DEVIL'S SLIDE
The folks who run the Hamm’s Building, where my office is located, put out a newsletter and invited me to contribute an article discussing the service I offer. I submitted this, which they kindly published.
DEVIL’S SLIDE
I represent ordinary individuals with extraordinary legal problems, usually because of some psychological problem. Often the problem originates with them or their relationship with someone else. The problem may be magnified by public officials who bring their own attitudes into the case. Having served as a prosecuting attorney for years, and a defense attorney for even more, I pay attention to the psychological factors involved in the legal mess my client wants me to get him out of.
Shortly after moving into the Hamm’s Building I received a call from an attorney in New York who was the friend of a judge in San Francisco who kindly recommended me for a legal emergency.
The attorney in New York had a client from Brazil whose grandson was lying unconscious in San Francisco General Hospital after attempting suicide by jumping from Devil’s Slide, the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Mateo. Sheriff’s deputies had noticed his car and found a suicide note inside. The crew of a Coast Guard helicopter located the young man lying unconscious, four hundred feet below. Using climbing ropes, they rescued the Brazilian man, Sebastiao, a nom de plum, 23.
When Sebastiao regained consciousness at the hospital, I spoke to him, and met his mother from Brazil and sister who arrived from New York. I learned that Sebastiao had come to the U.S. as a visitor a few years before, but overstayed because there were few jobs in Brazil. Here he met an attractive young Brazilian woman and they had a child together. But they fought over his working two jobs and his not being around enough to suit her. She would tell him things that drove him to distraction, such as during love-making that a boyfriend she had acquired during a period of separation was better than he was. One evening they had a fight over this, according to the public testimony, and Sebastiao’s roommate broke it up. Sebastiao left in a high state of emotion and the woman called the police, reporting that he had choked and tried to kill her. The roommate told police that he had seen Sebastiao with his forearm around the woman’s neck, which had red marks, which the police photographed.
Angry, disappointed, and realizing that he’d made a mess of his attempt to be a success in the U.S., Sebastiao decided that the solution to his problems was to end it all by jumping off Devil’s Slide, which is how he wound up meeting me.
The District Attorneys Office charged Sebastiao not only with striking a woman he lived with and leaving an injury, the red marks on the throat, but also with Attempted Murder, a very serious crime. The young prosecuting attorney said that Sebastiao was a candidate for State Prison. My job as the defense attorney was to try to beat the Attempted Murder charge as being too much for the circumstances and to keep Sebastiao out of prison. He was unable to make a very high bail.
At the preliminary hearing before a magistrate, I questioned the young woman and she admitted taunting Sebastiao about the boyfriend and contributing to the start of the fight.
The magistrate who heard the evidence was a woman who, from her questions and comments seemed to have a mature understanding of human weakness as well as the law. She ruled that Sebastiao should be held for trial, but only on the Spousal Abuse charges, not the Attempted Murder, because the evidence showed that this was a sudden quarrel that occurred in the heat of passion, literally. Had the woman died instead of receiving red marks on the neck, the offense might have been considered manslaughter, not murder because of those existing factors and the lack of worse elements.
The young district attorney, however, who had recently married and may never have had a quarrel with his bride, much less a real fight, felt it appropriate to file, again, along with the battery charges, the previously dismissed charge of Attempted Murder, which he is allowed to do, subject to my objection.
Having won earlier on the facts, I now had to win again on the law, by moving to dismiss the re-filed charge. This meant that I had to write a legal brief, a small book, in effect, setting forth the facts in detail, the law, based on experience and legal research, excerpts from the hearing transcript of witness-testimony, the magistrate’s earlier ruling, and my argument stating why the Superior Court judge should overrule the prosecuting attorney, follow the ruling of the magistrate below, and dismiss the Attempted Murder charge. The case had come down to a conflict in judgment between the young prosecuting attorney and the older defense attorney, me.
We needed a good judge or soon we’d be facing a jury and I’d have to do what you’ve seen in the celebrity trials on TV, which I’ve been called on to do more than once over the years, without the circus-like publicity, although the Golden Dragon Massacre and Foxglove cases certainly had their share. Foxglove was a tale of poison-murder that lacked only two things, poison and murder.
The Presiding Judge before whom our motion to dismiss the Attempted Murder charge came was a well-experienced, no-nonsense sort of man, someone I’d worked with as a prosecutor, and before whom I’d had the not-always-pleasant experience of trying a case to a jury.
Was he going to side with the prosecutor, as he often did, or the defense attorney, as he was often disinclined to do, or the magistrate who had dismissed the Attempted Murder charge earlier, I wondered.
I argued that the magistrate had used good judgment in understanding the facts and that the prosecutor was being somewhat overzealous in refusing to accept her judgment and overcharging the case.
The prosecutor pointed to the red marks and some heated language that sounded awfully much like threats before the fight. If you’ve ever watched “Twelve Angry Men,” the great jury movie starring Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, you’ll have seen an excellent example of threatening words that aren’t always meant as real threats, at least when they’re not backed by red marks on the throat.
The Superior Court judge ruled that the magistrate had correctly assessed the facts when she found that the sudden quarrel and heat of passion eliminated the essential Attempted Murder requirements of premeditation, deliberation, and malice. In other words, this fight was a heated exchange, not the sort of cold-blooded attack required for murder, despite some unfortunate language. “I agree with Mr. Sheridan that the district attorney has overcharged the case,” remarked the judge, as he threw out the Attempted Murder charge for the second time.
With that now out of the way, unless the DA appealed the ruling, the two attorneys were required remove our combat helmets and put on our diplomat’s suits to see if we could work out a negotiated disposition that I hoped would spare Sebastiao from going to prison.
Sebastiao, who by now had recovered from his injuries and wanted to return to Brazil, thus accepted a deal I negotiated for his release from the county jail on the basis of months of credit for time served, while Uncle Sam saw to it that he got his wish to return to Brazil, since, as an overstay, he had no papers. Arrangements were made for the sister to bring the child to Brazil for visits.
I also teach Constitutional Law at San Francisco Law School where the Student Bar Association generously voted me “Professor of the Year.”
In conclusion, the sort of thing we do in Suite 810 of the Hamm’s Building is to help people who have problems with the police or at the Hall of Justice in the Bay Area counties, particularly if it involves allegations of a domestic or sexual nature, as I’ve spent quite a bit of time working in this area as a prosecutor and defense attorney. Legal problems because of psychological problems, I call this.
That’s how I wind up helping ordinary people with extraordinary problems.
