forfeiture proceeding while her criminal case was pending, any final decision was on hold for now, but the questions alone raised a spectre of criminality over Maya and everything she touched.
The BBW accounts were incredibly sloppy. As just one example, Maya had cut Vogler a check from her own personal checking account for $6,000 for emergency repairs from water damage in July and another personal check for a half month’s pay, $3,750, last March. There was no record he had ever given her back the money. There was at least $30,000 worth of checks from Vogler to Maya over the past two years with no explanation at all in their records. The only question seemed to be what precise illegality was being funded by the operation.