And I headed to mine.
3
At 8 p.m. The steel door of my cell automatically slid closed with a metallic bang that jolted my entire being. Every night it went through me like a train. I had been in lockup for five weeks now and it was something I couldn’t and didn’t ever want to get used to. I sat down on the three-inch-thin mattress and closed my eyes. I knew the overhead light would stay on another hour and I needed to use that time, but this was my ritual. To try to blank out all the harsh sounds and fears. To remind myself of who I still was. A father, a lawyer—but not a murderer.
“You got Q all hot and bothered out there.”
I opened my eyes. It was Bishop in the next cell. There was a grated air vent high up on the wall that separated our cells.
“Didn’t mean to,” I said. “I guess next time somebody needs a jailhouse lawyer in here I’ll just pass.”
“Good plan,” Bishop said.
“And where were you, by the way? It was about to become kill-the-messenger time with him. I looked around, no Bishop.”
“Don’t worry, homes, I had you covered. I was watching from up on the rail. I had your back.”
I was paying Bishop four hundred a week for protection, the payment delivered in cash to his girlfriend and mother of his son in Inglewood. His protection extended throughout the quarter of the high-power octagon where we were housed: two tiers, twenty-four single cells, with twenty-two other inmates presenting varying levels of known and unknown threat to me.
On my first night, Bishop had offered to protect me or hurt me. I didn’t negotiate. He usually stuck close when I was in the dayroom but I had not seen him on the second-tier walkway rail when I gave Quesada the bad news about his case. I knew very little about Bishop, because you didn’t ask questions in jail. His dark black skin hid tattoos to the point of making me wonder why he even got them. But I had been able to make out the words Crip Life inked across the knuckles of both his hands.
I reached under the bed for the cardboard file box that held my own case docs. I checked the rubber bands first. I had wrapped each of the four stacks of documents with two bands each, horizontal and vertical, with the bands crossing at distinct spots on the top sheet. This told me if Bishop or anyone else had snuck in and gone through my stuff. I had a client once who almost went down on a first-degree murder because a jailhouse snitch had gotten to the files in his cell and read enough discovery material to concoct a convincing but phony confession he claimed my client had made to him. Lesson learned. I set rubber-band traps and would know if someone had looked through my paperwork.
I was now facing a first-degree murder charge myself and was going pro se—defending myself. I know what Lincoln said and probably many wise men before him and since. Maybe I did have a fool for a client, but I couldn’t see putting my future in any hands other than my own. So, in the matter of The State of California versus J. Michael Haller, the defense’s war room was cell 13, level K-10 at Twin Towers Correctional Facility.
I pulled my motions packet out of the box and snapped off the rubber bands after confirming that the documents had not been tampered with. A motions hearing was scheduled for the following morning and I wanted to prep. I had three requests before the court, beginning with a motion to lower bail. It had been set at my arraignment at $5 million, with the prosecution successfully arguing that I was not only a flight risk but a threat to witnesses in the case because I knew the inner workings of the local justice system like the back of my hand. It didn’t help that the judge handling the arraignment was the Honorable Richard Rollins Hagan, whose rulings in prior cases I had twice gotten overturned on appeal. He got some payback on me, agreeing with the prosecution’s request to more than double down on the schedule that recommended a $2 million bail for first-degree murder.
At the time, the difference between $2 million and $5 million didn’t matter. I had to decide if I wanted to put everything I had into my freedom or into my defense. I decided on the latter and took up residence in Twin Towers, qualifying for keep-away status as an officer of the court who had potential enemies in all of the gen-pop dorms.
But tomorrow I would stand before a different judge—one I believed I had never crossed—and ask for a reduction in bail. I had two other motions as well and now reviewed my notes so I could stand and argue before the judge instead of read.
More important than the bail motion was the discovery motion that accused the prosecution of withholding information and evidence I was entitled to, and the challenge to the probable cause of the police stop that led to my arrest.
I had to assume that Judge Violet Warfield, who had drawn the case on rotation, would put a time cap on arguments on all the motions. I would need to be ready, succinct, and on point.
“Hey, Bishop?” I said. “You still awake?”
“I’m awake,” Bishop said. “What’s up?”
“I want to practice on you.”
“Practice what?”
“My arguments, Bishop.”
“That ain’t part of our deal, man.”
“I know but the lights are about to go out and I’m not ready. I want you to listen and tell me what you think.”
At that moment the lights on the tier went out.
“Okay,” Bishop said. “Let’s hear it. But you pay extra for this.”
4
Monday, December 2
In the morning, I was on the first bus to the courthouse, having dined on a baloney sandwich and a bruised red apple for breakfast. It was the same breakfast every morning and it was served again at lunch for good measure. In my five weeks here we caught a break from it on Thanksgiving only, when the baloney was replaced with a slice of pressed turkey and served at all three meals. I was long past any revulsion with the food at Twin Towers. It was the routine and now I put it away quickly and easily every breakfast and every lunch. Still, I estimated that I had already lost between ten and twenty pounds during my incarceration and I looked at it as getting down to fighting weight for what would surely be the bout of my life.
On the bus, I was with thirty-nine other inmates, most of whom were heading to morning arraignment court. As a lawyer, I had seen the wide-eyed look of fear in clients when I met them for initial consultation at first appearances. But that was always in court and always with me calming and preparing them for what lay ahead. On the buses, I was surrounded by it. Men facing their first experience of incarceration. Men who had been in lockup many times before. Rookie or recidivist, there was a palpable sense of desperation coming from all of them.
I found the bus rides to and from court to be my own moments of biggest fear. It was random selection when you were loaded on. I had no Bishop, no bodyguard. Should anything happen to me, the deputies were behind an iron grate at the front: the driver and so-called safety deputy. Their role would be simply to sort out the dead and dying when whatever happened was over. They weren’t there to protect and serve, just to move people along in the underbelly of the justice system.
This time it was one of the modern buses with compartmentalized seating, the sight of which filled me with even more dread. The newer fleet was designed after there had been full-scale riots on buses that had raged out of control. With the Sheriff’s Department responsible for the safety of inmates, the riots resulted in scores of lawsuits against the agency for failure to protect those who had been injured and killed. I had lodged a couple of those lawsuits myself and so was aware of the weaknesses of the old and new designs.