The Fence - Dick Lehr [133]
The taking of depositions was exhausting. Tempers flared. Over the summer, Mike sat through six grueling days of often pointed questioning from attorneys representing the officers, the police department, and the city—and on the seventh day he’d had enough.
“The record should reflect,” said Tom Drechsler, Burgio’s attorney, “that Mr. Cox has just left the room without asking for a recess and he has gotten up and left in the middle of a question.”
Steve Roach quickly came to his client’s defense: What do you expect? “You’re browbeating him,” he said. “Mr. Cox was visibly upset and he left the room to take a break.”
Drechsler and the others denied any such thing; countering, they accused Roach of using hand signals to coach Mike on how to respond to their questions. “It’s prompting his client,” Drechsler complained. “It’s inappropriate. The record doesn’t reflect the gestures.”
Roach wouldn’t give an inch. “Questions in the now seventh day of this deposition have been abusive,” he charged. “They have been repetitive.”
The gloves were off. Each side got nasty. “Oh, please,” Drechsler said, fed up with what he considered Roach’s persistent interference. He called Roach’s conduct “highly unprofessional and highly inappropriate.”
“You have a very suspicious and paranoid mind, Tom,” Roach said.
“Well, excuse me, but I don’t need personal insults and criticisms from you.”
“Well,” said Roach, “that’s what you’re doing to me.”
Drechsler admonished Roach. “Don’t use words like ‘paranoid’ and things like that unless you’re a qualified psychologist and you’re prepared to testify on the record. That’s a personal insult. I’m not getting personal with you and I’d appreciate and expect for you to refrain from personal insults, okay?”
But the fireworks did not let up. For the remainder of Mike’s final day of deposition, Roach stood guard, constantly interrupting and challenging his opponents in a bid to block and parry a beating by words from the phalanx of attorneys.
The opposing lawyers were not impressed with Roach’s lawyering. They seemed to consider Roach out of his league. “We’ll take your lessons on trial practice another day,” one smartly told him.
Indeed they would—come December with the start of Mike’s case.
Mike Cox had never thought much of the diagnosis made soon after his beating that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He didn’t much believe in psychiatry, and, to him, the best therapy would be winning his federal civil rights case. Even so, his lawyer Steve Roach took him to a second psychiatrist for another opinion—both for Mike’s own well-being and for the purposes of the lawsuit. Roach personally drove Mike twice to the doctor’s office in the bedroom community of Chelmsford, thirty miles north of Boston. Mike and the Harvard-trained forensic psychiatrist spoke privately while Roach waited outside. The doctor also met with Mike and Kimberly together.
The psychiatrist found Mike friendly and cooperative, but a bit guarded. He assessed Mike’s intelligence in the “superior range,” with no indication of delusions, hallucinations, obsessions, or compulsions. “His insight is limited, however,” wrote Dr. Ronald P. Winfield in a report prepared in May 1997, “in that he continued to feel and to state that he did not believe that he had a psychiatric disorder.”
Mike’s views notwithstanding, Winfield affirmed the earlier diagnosis for PTSD, a disorder he determined was “directly due to the beating which he suffered at the hands of fellow Boston Police Officers.” Observing that Mike’s symptoms had persisted in the several years since the beating, Winfield said his condition was “chronic.”
Of particular interest, the psychiatrist found that Mike’s “pre-existing psychological makeup made him particularly vulnerable.” He cited a study showing that Vietnam War veterans who’d been gung-ho about the war prior to combat were more susceptible to developing PTSD. “The destruction of one’s beliefs is an intensely painful