He had been pacing around the office, delivering his peroration to a jury he hadn't even assembled yet. Now he went behind his desk and sat down, laced his fingers together, and assumed a fatherly mien. Billy Flynn affected an older appearance, with a receding hairline and gray around the temples. Probably another jury thing. He had an Adolphe Menjou moustache, and a warm, husky voice. You liked this man, almost instantly.
"Let me give you the Billy Flynn extremely short course in the Law, Sparky. After the Invasion, the dominant legal form was based on the English system of jurisprudence. People erroneously assume this system is involved in dispensing justice. It is not. It is interested solely in providing fairness, in conducting all its affairs by a set of rules. You know what those rules are and you play by them, and you win some, and you lose some. The system is largely weighted in favor of the accused. This results in oddities such as 'admissible evidence.' According to the law, how evidence is gathered is more important than its actual probative value. In other words, if the police don't play by the rules, you go free. No matter what you've done, no matter how compelling the evidence. Case dismissed. This obvious insanity is tolerated because of the 'rules.'
"Or take prejudicial testimony. If you've been convicted of ninety robberies, and are accused of a ninety-first, with exactly the same modus operandi, those prior convictions cannot be put in evidence against you. It might 'prejudice' the jury.
"The upshot is, the English system of law is by far the way to go if you are guilty.
"Of course, in recent years, another type of law has been tried...."
I could listen to the man talk all day. His arguments at the bail hearing alone were worth every penny of his outlandish fee. When he was done, even I was almost convinced I wasn't a flight risk—a man who had fled the jurisdiction and been on the run for seventy years, who had no money, no roots in the community, and absolutely nothing to lose by jumping bail... and who had in fact spent the last twenty-four hours thinking of nothing but the best way out of town if bail were granted. But in the end I would not have released me on my own recognizance, and the judge didn't, either.
At one point I told Billy Flynn he could have been a great actor.
"I am a great actor," he replied.
But he was a bit long-winded, and I wasn't taking notes. Besides, half of the power of his words were in the delivery, something every actor understands. So while I thoroughly enjoyed the two-hour diatribe he had introduced as an extremely short course in the law, I won't try to set it down here. He had much more to say about the traditional, English system. And much to say about the new system.
For there were other ways.
Even in English common law one often had the option of being tried by a judge or a jury. Trial by a wise and/or impartial judge had been the method used by many cultures before the Invasion. It often worked well. Then there was trial by a council of elders, or by an entire community. Always, there was The Law behind such systems, sometimes called "custom," sometimes written down and sometimes not. There were referees, arbitrators, mediators of all sorts. All these systems had strengths and weaknesses.
People had always aspired to more than the traditional system of law could offer. Billy was right: the law was an ass. And a big reason was, legislators are forced by the nature of codified rules to try to anticipate every situation that can arise in human affairs. This is plainly impossible. And, recognizing the imperfectibility of human affairs, the law had to give a big edge to the accused if it was to avoid injustice to the innocent. Both of these things resulted in injustices, even travesties of the law. Couldn't there be a better way? The system of a wise and impartial judge seemed to offer the best option for making the law more nearly just. And, yes, for trying to do something the English legal system did not even attempt: finding the truth, so far as that concept could be said to really exist. In criminal matters, was it possible to attempt a determination of what really happened, as opposed to what the admissible evidence and unreliable and biased eyewitness testimony tended to indicate might have happened?
Well, very little could ever be proved one hundred percent true. But likelihood could be determined to a very high degree of probability, and we had a machine that was very good at just that sort of thing. The Lunar Central Computer.
Oh, my, how the lawyers did howl when it was suggested! The basic proposal had been around for over a century when it was finally agreed, over loud objections from the bar, to give a new system a twenty-year optional tryout. After twenty years submit it to the voters. We were currently fifteen years into the experiment, and still the only planet with a dual legal system. But Luna was being watched intensely by every other planet in the system with an elected government, who all knew a politically popular thing when they saw it.
People liked the new system. It seemed to work better. Officially it was called the Juridical Protocols Test. Professionals in the law usually called it the Judge. The public, after a few years, referred to it as the Court of Common Sense.
This was the system upon whose tender mercies I was throwing myself. Why? Many reasons I needn't explore, and one I can't completely explain. My first visitor, after my initial consultation with Billy Flynn, was Hildy Johnson, and she had this to say:
"Sparky, I know what your high-priced mouthpiece just told you. I'd like to give you a bit of advice that will cost you a lot less. Go before the Judge. You won't regret it. And I guarantee that."
I was about to say Hildy Johnson never lied to me, but of course the first words out of her mouth when we met were a lie. But we had become quite good friends, way back when, and she had never betrayed me. Even when it would have been to her professional advantage to do so. So the Judge it would be.
I'd have been a lot more confident of my chances if I didn't keep remembering that the Lunar CC had, not long before, suffered a planetary nervous breakdown.
Everything about the Juridical Protocols Test was different.
All trials were televised, even if no one tuned in. Most were dull enough so that a tiny room, a table, and half a dozen chairs were sufficient. But in higher profile cases larger halls were available.
The case of Luna v. Kenneth Valentine was held in the largest JPT courtroom, which could accommodate five hundred. It was an instant sellout, with seats at ringside being scalped for over a thousand dollars. The room itself was unremarkable, nothing more than a big barn with maroon velvet drapes against the walls, uninspired lighting, gray carpet, and more maroon in the upholstery. This operation was badly in need of a set designer.
Close to one wall was a big round table with low-backed chairs on casters, enough to seat twenty people. On that wall was hung a twenty-foot television screen. The table was wood-grain Formica. A few feet behind it was a low U-shaped barrier (the bar?) and behind that concentric rows of seats, steeply raked to give everyone a view. It was like an operating theater from an old movie, or a college lecture room: Freshman Introductory Law 101. One aisle came down the center to the only break in the barrier. Witnesses testifying in person would enter through that break.
The prosecutors sat directly across the table from me, my defense team, the clutter of paper and briefcases and computerpads they had made around their places, and Toby.