Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [92]
Susan told the court that she was simply responding to the civil suit when she contacted her youngest son via e-mail. In a letter to the court, she railed at Judge O’Malley’s April 19 decision to revoke her bail, claiming she had written to Gabriel only after her lawyers, Peter Coleridge and Jack Funk, advised her that the no contact order did not apply to legal correspondence.
“However, I was charged with 24 counts of contempt of court for 24 e-mails to Gabriel and reincarcerated and placed on a no bail hold by Judge Mary Ann O’Malley,” Susan complained in the letter.
Susan subsequently fired Peter Coleridge in May 2005, and announced her intent to act as her own counsel. Since her arrest, she had fired all three of her criminal attorneys—William Ousterhadt, Elizabeth Grossman, and now Peter Coleridge—supposedly because of disagreements over the handling of her defense. She had repeatedly refused to entertain an “insanity” defense or one using “battered woman syndrome.” She had spent much of her life running from a diagnosis of mental illness and she wasn’t about to hide behind such a claim now.
Susan would represent herself pro per. In an interview with the Contra Costa Times in the summer of 2005, she told the newspaper that she was convinced she was not going to get the defense she wanted unless she represented herself. “If I’m going to lose when represented by counsel, I might as well represent myself,” she was quoted as saying. “At least I’ll give them a fight.”
While self-representation is not a good idea for any defendant, in Susan’s case it was a particularly bad choice. In Contra Costa County, women who choose to represent themselves are at a severe disadvantage in comparison to their male counterparts. The women who are housed in the West County Detention Facility are not permitted to use the jail’s “Male Only” law library, despite many administrative complaints from defendants facing felony charges. This restriction greatly limits the amount of research that they can undertake on their own.
This fact may have played a role in the abrupt change Susan announced in late July 2005 when she asked a judge to appoint Oakland defense attorney, Daniel Horowitz, to her case. Horowitz had gained notoriety as a TV legal analyst during the Scott Peterson murder trial by stationing himself at the courthouse to offer legal commentary to cable stations in need of a sound bite. He soon became a regular on Court TV, providing analysis for the Peterson case and later in the Michael Jackson molestation trial.
Representing Susan Polk at her upcoming murder trial would be another opportunity for the lawyer to grab the media spotlight. While Horowitz had represented more than one dozen defendants in capital murder cases during his two decades as an attorney, the majority of his practice was at the Federal level, involving white-collar crimes such as money laundering and embezzlement.
According to his attorney profile, Horowitz was “a defense attorney with an extensive computer and business background” and 90 percent of his practice was devoted to litigation. Nevertheless, he was anxious to take Susan’s case to trial. In August, he asked Judge Thomas Maddock to allow him to bring his cocounsel, Ivan W. Golde, on board for the case. Judge Maddock agreed, under the condition that the county pay only Horowitz’s fee.
While Horowitz was lead counsel on the case, it was Ivan who actually persuaded Susan to meet with them. He made the initial contact while visiting a client at the West County Detention Facility where Susan was being held. During their brief conversation, Ivan convinced Susan to