I know that my longer posts may not be quite as welcome here, so I’ve done my best to cut this one down. For those who make it through to the end of this sad tale of theft, vandalism and incompetence, I hope it was worth it.

* * *

“How’s it going?”

It was Karl. I didn’t like talking to Karl, but I couldn’t help it. We’d been classmates in law school. Karl had finished near the bottom, and I near the top, but Karl was doing great, and I was really struggling. I told Karl I was doing ok.

“Whaddya got today?” he asked.

I had a bail hearing. I was starting to do more contested bail hearings, because bail court was always packed, and it was a great place to pick up clients. You show up, fight for your client, and if you’re lucky, you pick up another client and on a good day, maybe even two. “Just a bail hearing,” I said, “what about you?”

“I have five guilty pleas,” said Karl, not trying to keep the delight out of his voice.

“Wow, that’s great, Karl.”

Karl was a dump truck. That’s what we called lawyers like Karl back then, lawyers who knew no plea other than ‘guilty’. Karl was going to plead five people guilty that day, and the provincial legal aid plan was going to reward him handsomely for throwing his clients under the bus. He’d be leaving the courthouse a G-note richer in receivables.

“I’ve opened twenty files this month,” he continued, “things are going really great. How about you?”

“I’m doing ok,” I said, and excused myself to do my crappy little bail hearing. I entered the courtroom and sat up front, waiting for things to get started, and while I waited I wondered why Karl had so many clients, and I had so few.

Karl went to law school as a mature student, in his mid-thirties when we started, but around forty now. Maybe his maturity helped him. He had a hint of gray at the temples, but I had no gray at all. Instead, I had a decidedly baby-faced look about me. Maybe that was it, I thought to myself. Maybe I should grow a beard or something, make myself look a bit older. Then court started, and I sat around waiting for my client’s case to be called.

We didn’t have smartphones back in those days, so I sat there with no smartphone, and watched as the judge started to run through his docket. There were a few consents, an adjournment or two, a comically brief contested bail hearing that ended with a self-rep being sent back to the cells in a rage, and then it was my client’s turn.

“I don’t know why my friend is fighting this,” the crown said, “we are willing to grant bail, on conditions.” I explained that my client didn’t want conditions other than to keep the peace and be of good behaviour. The judge sighed, and told the crown to get on with it. So the crown put the complainant on the stand, my client’s ex-wife, and the court heard her tale of how my client had beaten her and tossed her down the porch steps at his house. When she finished, I got up to cross-examine. My client had told me a very different story about how his ex-wife went down the stairs, and some more things besides.

“I believe you have a conviction for prostitution?” That’s how I began. I have always liked getting straight to the point.

“Yeah, but I got a pardon, so it don’t count,” the so-called victim said. That was a pretty good start, and it got better when the woman admitted, after a bit of rough handling, to her chronic alcoholism, that she was excluded from all family events, that she knew she was unwelcome at her ex-husband’s home, and the final kicker, that after leaving said ex-husband’s house, she’d been arrested for drunk driving, and it was only at the station after she blew one forty-five that the cop noticed bruising, and she told him all about what her evil ex-husband had done to her when she’d shown up for a family gathering. After I was done with her, I put my client’s current wife on the stand, an eye witness to everything including the so-called victim’s drunken fall, and when she finished her testimony the crown leaned over to me and said that he’d be dropping the charges. A pretty good result for junior lawyer me, but not really, because my client was factually innocent, and the crown’s witness was about as bad as you get. But still, I was feeling proud of myself. “Eat that, Karl,” I thought as I headed for the door, “eat that, you dump truck.” I left the courtroom and headed for the lawyer’s lounge to brag of my success.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and saw an old guy.

“I need a lawyer,” he said. He was maybe fifty, which to me was pretty old. I recognized the man; he’d been in court for a change of bail conditions on consent. He’d been hanging around waiting for paperwork when the court recessed.

“I remember you. You’re the guy charged with destroying a house.”

“I didn’t totally destroy it.” That was true, in the sense that the house was still standing. But he’d taken a chainsaw to it, and other tools as well, and by the time the bank got him out of there, the place was a wreck. The man hadn’t taken too kindly to being tossed out for not making the mortgage payments. I asked if he had any paperwork on him. He pulled out the original bail conditions, one of which was to keep his paperwork on him at all times. I glanced at it.

“Charged with damaging a mortgagee’s interest in a property. Interesting. Heard of that one, but never seen it.”

