Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [411]
In the next trial, one of the tribal chieftains testified that the horses were ceremonial ponies. On that basis, the Judge decided they were each worth $400.
Ritter later confided to a few friends that the evidence which caused him to think the government ought to pay, and pay well, was that the horses had been packed into a truck with open boards, and one mustang's leg was sticking through the slats. The people who were doing the job could have opened a door to extricate the horse, but that would have been a lot of work, so somebody just took a chain saw and cut the horse's leg off. Those animals were going for dog food anyway. Ritter said, "This shows the cavalier attitude of the government toward our horses."
What Ritter gave you, Dabney told himself now, was excitement. After leaving his courtroom, you could say to yourself, "There isn't another Bench like this in the whole country." Whether you won or lost didn't have to be so important as that you had a hell of an experience.
Why, Judge Learned Hand had written that Willis Ritter possessed one of the finest minds he had ever known on the Bench. That was what you had to count on.
4
Considering it was well after ten o'clock on Sunday night, Earl thought Judge Ritter looked surprisingly spry when he finally showed up in Court. Judy Wolbach was impressed with his God-like voice.
Ritter said no more than "The papers appear to be in order. I'll hear you," but she fell in love. A slow, deep voice with a lot of resonance.
Such a plump, nice, stern-looking man. He would make a good Lord for the flood, if God was close to eighty.
Gil Athay happened to be in Court, Judy noticed, and some of the top liberal lawyers in town like Richard Giauque and Danny Berman, his partner, about as Salt Lake Establishment as you could get, if you were also a liberal. Jinks, with them for an audience, would be off to a good start. He loved trial work, and under this kind of pressure, didn't falter a bit. Began with a dry, perfect presentation, exactly the reason he was a successful attorney. If she had been up there, Judy thought, she would have wasted time carrying on about how Attorney General Hansen didn't even have the nerve to appear, which probably would have been a mistake. Instead, Jinks went right into his argument.
Dabney had tried two jury trials in front of Ritter and been in his Court twenty-five or thirty times. Maybe it was the legends, but you never got over the anxiety that you might run into one of Ritter's sore spots. He could rule against you right then. Given the Judge's love of dispatch, Dabney knew he was taking a chance in talking a lot tonight, but in variety lay the strength of his frail case.
"Your Honor," Dabney began, "we have attempted to obtain justice in virtually every Court in this country, and this is the final effort to stop what we consider to be a clear unconstitutional exercise by the State of Utah to execute a man before the death penalty statute has been examined by either the Utah Supreme Court or the Supreme Court of the United States . . ."
Dabney did not have his argument written out. What he had to say was placed in five piles of paper. Once he got going, he could reach for a group of notes, and explore their points, but first he had to summarize the complaint. Since it was a taxpayers' lawsuit, his argument had to be that public funds were being spent "unlawfully." So now he said that if the Utah statute was found unconstitutional the State could yet be found liable.
Having completed his introduction, Dabney decided to add a ghost claim, not present in his brief. "It has recently," he said, "come to our knowledge that Mr. Gilmore might consider fighting for his life,