The Fence - Dick Lehr [146]
Trying to impeach Mike through his memory was their best hope. They asked Mike about a prior occasion when he was mistaken by other officers as a suspect. Hadn’t Mike been grabbed by a cop and then another yelled, “Stop, he’s a cop”? Wasn’t Mike conflating that incident with the pummeling at Woodruff Way? Wasn’t Mike mistaken about saying he heard Dave Williams yelling that command during his beating?
Tom Hoopes went last, and he sought aggressively to hit Mike hard on two points he’d raised during his opening. But Hoopes ran into a roadblock as soon as he suggested Mike was partly responsible for the night’s tragic outcome once he and Craig took over the lead position in their unmarked cruiser. The judge quickly interrupted the lawyer’s revival of the cowboy theme.
“This is an incredible reach,” Young said. He accused Hoopes of “wandering around as to whether someone violated departmental policy.” Even if the rule was broken, a victim of police brutality “still has his constitutional rights.” It simply had no relevance in the case, the judge warned Hoopes.
Hoopes simply switched to the other point of attack—greed.
“Sir,” he asked Mike, “would it be fair to say that you and your wife have a debt of about $200,000 from her medical school bills; is that right?”
Roach and Sinsheimer jumped to their feet to object.
They didn’t have to. The judge tossed a pencil into the air. Everyone watched the writing instrument bounce across the bench. Young summoned the attorneys to his sidebar. Mike watched from the witness stand. He was exhausted but had weathered the effort to break him down.
When the huddle broke, the judge turned to face the jury. “We’re trying a straightforward matter here, a matter worthy of trial,” he said. “But this reference to greed and reference to other motivations for bringing a lawsuit is improper. And I have instructed counsel that it’s improper.” The lawyers had been slapped around, hardly the kind of last word any defense would wish for during a key cross-examination.
Mike’s lawyers now went about trying to circle in on Williams, Burgio, and Daley. Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan testified about discovering Mike alone on the ground, battered and bleeding. No one else was around, and Teahan said only four or five Boston police cruisers were already there.
“No more than that?” Sinsheimer asked.
Drechsler objected immediately, and the judge, agreeing, told Sinsheimer, “Do not lead the witness.” But Sinsheimer had made his point. Teahan’s testimony planted firmly the idea that the dead end was the “closed container.”
Then they called the only witness who provided testimony directly implicating any of the accused. “I seen a black officer hit him over the back of the head with the flashlight,” Smut Brown said to open his account of the scrum of officers beating a man he thought was one of his pals, rather than Mike Cox. Sinsheimer asked whether he saw that officer today. Smut surveyed the crowded gallery looking for Williams, who’d moved back from the first row where he’d sat during Mike’s testimony.
But Smut found him. “The guy in the green suit back there,” he said.
The case was moving along as planned, but Sinsheimer and Roach were in for an unexpected comeuppance. Roach wanted Craig Jones to testify about the comment Dave Williams made back at the Roxbury station after the beating: “I think my partner hit your partner.” Defense lawyers objected, saying having Craig quote Williams was inadmissible hearsay, a legal rule of evidence that generally