Too often nobody wins in the courtroom and too often feels more like kissing your sister than a victory. People nowadays admire the Honorable Clifton Newman for the way he presided over the Murdaugh murder trial in Colleton County, but I first got to know him when he was still the Solicitor for Williamsburg County. I was hired to represent a Charleston area college student accused of murder in his hometown of Kingstree, South Carolina. As murder cases go, it was a defense lawyer’s self-defense dream case.
When my client returned home from college for the Thanksgiving break in his freshman year, he learned his younger sister was being recruited to join a gang. It really wasn’t much of a gang, more a high school click of wannabe gangsters than a real gang, but they’d dreamt up a demeaning recruitment ritual for young women. Hearing what the initiation entailed, my client forbid his sister from having anything to do with the gang or any of its members. When word got back to the self-appointed gang leader, he vowed vengeance against my client. When my client got wind of the leader’s threats, he took them seriously and started carrying a pistol for his protection. Kingstree being the small town it is, it wasn’t long before the two crossed paths and heated words were exchanged. When the so-called gang leader thought he would prove how tough he was by beating my client’s ass, my client shot him dead as a hammer in the parking lot of a quick stop store. As good a self-defense case as there ever was in my fifty yearsyears’ experience.
I fleshed out my client’s self-defense case at his preliminary and bond hearings and, although my arguments weren’t good enough to get the charge dismissed outright, they were good enough to get him released on bond. Unfortunately, my client was forced to put his college education on hold while he found a job so he could pay his parents back for his bail bond and attorney fees. There weren’t many jobs in Kingstree to begin with and being out on bond for murder, slammed the doors shut on the few jobs that existed. The case languished until my client’s name cropped up on the General Sessions trial roster and I was required to make the seventy-five mile, hour and forty-five minute drive to Kingstree to attend the hearing.
Solicitor Newman appreciated the trip I’d made and, remembering my arguments at his prelim and bond hearings, talked with me seriously about his having to deal with the victim’s grieving family. He countered my self-defense arguments saying the victim was just a high school student, he was unarmed, and his family denied he was a member of any gang. I replied my client was a student too, that was not my client’s understanding of the situation, and, under South Carolina law, the defendant in a self-defense case is entitled to act on appearances. Solicitor Newman offered an open court plea to voluntary manslaughter and in-chamber offer to put in a good word for my client with the judge, but my client steadfastly maintained his innocence and rejected the offer. Thus began a seemingly endless string of back-and-forth drives to Kingstree and a lawyer’s tug of war with neither side willing to give an inch.
The modest fee I’d charged my client’s parents to begin with was beginning to look more and more like I was being paid the minimum wage. The break that finally broke the deadlock came not from neither Solicitor Newman’s nor my trial skills. My client, who had no prior record before he was charged with murder, turned to crime to earn money when he couldn’t find a legit job. And not just any crime, he decided to try his hand at bank robbery. Solicitor Newman filled me in on the details of the robbery and my client’s arrest when I appeared for my client’s next docket sounding. Solicitor Newman was genuinely disturbed by how things had turned out but said the victim’s family would be satisfied if my client plead guilty to the bank robbery charge and would allow him to dismiss the murder charge.
My client freely admitted the bank robbery and agreed to plead straight up to the charge which carried from ten to thirty years, of which you had to serve at least seven years, to get it over with and the murder charge behind him. He pled guilty that afternoon to bank robbery and received a sentence of twenty years. Solicitor Newman was true to his word and never mentioned my client’s pending murder charge during the guilty plea and quietly nol prossed he murder charge later that same afternoon.
I’d won a murder case, but it didn’t feel much like much a victory. It felt more like kissing my sister, nothing to get excited about. What if my client hadn’t been charged with murder? What if he’d been able to find a job? What if he hadn’t decided to rob a bank? “What if” questions will drive a lawyer crazy. They are best answered by reminding yourself “if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.” You aren’t responsible for the legal system, just to do the best you can to help your client out of the fix he got himself in. So, pucker up, Sis, congratulate me for a not so satisfying victory in a murder case.
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