TO-WIT: CHINATOWN
“Forget it, Jake, its Chinatown.” And with those words, that great movie, probably the best that Jack Nicholson ever made, came to an end, leaving its protagonist brushed aside like a small child, weak and ineffectual in the face of a system far more powerful in its corruption than he, with his naïve sense of fair play and rectitude, could possibly bring to justice.
For those who haven’t seen it, Chinatown is a gritty, suspenseful, mystery of wealth, power, politics and incest, an odd mix of human conditions unfamiliar to all save perhaps family lawyers. The setting is Los Angeles’ Chinatown in the mid 1930’s, a culture inscrutable to the America that surrounds it, and which serves as an icon for the movie’s message that evil and ambitious men of wealth and power play by a set of rules quite incomprehensible to decent, common folk.
I know what you’re thinking, and yes, this does have something to do with the practice of law. Not long ago, a client’s cause led me to try a case in a county south of here, a place well known for its political treachery, for its pervasive and cancerous atmosphere of small minded power struggles that has infected the courthouse, the courtrooms and the lawyers there for eons. It is also a court system patently hostile to outside counsel, as evidenced by the local Rules of Court, an irrational, illogical, and inefficient conglomeration of words, mostly spelled correctly, that has as its main objective the need for outside attorneys to retain local counsel.
My client, a well known political gadfly, had been arrested for suggesting during the open comment period of a county commissioners’ meeting that an Asian butcher’s effort to deal with bureaucratic meat inspectors by hacking them to death with an ax sounded to him like a good plan for local government. For that little exercise in free speech, he was charged with the commission of several crimes, not the least of which was the singularly local offense of Displeasing Elected Officials.
The magistrate knew something of the First Amendment and threw out all the charges, causing the District Attorney to refile and seek a different magistrate. “Any magistrate so obviously committed to the First Amendment,” she argued in her petition for reassignment, “cannot possibly be considered impartial.” The motion was set for eight a.m. one day the following week.
Do I have to be there in person to oppose this motion,” I asked the judge’s clerk over the phone, as it was a two hour drive for me.
“No, of course not, just petition for leave to submit this on briefs only.”
“And I can do that by mail, right,” I queried.
“No,” he said, “you have to present the petition in person at eight a.m., Local Rule 73. But I can recommend good local counsel if you don’t want to make the drive.”
The second magistrate did as he was told and held most of the charges over for trial. Shortly thereafter I received notice of the 8 a.m. call of the criminal trial list, along with a warning that my attendance was mandatory. Since my presence there was required for all of fifteen seconds to announce I was ready for trial, I was loathe to make the drive solely for that purpose.
“Oh, you don’t have to appear personally,” advised the Clerk of Court, “you can get a court order excusing you.”
“And I can do that by mail or over the phone,” I inquired?
“Uh, no,” he replied, “you have to present it in person at eight a.m., Local Rule 69. Do you need local counsel?”
At the commencement of the trial, His Honor asked my partner and I if we wanted local counsel to assist us. “I must caution you,” he advised, “we do things a bit differently than where you come from.”
“Yes, I know,” I thought to myself, “its called inbreeding.” And I replied out loud that I thought we could handle it alone.
“Suit yourself,” he responded, “and now let us pray.”
His Honor refused to charge anything about the First Amendment, apparently believing that it had no application in his courtroom. Nonetheless the jury acquitted my client of all charges in ten minutes. My client let out a yelp of celebratory joy but the commissioners had him rearrested on the spot for Rampant Whooping, apparently another obscure local offense.
As he was led off in mouth cuffs, I sat there seething with rage and turning that particular shade of apoplectic purple unique to irate First Amendment buffs. As I gasped for breath, my partner reached over and tugged sympathetically at my sleeve.
“Forget it,” she said, “its Chinatown.”
2004, S. Sponte, Esq.