Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [184]
It sounded good, but I was wary. Sherman wasn’t just Lewis’s lawyer but also his friend. Still, he came to see me himself and talked convincingly about winning at trial. After weighing the option of a minimal eight-year deal and discussing it with my family, I decided to accept Sherman’s offer.
For several weeks he did absolutely nothing on my case except to ask the court to allow me additional research time in the prison law library, a request that was summarily denied. The aggressive defense he’d promised me never materialized. He took my case and basically sat on it.
Soon after he became my attorney of record, I discovered the extent of the deception. When I called Sherman one day to discuss my case, Ron Austin answered the phone. I recognized his voice. Austin was the informant who had recorded my calls for FBI Agent Ken McGuire.
Sherman quickly assured me that Ron didn’t have access to my case files, but that wasn’t the point. These people weren’t on my side. When I realized that, I was as livid with Sherman for making an empty promise to put on a vigorous defense as I was with myself for having believed him.
Sherman, unlike any reasonable lawyer, instead of arguing for my release, actually demanded that the government indict me: “If you have something against my client, just indict him, and let’s go to trial,” he insisted. For a defense attorney to do that seemed outrageous. But that’s exactly what the government did.
On September 26, 1996, after being held for over a year and a half, I was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles on twenty-five charges, including computer and wire fraud (copying proprietary source code), possessing access devices (computer passwords), damaging computers (inserting backdoors), and intercepting passwords. These were, of course, added to the original set of cell phone cloning charges from Raleigh.
For an indigent defendant—which I was—the judge can either direct that a Federal Public Defender be assigned or turn to the ranks of what are called “panel attorneys.” These are lawyers in private practice who take on indigent clients for a fraction of the rate that any well-established attorney would charge (at the time, the rate for panel attorneys was sixty dollars an hour). A panel attorney, Donald Randolph, was selected to handle my defense, and the new charges would be heard by Judge William Keller—referred to around the courthouse as “Killer Keller” because, courthouse regulars said, a defendant unfortunate enough to suffer a conviction in his courtroom, or even one who pled guilty, could expect the maximum sentence. Killer Keller was the Central District of California’s “hanging judge.” He was every defendant’s worst nightmare.
But I got a huge break. My other cases were being heard by Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, the same judge who had been responsible for my being held in solitary for over eight months, but at least she didn’t have as scary a reputation as Killer Keller. I really dodged a bullet there.
Attorney Randolph asked Judge Pfaelzer to have the new case transferred to her under the “low-number rule” (which allows related cases to be combined and heard by the judge handling the case with the lowest docket number—that is, the one assigned at the earliest date). Since the cases were related, she agreed. Nine months after I was indicted on the twenty-five counts, the smaller ones—the Raleigh charges and the supervised-release case—were finally settled. I was sentenced to twenty-two months. I had already been in custody four months longer than that. Attorney Randolph made an immediate request for a detention hearing, since I was now eligible for release on bail. The Supreme Court had held that every defendant had a right to a bail hearing.
When my attorney told Judge Pfaelzer that he had filed an application for bail to be heard the following week, the prosecutor objected, calling me a “flight risk and a