Gene Grassley looked at the note and shook his head.
Floyd Warren started to get to his feet and the two court officers standing behind him stepped forward to hold him in place. "Judge Lamont. Yo, Judge."
Lamont banged his gavel. "Stay seated, Mr. Warren. Tell Mr. Grassley what you want to say. It's really not appropriate, nor is it smart, for you to speak directly to me."
Grassley slipped into his seat and tried to calm his client.
Floyd Warren wasn't interested. "Judge, what about my statues?"
"I'm warning you, Mr. Warren. Speak through your lawyer."
"Don't you have no damn statues in this state?" He held up the piece of paper he'd just written on. "Statues of limitation?"
"Statutes? You mean statutes?"
"Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Statues."
The court officers were trying to keep Warren in place by holding on to his broad, powerful shoulders. They were waiting for a signal from the judge to use more force.
"Hasn't Mr. Grassley explained this to you?"
"He hasn't 'splained nothing to me. I got rights, don't I?"
"Of course I've told him," Grassley said, as the court officers shoved him aside so they could keep their hands on the defendant.
Lamont banged his gavel again. "Shut up, Mr. Warren. This isn't going to be a free-for-all in front of the jury. Not in my courtroom, I can promise you that. Handcuffs and leg irons come next."
There was a momentary silence and the officers let Floyd Warren settle back in his chair. His face was rounder now than in the mug shot taken at the time of his arrest so many years ago, and his dark skin wrinkled. He seemed to like being the center of attention.
Just as quiet resumed, the doors opened again and a third young man stepped inside, scoped the situation, and joined the others in the rows behind my seat. All three were wearing bright yellow T-shirts.
"Perhaps, Judge, you can repeat for Mr. Warren what I've already brought to his attention several times."
"I'd be happy to, Mr. Grassley." Lamont checked with the reporter to make sure this would all be part of the official record. "In New York State, until quite recently, there was a statute of limitations on rape cases, just as there are for all other violent felonies, with the exception of murder."
"I didn't kill nobody," Warren said, in a stage whisper meant for all of us to hear. He picked his teeth with the tip of his lead pencil.
"Because of the advances in DNA technology-the certainty of that science-many state legislatures have eliminated those five-year statutes. The district attorney is now able to bring charges on sexual assaults that occurred yesterday, even if they aren't solved for another fifty years.
"But that's a new law, Mr. Warren. That wouldn't apply to your old case. The sole reason Ms. Cooper is able to go forward now is because of your own actions. You kept this case alive all by yourself, all this time, by jumping bail and fleeing the jurisdiction."
Even if a second jury had convicted Floyd Warren three decades earlier, the sentences imposed on rapists were so light then that most were released to parole within five to ten years. The recidivism rate- the rate at which they repeated their offenses, often using exactly the same modus operandi-was staggering.
Lamont stopped speaking as the doors opened and swung shut again. I turned my head and saw two more young men, both yellowshirted, walk in and take seats with the others. The judge removed his glasses and looked at me quizzically. I realized these kids must not have been there to see him, and I shrugged my shoulders.
I looked back once more. There was something written on the front of the T-shirts, but the five solemn onlookers were sitting with arms crossed over their chests and I couldn't make out the words.
Lamont went on. "The statute was tolled by your very-"
"Told what?" Warren mumbled. "Nobody told me nothing."
Lamont pretended he hadn't heard the belligerent prisoner. He wagged a finger in Warren's direction. "The effect of the statute was suspended by your flight. That's what has kept the case alive."
It had been dead in the water for thirty-five years, until the day a few months earlier when Floyd Warren, aka Howard Rovers, stopped at a dealer's outside of town to buy a shotgun. Confident that he had eluded law enforcement for over three decades, he submitted his fingerprints for the application. When he returned to make the purchase, the local police were waiting. The New York warrant for bail jump had appeared as a match in the automated fingerprint system when Warren's background check was run. After the NYPD's Special Victims Unit was notified, Mercer Wallace asked me to dig through the archives to find the old trial folder, in hopes that some evidence still existed to send to the lab for DNA analysis. A crumpled pair of cotton underpants gave us our break.
"Ms. Cooper, Mr. Grassley-are you clear with the rest of my rulings?"
"Yes, Your Honor," I answered aloud, and Gene Grassley nodded.
"And I want the record to reflect," Lamont said, standing so that he could gesture with both arms, expressing the enormity of his outrage, "that I consider it shameful, a morally offensive blot on the legal history of this state that I am obliged by the Constitution to take this woman's testimony according to the laws of 1973."
"Objection, Your Honor," Grassley said. "Most respectfully, I don't think-"
"Save that nonsense for the jury. I'll say what I damn well please when they're not here. I was practicing law back then, Gene. You understand that when a stranger climbed through the window of your home and held a knife or a gun against the body of-of your mother or your sister or your wife, that woman, no matter how saintly she might have been, couldn't go to court unless she could prove she had struggled against her attacker, even when he threatened to shoot or to stab her? There had to be independent proof of who this animal was? That the testimony of every raped woman was deemed incompetent as a matter of law?"
"Judge, my client-"
"All that changed, as you both know, in the mid-1970s, before either one of you came to the bar. Yet I'm bound by those rules today. How foolish is that?" Lamont asked, tapping his gavel lightly against the copy of the penal law on his desk. "More than thirty years have gone by, the legislature finally caught up with reality, but I'm forced to make my rulings based on what the laws were when this attack took place. And I must say that is really a disgrace."
I couldn't tell whether Alton Lamont was truly outraged or not, as he placed his right hand over his heart and patted his chest several times. But I knew this statement would read well on his campaign materials when he stood for reelection in another year.
"Ms. Cooper, does your witness realize that I have no choice but to follow the old law?" He looked at the name in the indictment. "Miss Hastings, is she set to go?"
"Yes, she is, Judge. She understands." I didn't need to add that she was terrified at the thought of being in a courtroom with her rapist again. I didn't need to allow Floyd Warren to gloat with pleasure at the prospect of subjecting this woman to the same humiliating ordeal she had undergone a lifetime ago.
"Then we're good for tomorrow morning at eleven? That gives you time to settle in with Ms. Hastings first thing."
The judge knew that Kerry Hastings had flown in twice from her home on the West Coast to meet with Mercer Wallace and me. The first time, after so many years of silence had led her to assume the case would never be solved, was to give her own saliva for the DNA analysis of her clothing and bed linens. The second was for our initial preparation for trial.
"That leaves just the rape shield issue, Judge," I said.
Lamont cupped his hand to his ear again. "Didn't catch that, Alex."
As soon as I spoke, the five men in T-shirts had started to cough. Fake, exaggerated coughs that were loud and disruptive. I tried to ignore them.