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THE LAW IS A ASS for 06/13/2000
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 47
Originally written as installment # 37 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 568, October 5, 1984 issue
What do you get when you have three comic-book stories of varying degrees of annoyance and a silly way to connect them into one coherent column? Why, you get something like ...
******
"The Law is a Ass"
Installment # 47
by
Bob Ingersoll
I had had it. I was fed up with being an underpaid, overworked public defender. I wanted to earn real money like real lawyers.
I called up my boss, Hy Friedman, quit the public defenders and rented office space in the Standard Building, where all real defense lawyers had their offices. Not just because it was across the street from the Cuyahoga County Justice Center in downtown Cleveland, but also because the Sidebar --the official liquid libation vendor to the criminal defense bar--is on the first floor so just a short walk away. Hey, a man's got to have his priorities set, doesn't he?
#
"Mr. Ingersoll, there's a client out her to see you."
"Send him in, Della." I had hired Della Street as my secretary. She had been out of work since that second Perry Mason series, the one with Monte Markham, failed. Granted her typing skills had deteriorated from 120 words per minute to about 30 words period, but she knew the business and I needed that.
"I think I should warn you, though, he's weird."
"What do you mean 'weird? ' "
"Well, he's wearing the most gaudy red and yellow costume I've ever seen and I think his head's on fire.
Oh great.
I let Firestorm into my office.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Raymond?" Firestorm looked at me worried, obviously afraid that I had cracked his secret identity and would sell him out at the first opportunity. But what else should I have expected from a second-string super-hero who is a second-rate Peter Parker in his secret identity; no understanding of the basics, such as attorney-client privilege. "Excuse me," I said Firestorm's pea-brained mind at ease, "I meant, 'Mr. Storm.' "
"It's Felicity Smoak. She keeps pestering me with nuisance suits."
Felicity Smoak was the owner, president, CEO and whatever else one needed to be to connote "in charge" of a small computer software company located in the World Trade Center. Recently, in a battle with Stratos and Bazooka Joan--the super-villain equivalents of Earnest P. Worrell--Firestorm used his transmuting powers to turn the roof of the World Trade Center into loadstone, trapping the criminals. Problem was, Ms. Smoak stored all her programs on computer discs, magnetic computer discs. The result was that all of her software discs were exposed to the magnetic field of the Loadstone Trade Center and their contents wiped clean by the powerful magnetic field.
"Don't tell me, let me guess. She's suing you for turning her company's software discs into so many coasters?"
"How did you know?"
"I read Firestorm # 29. I didn't like it, but I read it. I'll bet Felicity is also suing you for what you did after she confronted you and you lost your temper: turning her clothes into soap suds and rending her nude."
"Yes she is. Mr. Ingersoll will you represent me?
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"First of all, I'm not a civil lawyer. And even if I were, I doubt I'd take your case. You're going to lose. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm a lawyer just starting out. I can't afford to take on, as my first high-profile case, a dead-bang loser."
"But didn't you say that the Doctrine of Emergency protects super-heroes from damage they cause while fighting super-villains?"
"It can, sometimes. But it's not an all-protective shield that operated in all cases. It won't, for example, protect you from stupidity.
"For example if you try save a person from drowning by throwing him an anchor, that would be stupid on your part and it would make the situation worse. If you try to put out a fire with a can of liquid clearly marked GASOLINE, that would also be stupid and would make the situation worse. The Doctrine of Emergency doesn't protect you from gross negligence and stupidity which makes the emergency worse.
In the same way: if you fight Stratos and Bazooka Joan you can't turn the roof of the World Trade Center into a loadstone; that was stupid and unnecessary. It's stupid, because you know the World Trade Center has several thousand computers in it, computers whose hard drives and floppy discs will be wiped clean by the intense magnetic field created from a lodestone roof. So your method, while visual thus satisfying the needs of a comic book, was grossly negligent because it caused foreseeable, and massive, damage making the situation worse and was unnecessary, because there were other, less harmful, ways to defeat them."
"Like what?"
"Turning their clothes into magnets, so they attracted each other instead of the roof. Turning Bazooka Joan's giant flying sled into a cage to trap them both. Telling Bazooka Joan that her stupid flying sled was physically impossible, because every time she fired the bazooka on the front end of her flying sled, the recoil would have caused it to spin around on its own axis out of control.
"Thus we see that your act wasn't a good way to handle the emergency--if the miserable likes of Stratos and Bazooka Joan can even be called an emergency--and caused more damage that those two losers could have caused if you simply looked the other way and let them have the run of the city. I mean I thought The Ringer was the stupidest super-villain ever until I saw Bazooka Joan.
"You're going to lose. And even if you win the suit for wiping out all her computer discs, there's no way you can win the other suit. You know the one for invasion of privacy or intentional infliction of emotional harm or battery for making her appear in public nude. I mean don't even try to pretend that your turning her nude was an emergency or anything other trying to embarrass her, because she yelled at you and you were having a hissy fit.
"Ben Grimm can get away with that, he's got Reed Richards's fortune backing him up. You've got..."
I showed Firestorm the door. It wasn't hard. It was that big wooden thing in the middle of the far wall. He left, but there was already someone else waiting to see me.
Ms. Tree.
I told her not even to bother coming in. I had seen the indictment papers. Obstruction of justice and failure to report a crime. She was guilty of both and I didn't want part of either.
It wasn't so much that she was guilty, hell most of my clients were. It's just that what she did bothered me. She and Mike Mist had solved a murder up at Mohawk Mountain House in Ms. Tree # 9. It seems that Donna Lee Westlake, a mystery writer of some renown, was trying to solve the thirty-year old mystery of what had happened to a man named Karper and the money he stole from the Grantwood Bank.
