Kaleidoscope by Alan P. Woodruff

Author:Alan P. Woodruff [Woodruff, Alan P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alan P. Woodruff
Published: 2019-04-07T22:00:00+00:00

26.

Lucius White’s War Room, the place where complex cases were analyzed and eventually were prepared for trial, was a windowless room between White’s and Harris’s offices. In the middle of the room was an oak conference table surrounded by six designer chairs. One corner of the room was occupied by a short green leather sofa, two matching chairs, and a table that held a coffee machine and a copier. At one end of the room there was a white marker board on which the attorneys and their investigator made notes, charted relationships between people and facts, and recorded working theories. One side wall was covered with brown corkboard. Early in every case, seemingly random facts were recorded on white cards and posted on the corkboard walls. As patterns later emerged, facts were transferred to colored cards, each color representing facts that related to different events.

The trial of United States v. Martin Bower was scheduled to begin in a matter of weeks, and White was still not certain what his strategy would be. That was the purpose of today’s meeting.

They had amassed an abundance of facts, but there were still too many gaps and apparent conflicts in their knowledge to enable them to formulate their trial strategies. The facts he knew represented little more than a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to guide the placement of the pieces. Maybe today would be the day they could be brought together.

War Room conferences were not usually attended by clients. White, Horse, and Harris had, over time, developed their own ways of discussing facts and legal theories that, to a layman, might as well have been a foreign language. The presence of clients at these meetings usually meant that half their precious planning time was spent answering their client’s questions about the law and how it applied. But today was different. They needed Bower’s help sorting out what they knew, but the decision to include him in their working session had not been easy.

In criminal cases, an attorney who is not certain of a client’s innocence or alibi generally does not want to know too much. Defendants cannot be compelled to testify, and juries are always instructed that a defendant’s failure to testify cannot be considered evidence. But the reality is that, as the saying goes, “If you don’t talk, you don’t walk.” An attorney’s dilemma is that if they believe that their client is likely to lie on the witness stand — and thereby commit perjury — the attorney cannot call his own client as a witness.

White was certain that Bower would be a good witness and wanted to be able to use him, but he still wasn’t certain of Bower’s innocence.

When the participants began to arrive, the War Room was filled with the aroma of fresh coffee — a blend that included a mix of hazelnut and vanilla. An assortment of morning pastries adorned a silver tray in the middle of the conference table.

The corkboard wall of the War Room was covered

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