Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [54]
JAMES STUEHRINGER, a gregarious midwesterner with a head full of carefully barbered salt-and-pepper hair, practices civil and criminal law at one of the larger firms in Tucson. The obvious question is whether Stuehringer had a conflict of interest. How could he defend the prosecutor against charges of misconduct in the very case that had put one of his clients on death row?
“I was done representing Fong,” Stuehringer told me over lunch at Rigo’s. “I had taken his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to take his case. I had written him a letter saying, ‘I worked my ass off for you, and I wish you well,’” Stuehringer said. “The accusations against Ken just had to do with McCrimmon and Minnitt. So was there a conflict in representing Peasley? I sat down with my partners to talk about it, and they said, ‘There’s no conflict, but be prepared for some shit.’”
Karen Clark, the lawyer who conducted the bar association’s investigation of Peasley, tried repeatedly to get Stuehringer thrown off the case but failed. Lougee saw Stuehringer’s role as symptomatic of the cozy nature of law practice in a small city like Tucson, not to mention a betrayal of a client who faced execution. “You don’t take on the representation of the guy who is charged with misconduct in a case when you were the attorney for the other side unless you are basically saying, ‘No harm, no foul,’” Lougee said. “By representing Peasley, Stuehringer was basically admitting that Soto-Fong was guilty. It’s appalling.”
Godoy and Peasley, not surprisingly, felt wronged by the investigation. “I was just really upset that I had to go through all this,” Godoy said. “I was upset with the system, how far they had gone, and the lack of support from my own command staff.” Because of Peasley’s and Godoy’s prominence in Tucson, a prosecutor from outside Pima County investigated the two men for obstruction of justice, and ultimately obtained an indictment of Godoy for perjury. The indictment meant that Godoy had to retire from the police force, though because he had twenty years’ tenure he received a full pension. Godoy’s lawyer, Michael Piccarreta, told him that prosecutors had offered him a plea. “They said, ‘We’ll give you a deal’—guaranteed probation if I turn on Ken and say that he was obstructing justice,” Godoy recalled. “Now, I don’t cuss that much and it takes me a while to get upset, but I told Mike, ‘Fuck no.’ I didn’t want to lie to get an indictment on Ken.” The criminal case against Godoy was finally assigned to a Pima County judge, Lina Rodriguez, who promptly dismissed the indictment on the unusual ground of an “overzealous” presentation to the grand jury. (The same judge later wrote a letter to the bar association as a character witness on Peasley’s behalf.) In all, Godoy felt only modestly repentant about the experience: “Did I make a mistake or mistakes? Sure, I did. I’m not going to say I didn’t, ’cause it’s pretty obvious I did. Were they intentional? Did I need to do it to get somebody in prison? Of course not.”
For a long time, Peasley’s case stayed within the Tucson legal community. After more than a year of intermittent hearings, the bar association offered to drop the matter if Peasley would accept censure—a punishment well short of disbarment. Peasley turned it down.
He miscalculated. By rejecting the censure, he let the process continue, and as lawyers outside Tucson began to see the facts of his case the potential consequences grew. “In hindsight, of course, you’re going to second-guess yourself for not taking the censure,” Peasley told me. “I didn’t do anything ‘intentionally’ or ‘knowingly’ wrong. I was not willing to take a censure for something I didn’t think I did.”
But, as the case moved forward, Peasley’s defense evolved from a complete denial of wrongdoing to something more nuanced. First, he pointed out that the case against him had been built using documents that he himself had turned over to the defense in the El Grande cases. Eventually,