Omerta - Mario Puzo [17]
The next family dinner was a celebration to honor Nicole for winning another case—this time her own. In a recent trial she had championed a difficult principle of law at great personal risk. And she had been brought before the Bar Association for unethical practice and had been acquitted. Now she was exuberant.
The Don, in a cheerful mood, showed an uncharacteristic interest in this case. He congratulated his daughter on the acquittal but was somewhat confused, or pretended to be, by the circumstances. Nicole had to explain it to him.
She had defended a man, thirty years of age, who had raped, sodomized, and killed a twelve-year-old girl, then secretly hidden her body so that it could not be found by the police. Circumstantial evidence against him had been strong, but without a corpus, the jury and judge would be reluctant to give him the death penalty. The parents of the victim were in anguish in their frustrated desire to find the body.
The murderer confided to Nicole, as his attorney, where the body was buried and authorized her to negotiate a deal—he would reveal the body’s whereabouts in exchange for a life sentence rather than execution. However, when Nicole opened negotiations with the prosecutor, she was faced with a threat of prosecution herself if she did not immediately reveal the whereabouts of the body. She believed it mattered to society to protect the confidentiality between attorney and client. Therefore, she refused, and a prominent judge declared her in the right.
The prosecutor, after consulting with the parents of the victim, finally consented to the deal.
The murderer told them that he had dismembered the body, placed it in a box filled with ice, and buried it in a nearby marshland in New Jersey. And so the body was found and the murderer sentenced to life imprisonment. But then the Bar Association brought her up on charges of unethical negotiation. And today she had won her acquittal.
The Don toasted to all of his children and then asked Nicole, “And you behaved honorably in all this?”
Nicole lost her exuberance. “It was the principle of the thing. The government cannot be allowed to breach the lawyer/client privilege in any one situation, no matter how grave, or it is no longer sacrosanct.”
“And you felt nothing for the victim’s mother and father?” the Don asked.
“Of course I did,” Nicole said, annoyed. “But how could I let this affect a basic principle of the law? I suffered for that, I really did; why wouldn’t I? But unfortunately, in order to set precedents for future law sacrifices have to be made.”
“And yet the Bar Association put you on trial,” the Don said.
“To save face,” Nicole said. “It was a political move. Ordinary people, unschooled in the complexities of the legal system, can’t accept these principles of law, and there was an uproar. So my trial diffused everything. Some very prominent judge had to go public and explain that I had the right under the Constitution to refuse to give that information.”
“Bravo,” the Don said jovially. “The law is always full of surprises. But only to lawyers, of course.”
Nicole knew he was making fun of her. She said sharply, “Without a body of law, no civilization can exist.”
“That is true,” the Don said as if to appease his daughter. “But it seems unfair that a man who commits a terrible crime escapes with his life.”
“That’s true,” Nicole said. “But our system of law is based on plea bargaining. It is true that each criminal