“It’s not fair,” he said, “I don’t wanna go to jail again.” I asked him what was his prior conviction.

“That’s just it. I already went to jail for this house thing, fifteen days I got. The judge gave me fifteen days last month.”

“What?” The man said more words, and then more, but his words were the scattered nonsense you hear from clients sometimes, the narrative out of order, the important facts buried under irrelevant crap, and in the end it took me almost thirty minutes to get the full story out of him at the coffee shop around the corner. But by the time he finished, I was excited. I was more than excited. I was seriously stoked.

“So let me get this straight,” I said, “the bank noticed you were wrecking the house with power tools when they came to check things out.”

“Right.”

“And when they saw what you were doing, they got a court order telling you to stop wrecking the house.”

“Right.”

“And after you got that court order, you wrecked the house even more, as in a lot more.”

“I was pretty mad. Wouldn’t you be, if you were being kicked out of your own home?”

“And when the bank saw that you’d breached the court order, they brought a motion for contempt.”

“Yeah, and the judge, he gave me fifteen days. And I served the whole fifteen. No parole or anything.” That seemed harsh, but when I looked into things a bit later, I learned that it was true, and that prison officials thought that the usual parole rules didn’t apply to those convicted of contempt.

“That’s pretty harsh,” I said.

“Do you think you can do something for me?” We made an appointment for him to come to my office later that week. He gave me a retainer cheque, and after he left the office I started to dance around like a nut. I burst into Aaron’s office. “You’ll never believe this,” I said, “I gotta new case!”

“Yeah?” said Aaron, the lawyer I rented space from. He was in his mid-forties, technically married but on his way to a divorce, and locked in perpetual mortal combat with his ex. “Do I get a piece?” he said. Aaron’s family law lawyer was super expensive.

I shook my head. “Nope,I landed this client on my own. And you’ll never guess how I’m gonna plead him.”

“Guilty?”

“Of course not!” I hated pleading clients guilty. It was a last resort sort of thing. I was at court to keep people out of jail, not help put them in.

“So not guilty.”

“Nope!” I said.

“So you got your first insanity plea. Congratulations.” Aaron found me amusing, and maybe a little weird. I’d been lawyering for almost three years by this point, but I had lost none of the glee that I’d started out with. I still haven’t, after more than thirty years.

“Nope. You’ll never guess.”

“Guess what?” said Dimitris, walking in to join us. He had been promoted to Aaron’s partner a year before, a big mistake on Aaron’s part. That promotion is what started them both on the path to disbarment.

“I got this new case, and I’m gonna plead the guy autrefois convict!”

They stared at me blankly. I decided to educate them.

“Aside from the usual guilty or not guilty, there’s two other pleas: autrefois acquit, and autrefois convict. You plead a guy autrefois convict if he’s already been convicted of the thing he’s charged with.” When I’d learned about autrefois pleas in law school, I thought I’d never get a chance to do one. I’d never heard of anyone pleading it; it was just one of the zillion things I learned in law school that got shoved to the back of my brain as an interesting thing, but something that I’d never need. After all, how often do people get charged twice for the same thing.

“That’s it?” said Aaron, “that’s why you’re excited? Because you’re pleading this auterfoy thing?”

Aaron didn’t get it. Neither did Dimitris. When I got home that night I told my wife all about it, and she didn’t really get it either, not being a lawyer,, but she understood me, and was happy for me. Plus the thousand dollar retainer. That made us both happy.

The following month my client’s case came up, and I was ready, I was stoked. I checked the list, and saw that I’d drawn Judge Hermann, also known as the Hermannator, but I didn’t mind. The Hermannator was a real hardass, but he respected good legal argument, and I had a good one that day. I walked into the lawyer’s lounge and grabbed a cup of the shitty coffee that was always on tap. In less than an hour I was going to be in a courtroom. I was going to plead my client autrefois convict, and when I said those words, jaws would drop. Pens would stop writing. Mouths would stop moving, and all heads would turn at the strange plea, so rarely heard in a courtroom, and everyone would look at the lawyer who had entered the unusual plea, and they would say, who is this young lawyer, this new Robinette, this Greenspan, this Cicero, this–

“Hey, what do you have today?” It was Karl the dump truck, Karl of the quick and dirty guilty pleas. Crowns loved Karl. Judges loved Karl. But defence lawyers hated him, and he was barely tolerated in the lawyer’s lounge.

