The Baghdad Lawyer by Sabah Aris

Author:Sabah Aris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

12.

THE JUDGE’S DAUGHTER

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

HOW CAN A MAN CHOOSE between his duty to his friend and the truth? It is an almost impossible choice, yet one case left me facing this exact dilemma. If I lost the case, my friend would be publicly disgraced. If I won, then an innocent man could face seven years in jail.

The case came to my attention as I was working yet another all-nighter. While I sat at my desk, swamped by papers, my secretary interrupted me to say that there was a man outside who was insisting he had to see me straight away.

“Who is he?” I wearily asked.

“He won’t tell me,” she answered. “And I can’t tell who he is because he is wearing a hat and covering up his face.”

I was always happy to see people in my office, but behavior such as this concerned me. As a criminal lawyer in Baghdad who had fought against many dangerous criminals in the courtroom, I always faced the danger that one day one of these individuals would seek vengeance. Yet while this was a possibility I was also intrigued.

“Send him in,” I told my secretary.

Shortly after she left, the door slowly opened and a man appeared hiding his face, just as my secretary had described.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I asked.

“Sabah, it is me,” the man replied as he took off his hat.

I recognized the man immediately, “My God, what are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry, Sabah,” the man said, as I embraced him in a warm hug. “I could not let anyone see me entering your office. After all, it is technically illegal for me to be here.”

He was right. It was illegal. The man was an acting judge, and it was forbidden for any judge to visit a lawyer’s office.

Taking the judge’s hat and coat, I offered him a seat. As we sat down the judge picked up an old picture of my father from my desk and smiled. He remembered him well. He had actually presided over a case that had made my father very happy. It had been a trial where I had represented an old family friend, a woman named Salma, who had been wrongly dismissed from her job because her manager wanted to replace her with a younger and more attractive secretary. I won the case that day, which made my father very proud, as Salma and her family had been very kind to him when he first came to Iraq. He saw it as finally paying her back after all the kindness she had shown him.

Putting down the picture, the judge smiled as we talked about Salma’s case as well as other cases that we had both dealt with throughout the years. Yet despite enjoying the chance to reminisce, I was eager to hear what the judge’s current visit was about. However, for now it was clear that he wanted to ease himself into the subject. It

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