Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound

An updated version of the Western gunslinger is that of the courtroom shootist.  We cling to the memory of Jimmy Stewart and George C. Scott squaring off in Anatomy of a Murder, or of Tom Cruise finding the courage, testosterone and a well-written script to challenge Jack Nicholson, the “take no prisoners”  Marine Colonel in the witness chair in A Few Good Men.  But simply because the legend may stretch the truth, the vignettes of Western lore normally were not woven from whole cloth.  Similarly, these courtroom tales of dueling advocates, shooting at each other with their words and their wits, usually were very close to being the real McCoy and not the product of some imaginative screen writer’s fertile and creative mind.

       Just as with the gunslingers of the Old West, the courtroom legend of the word slinging advocate often surpasses the reality - but not always.  Sometimes, the actual event is as good as advertised and is recounted for years afterward in the halls of justice and the coffee rooms of the court officials – be they judges, bailiffs, prosecutors, defense attorneys or court reporters, among others.  All of these courthouse rats are trying to cadge a nibble from the same wheel of hoop cheese, the glory of having been there when the big shootout was waged.

We like to believe that good trial lawyers can be equated with the pistoleros of Laredo, Tucson and Dodge City. We admire and are thrilled by the epic drama played out in courthouses across the judicial frontiers of our country by the hired guns of the defense bar and their eternal

adversaries, the state and federal prosecutors who work for the “guv’mint,” as we say in the South.

We revel at the sound of their “slapping leather,” even though their weapons of choice are their guile, their guts, their wits and their words. These tools of their trade can inflict psychological wounds every bit as grievous as the physical ones inflicted by the Colt .45, the preferred instrument of the deadliest of the Western gunslingers.  But at least in a courtroom the adversaries collect a fee or draw a salary, and often have a few shots of Jack Daniels together at trial’s end.

          And yet, there really is something to the notion of the mano a mano face offs in today’s courtrooms.  Those face-offs, at their best, come closer than anything else we’ve got going to recreating the legend of the Dodge City gunfighter. Picture Robert Duvall’s famous scene as the Air Cavalry Commander in Apocalypse Now:  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” … “It smells like VICTORY!”

          That one scene better characterizes what it feels like to be a genuine twenty-four- carat, meet you at high noon with iron on your hip, ass-kickin’ trial lawyer than any course I ever took or lecture I ever heard. It certainly illustrates the quest for the blue ribbon or the gold medal in a courtroom face-off better than any bloodless and sissified “bureaucratese” ever uttered by a boss or supervisor spouting about “the skills of a successful advocate,” or some similar drivel.

            The pages of this book are filled with accounts of the prosecution, and often the preceding investigation, of assorted drug dealers, robbers, murderers, child molesters and other scions of our society that I met and prosecuted during my career. The bad men and blood-spilling thugs became a part of my life for more than twenty years.  A few of the very worst of them are permanently embedded in my psyche, much to its detriment. I developed  more than a passing relationship with the courtroom fast-draw artists of the defense bar who represented the bad guys, sometimes with a thinly disguised contempt for the human detritus that they represented,  sometimes with a genuine passion for the “cause,” but always with the desire to kick some prosecutor’s ass.

            The reader will also witness some of what really goes on in courtrooms across the country every day.  Readers will feel the frustration of the victims who come seeking simple redress for the grievance inflicted on them by some bad guy, but frequently find eternally more grievance and frustration heaped upon them by a system that doesn’t seem to care – and too often doesn’t – than from the criminal himself.  More than a few of the characters and situations in these pages are so strange as to almost defy belief, except to those who come to court on a daily basis and see for themselves this black comedy that we refer to as “justice.”