Most young lawyers take municipal court prosecutor jobs to gain trial experience and leave as soon as something better comes along. But not Ira Grossman. He made a career out of being a municipal court prosecutor, first with the City of Charleston and then for the Town of Mt. Pleasant. He took his jobs seriously, seemingly believing he was personally responsible for keeping the city streets safe. He could be a stickler sometimes but, at least with me, he always kept his word. In fact, Ira liked going up against the big-court criminal defense lawyers to test his mettle. He would call lawyers into his office to lay out his evidence against their clients. It was effective and often moved cases. Ira did this to me when I was representing my next-door neighbor who’d been arrested with DUI. Ira showed me the video tape of my poor client swaying back and forth as she tried to count backwards from nineteen. She was so drunk she started countings the wrong way and slurred, “One, two, three, oh fuck you.” Ira indignantly demanded to know what excuse I would offer and seemed genuinely surprised when I said all my client wanted was a quick and quiet guilty-plea for a fine. But his tactic of laying out his evidence didn’t always work.
My ex-father-in-law, a highly respected attorney, didn’t wish to sully his reputation representing a wealthy elderly client accused of flashing his penis at his just as elderly neighbor. Ira’s sense of propriety was as offended as my father-in-law’s. His complexion was livid when he called me into his office and laid out his evidence against my pervert client who he couldn’t allow to harass an elderly woman in his city. His evidence was a series of photographs which appeared to show my client standing in his open garage door flashing the woman. It never occurred to Ira to question how it was the victim just happened to have a camera handy when the flashing occurred.
Ira laid out the pictures on his desk one by one. Here’s your client standing in his garage with his bathrobe on. Here he is looking across the way towards the victim’s home. Here he is opening his robe to expose himself to her. Here he is retreating back into his garage. And here he is at his back door. An open and shut case, or so Ira thought. Ira saw in the photographs exactly what he expected to see.
Lawyers have to learn to look at evidence from all different angles without preconceptions. To look for ways to turn seemingly damning evidence to your client’s advantage. I scooped the photographs off Ira’s desk and rearranged them like I was playing a hand in a card game. I laid the picture of my client at his back door first and said to Ira, “Here he is at his back door taking his wet bathing suit off before entering the house. He has a pool in his back yard and his wife won’t let him in with a wet suit dripping on her kitchen floor.” Then I laid down the picture of him standing in his garage door looking across the street. “When he took off his bathing suit, he saw the flash of the victim photographing him from across the street and walked to his open garage door to confront her.” I laid the third photograph down and said, “Here he is having spotted her taking her pictures from her second floor, bedroom window.” “He was so shocked, he let his bathrobe fall open.” As I laid the fourth photograph down I said. “And, finally, here he is going back inside his house.”
Ira had the look of someone stupefied by a card trick but there wasn’t any magic about it. Ira just didn’t have all the facts and saw only what he expected to see. My client had told me he and the woman had been having an affair for quite awhile and she was mad at him because he was breaking it off. To prove his story, he produced tape recordings of hot and heavy telephone conversations they’d had. Nobody could make up sex tapes between 70 year retired Navy Captain and his 65 year old neighbor.
They apparently had a rocky relationship and on one call he was telling her he wanted her back. “You think you own me. That you can treat me as you like and expect me to come crawling back to you. Well, not this time, I’m never coming back,” he said with a shaking voice followed by a long silence. Then, as if broken, my pitiful client cried out, “I am not afraid to beg for your love.” I had my doubts about his bathrobe accidentally opening up, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen before. I didn’t need to tell Ira about the tapes because he’d already lost his enthusiasm for his case and agreed to a disorderly conduct plea with a modest fine to make it go away.
You don’t only learn trial skills in the Circuit Court. You learn them in every case, big and small. You learn them by taking the time to look at things from all angles with an open mind. There is no more important lesson to learn than how to present the most damaging evidence in the light most favorable to your client.
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