A Criminal Defense Read Online Free PDF

justice you’re worried about,” Donnally said. “You know the investigation into his murder—successful or not—poses the risk of exposing you to prosecution.” He gestured toward the outer office where Hamlin’s two paralegals waited in their cubicles to be interviewed. “And everybody else connected with Hamlin, too.”
    Donnally had seen her type before—private investigators, paralegals, junior attorneys—in court hallways or behind defense tables, underlings of lawyers like Hamlin, with a cops-versus-cons mentality they’d adopted from their clients in which the cons were the victims and the cops were the persecutors. And this framing of the world provided both the logic and the justification for their acts of war against the integrity of the criminal justice system.
    Donnally had learned that lesson while he was still a patrol officer. It was a delusional kind of thinking only matched by that of corrupt narcotics cops for whom the war on drugs justified planting evidence and framing those they believed—based on little more than a feeling in their gut—were guilty anyway.
    But what explained the mentality of the underlings in their war against the system didn’t necessarily explain the Hamlins themselves. Donnally had long recognized there was more to them than that, more motivating them than that, but he’d never understood what it was.
    Jackson didn’t respond right off. Her blinking accelerated and her hands formed into fists. “I always thought a sense of mission and loyalty went together. Driving over here I realized that they don’t. Mark was ready to throw us under the bus.”
    Donnally could also see that Jackson now felt herself facing the prospect of no longer just playing the part of a con in fantasy, but of living the reality in state prison.
    Suborning perjury: two to four years.
    Destroying evidence: two to four years.
    Concurrent: as few as two years.
    Consecutive: as many as eight.
    In her immunity demand, Donnally heard a disguised confession to all the police and prosecutors suspected Hamlin and his crew had been up to throughout his career.
    Donnally looked up again at the second of the framed courtroom drawings he’d recognized when he first sat down.
    People v. Demetrio Arellano .
    Hamlin was pictured standing below the bench staring at his wristwatch, his right hand raised in the air, as though counting down to the dropping of the flag at the Indy 500. Except zero didn’t mark the start of a race, but the end. The killer went free because the single prosecution witness hadn’t appeared to testify.
    It had been Navarro’s case.
    On the night before he was to testify, the witness took a cab to the airport and caught a plane to El Salvador. Later, Navarro and Donnally searched the man’s Tenderloin District apartment and recovered an answering machine message.
    Hey man, this is a friend. You show up in court and you’re gonna get busted for that thing you did in Texas. You know what it’s about and you’re in the crosshairs. They say scarcity is a bad thing. They’re wrong. It’s a good thing, a really good thing, if you know what I mean.
    Navarro had suspected the caller was a private investigator hired by Hamlin. Who else would’ve known how to find out about an out-of-state warrant, and who else but Hamlin would’ve known how to phrase a threat solely out of statements from which the sense of menace could be parsed away in a sharp cross-examination.
    In the end, no parsing was required because the witness never showed up again in San Francisco.
    Demetrio Arellano walked on the case for lack of evidence.
    Hamlin walked on the witness intimidation charge because no one could tie the tape to him.
    And the private investigator, who Navarro later identified through a pretext call to his office, walked because the witness wasn’t around to authenticate the recording and