Plea of Insanity Read Free Page A

‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
    ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
    ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

3
    Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Julia Valenciano stood at the State’s podium in courtroom 4–10 – a 74-page trial calendar before her and four boxes of felony cases stacked at her feet – and she panicked. She nibbled at the inside of her cheek and stared in disbelief at the yellow Witness Availability Sheet in her hand that Mario, her Victim/Witness Coordinator, had prepared for her late last Friday.
    ‘State?’ grumbled the judge from the bench, obviously waiting for an answer. It was one Julia really didn’t want to give him. The Honorable Leonard Farley was already in a mood more foul than usual. She closed her eyes for a second and wished she were somewhere else. Like Hawaii.
    It was Monday morning and the packed courtroom bustled around her. Even though printed signs everywhere warned ‘No talking, no children, no cellphones!’ the air buzzed with the hushed whispers of the victims, witnesses, family members, and out-of-custody defendants that filled the rows of benches behind her. To her right, a long line of irritated, toe-tapping defense attorneys snaked its way behind the defense podium and through the small wooden pass-through gate that led into the gallery. Most had several clients on calendars throughout the courthouse, which meant they were going to be late for somebody’s courtroom this morning, but no one wanted to be late for Judge Farley, so everyone came to 4–10 first. Behind her, a similar line had formed for prosecutors at the State’s podium. She could almost hear both sides’ collective sigh of impatience as she fumbled through the file marked State vs. Powers .
    Corrections opened the door to the jury room at that moment, and a line of disheveled-looking defendants – fresh from the Dade County Jail across the street – made their way into the jury box, their wrists all chained together, like a surreal string of paper-doll cutouts.
    ‘Am I speaking?’ the judge asked, exasperated, looking around as Corrections settled the defendants into seats in the box. He still had not gotten his answer. His eyes fell on Jefferson, the bailiff. ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked. A nervous Jefferson nodded.
    ‘Judge,’ Julia began slowly, ‘we seem to have a problem.’ Scrawled across the computer-generated Witness Availability Sheet, in Mario’s barely legible handwriting, were the words, ‘Victim uncooperative. Refuses to come in now – MG.’ Julia could’ve sworn those words were not there on Friday when she’d prepped the Monday-morning calendar until eight o’clock at night.
    ‘I don’t have any problems, State,’ said Judge Farley, leaning back in his chair, his darkblue eyes crinkling to slits. He smelled blood and it made him happy.
    Each of the twenty felony division judges that worked in Miami’s downtown Richard Gerstein Criminal Justice Building had three Assistant State Attorneys (ASAs), three Public Defenders (PDs), and two Division Chiefs (DCs) – one for each side – assigned to their courtroom. ‘A’ prosecutors and ‘A’ PDs handled first-degree felonies; ‘B’s handled second-degrees; and ‘C’s worked the bottom-feeder third-degrees, like simple burglaries and grand thefts. Division Chiefs supervised the letters and handled ‘no-name’ homicides – those murders that didn’t grab headlines or get snatched up by prosecutors in specialized divisions like Major Crimes, Domestics, Organized Crime, Career Criminal, or Narcotics. It was just the luck of the felony-assignment draw for Julia Valenciano that she’d been picked to be the B in Judge Leonard Farley’s division, better known around the courthouse as Siberia.
    Julia had been a prosecutor going on three years now, and for a good part of those three years, she’d have to