The Laws of our Fathers Read Online Free PDF

Sonny asks. 'That's a coincidence?'
        'That's no coincidence. And no drive-by. Maybe the Saints want to make it look that way. This was a contract killing.'
        The portent of this is bad: A street gang taking deliberate aim on a probation officer's family. A new battlefront opened in the war on the streets.
        'Want to know the rest?' asks Lubitsch, still glowing.
        'I'll hear it in court, Fred. I'm going to do your warrant after my motions.'
        'Whatever you say, Judge,' he answers, but cannot restrain one more disbelieving toss of his head. He says yet again, 'It's a doozy.'
        Sonny grabs the black robe from the coat tree behind her desk and zips it halfway. With a certain processional formality, Marietta and Annie hasten before her down the hall into the courtroom. A double doozy. Everyone will want a piece of this case. The Mayor will be on TV, sticking up for law enforcement. An atmosphere of brooding anger will penetrate the courtroom. Sonny, who has not yet endured the storm of a controversial case, becomes conscious somewhere at her center of the troubled qualms of fear.
        In the corridor, Marietta's fine alto arrives, so round with pride you would think it's her own name she is singing out. 'The Honorable Sonia Klonsky,' she can be heard crying, 'judge presiding.'
        
*
        
        Two p.m. bond call. Black men in manacles. The Chief Judge, Brendan Tuohey, sets bail according to a pre-established scale on all cases on which the grand jury returns an indictment. But under state law when a defendant is arrested on the basis of a prosecutor's complaint, he is entitled to a bond hearing before the assigned trial judge. Sonny regards it as one of her saddest duties to deliver the crushing news most of these young men receive, that their liberty, like some item checked at the door, is lost and unlikely soon to be retrieved.
        April, Eliot said, is the cruelest month. But if he was looking for the cruelest place, he should have come here, to the Superior Court of Kindle County. A kind of barbarity seems to blow in with the defendants from the bad neighborhoods and mean streets, a grim devastation, a slaughterhouse reek. Here are freely traded the secrets no one wants to hear. At one point last month, there were four different trials ongoing involving mothers or fathers who had murdered their children. This morning Sonny arraigned six gang members who surrounded a recalcitrant twelve-year-old in a housing project stairwell and beat him with a pipe until the brain matter was literally oozing from his skull. These tales of astonishing brutality, of stabbings and rapes, of shootings and stickups, of the inevitable 'crime of the day,' so heinous that, like certain forms of pornography, it seems beyond normal imagining - these are routine, routine, routine, and their meanness is matched only by the system of which she is standard-bearer and emblem, whose clandestine rationale too often seems to Sonny to be to capture, judge, and warehouse the very poor. Every month or so, preparing for a status call, she will go back to the lockup, looking for Annie or the transport deputy, and confront, through the bars, the day's load of prisoners, twelve or fourteen young men. You would expect them to rise up and revolt, but most are quiet, shifting about, smoking their cigarettes. If they dare to look her way at all it is without defiance or, often, hope. They have been humiliated. Tamed.
        On the bench, though, sorrow is seldom the predominant emotion. In this atmosphere of loathing and fear she labors on, trying to impose reason where, generally speaking, impulse and emotion have held sway. Murder is the marquee business of this courtroom - gangbangers killing gangbangers; men killing men. They use guns mostly - also knives, bats, razor blades, automobiles, crowbars, and, in one celebrated case, an anvil. The young people kill each other for reasons that are often