Page 38 of The Lincoln Lawyer

He said the last part cheerfully, as if he were taking great delight in sending McGinley off to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth.

The sentencing went by quickly after that. There was nothingin the presentencing investigation report besides what everybody already knew. Darius McGinley had had only one profession since age eleven, drug dealer. He’d had only one true family, a gang. He’d never gotten a driver’s license, though he drove a BMW. He’d never gotten married, though he’d fathered three babies. It was the same old story and same old cycle trotted out a dozen times a day in courtrooms across the county. McGinley lived in a society that intersected mainstream America only in the courtrooms. He was just fodder for the machine. The machine needed to eat and McGinley was on the plate. Flynn sentenced him to the agreed-upon three to five years in prison and read all of the standard legal language that came with a plea agreement. For laughs—though only his own courtroom staff complied—he read the boilerplate using his brogue again. And then it was over.

I know McGinley dealt death and destruction in the form of rock cocaine and probably committed untold violence and other offenses he was never charged with, but I still felt bad for him. I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything but thug life in the first place. He’d never known his father and had dropped out of school in the sixth grade to learn the rock trade. He could accurately count money in a rock house but he had never had a checking account. He had never been to a county beach, let alone outside of Los Angeles. And now his first trip out would be on a bus with bars over the windows.

Before he was led back into the holding cell for processing and transfer to prison I shook his hand, his movement restricted by the waist chain, and wished him good luck. It is something I rarely do with my clients.

“No sweat,” he said to me. “I’ll be back.”

And I didn’t doubt it. In a way, Darius McGinley was just as much a franchise client as Louis Roulet. Roulet was most likely a one-shot deal. But over the years, I had a feeling McGinley would be one of what I call my “annuity clients.” He would be the gift that would keep on giving—as long as he defied the odds and kept on living.

I put the McGinley file in my briefcase and headed backthrough the gate while the next case was called. Outside the courtroom Raul Levin was waiting for me in the crowded hallway. We had a scheduled meeting to go over his findings in the Roulet case. He’d had to come to Compton because I had a busy schedule.

“Top o’ the morning,” Levin said in an exaggerated Irish accent.

“Yeah, you saw that?”

“I stuck my head in. The guy’s a bit of a racist, isn’t he?”

“And he can get away with it because ever since they unified the courts into one countywide district, his name goes on the ballot everywhere. Even if the people of Compton rose up like a wave to vote him off, the Westsiders could still cancel them out. It’s fucked up.”

“How’d he get on the bench in the first place?”

“Hey, you get a law degree and make the right contributions to the right people and you could be a judge, too. He was appointed by the governor. The hard part is winning that first retention election. He did. You’ve never heard the ‘In like Flynn’ story?”

“Nope.”

“You’ll love it. About six years ago Flynn gets his appointment from the governor. This is before unification. Back then judges were elected by the voters of the district where they presided. The supervising judge for L.A. County checks out his credentials and pretty quickly realizes that he’s got a guy with lots of political connections but no talent or courthouse experience to go with it. Flynn was basically an office lawyer. Probably couldn’t find a courthouse, let alone try a case, if you paid him. So the presiding judge dumps him down here in Compton criminal because the rule is you have to run for retention the year after being appointed to the bench. He figures Flynn will fuck up, anger the folks and get voted out. One year and out.”

“Headache over.”

“Exactly. Only it didn’t work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown walks into the clerk’s office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?”

“Not personally. I know of her.”

“So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she’s black, she’s a woman and she’s popular in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better.”

“Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?”

“That’s what I’m getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in—though it was kind of curious why she’d want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures with her practice.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk’s office and withdraws from the ballot.”

Levin nodded.

“So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat,” he said.

“You got it. Then unification comes in and they’ll never be able to get him out of there.”

Levin looked outraged.

“That’s bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that’s gotta be a violation of election laws.”

“Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie has always maintained that she wasn’t paid off or part of some plan Flynn cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn’t sustain her lifestyle on a judge’s pay. But I’ll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front of Flynn.”

“And they call it a justice system.”