Ms. Westlake solved the mystery. Karper attacked Elwood, a bellhop at the Mohawk Mountain House. Elwood, in defending himself, accidently killed Karper. When Westlake heard this, she got mad and killed Elwood, making it look like a suicide, because Karper, it turned out, was Westlake's father.
But Ms. Tree and Mike Mist saw through Westlake's ploy and discovered she was a murderer. Ms. Tree knew Westlake had committed homicide. Ms. Tree didn't tell the police about the crime. I don't know why. Maybe it was because Ms. Tree liked Westlake's writing. Maybe it was because Westlake had killed a killer. Didn't matter which. The first reason didn't wash. Excusing someone's crime because you like their writing isn't a justification. And the second justification, that Westlake had killed a murderer so was only doing the State's work as executioner, was wrong. One hundred percent wrong. And not just because New York didn't even have the death penalty at the time.
Elwood wasn't a murderer. Oh, he had killed someone, but he wasn't guilty of a homicide. Remember Karper was trying to kill Elwood. Elwood acted in self-defense. He committed no crime. So excusing Westlake's homicide, on the grounds that she only killed a killer, is improper.
Ms. Tree asked me why I still wouldn't take her case. I explained.
"You're a hero. Granted you're a hard-boiled detective, but I don't care if you're a three- minute egg. Heroes--at least heroes, as I see them--are supposed to have a code, they're supposed to stand for something, to be a role model.
"That's why I don't read Mike Hammer; I don't like his code. And I don't like the one you demonstrated by letting Westlake go. She killed another human being, one who was innocent of wrong doing. If she deserved clemency, that was for the judge and jury to decide, not you. I can't condone what you did, and I can't defend you."
Once again, I showed a potential client the door.
Once again, there was a new, potential client waiting to see me
Robin Rand. You saw his case in The Fly # 9. Remember how someone had framed Tom Troy, the lawyer who is also the Fly's secret identity, for jury tampering? (I can almost forgive you that, it happened so long ago I can see where you might have forgotten. Considering the story, I can even understand it if you actively tried to forget it.) Anyway, Rand was the man who framed Troy.
Rand was acting as the Earth-bound agent of Karth, an evil emissary from the dimension that gives Tom Troy his Fly powers. Karth wanted to destroy the Fly, so he set up the frame. Rand was a willing accomplice. How willing? Try good and willing. Consider: Rand had plastic surgery so he would look like Tom Troy, then he tampered with a jury, so Troy would be blamed. Rand wouldn't have been too hard to find, if you had wanted to go good and willing hunting.
The Fly found Rand and coerced a confession out of him by flying him up into the air and threatening to drop him, if he didn't confess. Rand confessed. Joe (The Shield) Higgins, who is also an F.B.I. agent, taped the confession. Troy and Higgins played it for the judicial ethics committee, and the committee reinstated Troy's license to practice law.
So far so good. I mean, yes, Rand was a straw man; created by the new writer on The Fly simply to end an over-long plot line and by being guilty instead of the Fly. But Rand did end the plot line; easily one of the worst subplots I had endured in years, so I could forgive him his strawman stature. Hell, I even told Rand to thank the new writer on The Fly for that service.
Rand's problem was that he was being prosecuted for bribery, jury tampering and probably driving left of center. And they had an air tight case against him, didn't they? Rand had confessed, after all.
I got Rand off in ten minutes.
The Fifth Amendment. the Constitution. Self incrimination. Fly forced that confession out of Rand, by threatening to turn him into an ugly splat on the sidewalk. It wasn't admissible against him
The prosecution argued that the Fly is a private citizen, and the Fifth Amendment only talks about confessions coerced by the police or the state. I reminded the court that the Fifth Amendment talks about compulsion to incriminate, it doesn't say anything about who does the compelling. I also pointed out several cases, where compulsion from private citizens producing confessions invalidated the confessions. I even argued the legal principles; that the reason a coerced confession isn't admissible is that it is inherently unreliable, as noone can be sure whether the confession was truthful or someone who was being beaten simply saying what another person wanted to hear to stop the beating.
The State argued that the Miranda case only deals with custodial interrogations. Rand wasn't in jail at the time. I countered with the principle that "in custody" isn't always the same thing as "in jail." I fa reasonable man thinks he is not free to go, when the police question him, he is in custody for Fifth Amendment purposes. I pointed out that Rand had been taken, against his will, by a super-hero and an FBI agent. The fact that he wasn't in police headquarters didn't matter. No reasonable man in Rand's position--which was upside down and several hundred feet above the city--would think he was free to go, after being grabbed up by a super-hero and an FBI agent and dangled him above the ground. And even if he was free to go, he wouldn't want to go, because the only place he could go was down.
The judge wavered.
I won, when I reminded the judge that the Fly was acting in conjunction with an FBI agent. The judge didn't need any more State action than that to realize that the Fifth Amendment had been trammeled upon.
The judge threw out the confession, because it violated the self incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment. Without the confession, there was no case. The fact that Rand looked like Tom Troy wasn't enough to convict him of anything. The prosecution had to drop the charges.
My first high-profile case and a clear winner. I could see my career in private practice spreading before my eyes, an uncompromising success.
Rand congratulated me on the steps of the Justice Center. He said I was a, "sharp cookie," and he liked the way I got him off on a technicality.
I tried to stop him in mid-sentence, but it was too late.
The sound of machine gun fire filled the air. A red flower-like blood stain blossomed on Rand's white shirt. He died on the Justice Center steps.
I looked up to see a man dressed all in black with white and blue V-shaped piping on his shoulders speeding away on his Vigilante motorcycle.
#
Hy? Mr. Friedman? Can I have my job at the Public Defender office back?
Please!
BOB INGERSOLL
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