“A plea,” I said, feeling smug.

“Just one? I’ve got six. That’s a record for me. I only had five coming in, but I picked up another.”

“That’s great, Karl, just great.” Karl’s crap couldn’t touch me today. I was pleading a guy autrefois convict, and I didn’t give a damn how well Karl was doing, or how badly my practice was struggling. I was in legal heaven. But I didn’t enjoy Karl’s company, so I left him and the crappy coffee in the lawyer’s lounge, and went out into the hallways to find my client. I found him sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. We had a brief discussion.

“Whaddyou mean, you switched lawyers?” I said.

“I talked to this guy,” he said. “What guy?” He handed me a card, but before I looked at it I knew what I would see “Karl Mandrick”. it said, “Barrister, Solicitor and Dump Truck.”

“But why?” I asked, “why would you want to switch lawyers on the day of your court case? I know the case inside out; I’m totally prepared. We’re gonna plead you autref–

“Yeah, about that autrewhatever thing, Mr. Mandrick says he’s never heard of it, that it’s not really a plea. It’s just gonna make the judge mad.” Dump truck Karl had never heard of the plea of autrefois convict,and he’d infected the client with his ignorance. I tried to explain the autrefois convict plea again, but the client was locked in, and it’s hard to shake a client who’s locked in on some idiot notion.

“Yeah, so Mr. Mandrick says he gets along great with the judges and stuff, and he told me I’d walk out of here with no jail time, for sure.”

“Wait here.” I abandoned my client on the bench and headed back to the lawyer’s lounge to have a word with Karl. When I opened the door to the lounge there were a few of the older lawyers, the usual crowd. A couple of them were yacking away, another was making notes. Over in the corner was Karl.

I didn’t want to embarrass Karl or anything like that, and besides, even at that young age I had already developed a wonderful sense of tact, of how to handle difficult situations politely and calmly.

“What the fuck, Karl?” I shouted. Pens stopped writing, and mouths stopped moving and heads turned towards me. Karl looked up at me, appalled. “What the fuck,” I said again, “you stole my client, the guy who wrecked his house.” The older lawyers looked over in disapproval. I turned to them and pointed at Karl. “He stole my client right out in the hallway. I’m on the record, I got a retainer and all that, and this fucker, this dump truck, stole my client, and now he’s gonna plead him guilty.”

“He wants to plead guilty,” Karl said.

“Only because he’s an idiot.” I left the lawyer’s lounge and headed back to where my client was waiting. I could hear the dump truck following me, and then Karl and I fought it out in front of the client, an unseemly squabble, embarrassing really, especially considering that I lost, lost to Karl, Karl of the guilty plea, Karl the dump truck. I was forced to admit defeat.

“Fine,” I said, “but I’m going to watch. Gonna get my money’s worth.”

“Whaddya mean?” the client said.

“I’m keeping your retainer. You’re not getting a penny back.” Our squabble became louder and more unseemly and it ended only when the doors opened and it was time to enter the courtroom and watch the Hermannator dispense justice. I sat there for an hour, listening to adjournments and pleas and then it was the turn of my former client, and his new lawyer, Karl. It was time for Karl to work his magic. I watched as Karl pleaded his man guilty, without negotiating with the crown, without preparation, without anything at all.

“My client’s a first offender,” Karl said, going on about his client’s spotless reputation, about the client’s moment of madness, his speedy regret, assurances that he would never do anything like that again. But this was Judge Hermann’s courtroom, and Hermann liked to draw blood. He gave the client thirty days. The client jumped to his feet.

“But the last time the judge only gave me fifteen! It’s not fair!”

“Fifteen days for what?” said the judge

“Fifteen days for wrecking a house.”

The judge turned to the crown. “I thought you said no priors.” The crown shook his head. “Nothing that I can see.”

“Well,” said the judge, “he’s admitted to a prior, and I’m entitled to believe an admission against interest.” He turned back to the poor sap standing in the dock before him. “I was going to give you thirty, but seeing as you have a prior, and for the same thing–”

All Karl could manage was a feeble ‘but but but”, and then he turned, and looked at me as if for rescue. He mouthed something to me, and to this day I think he mouthed something like, “what was that plea?” But I ignored him, and I watched as The Hermannator gave the client sixty days. The client tried to speak, but his words came out in a rapid jumble that sounded like nonsense. The judge told him to shut up and sit down. When I walked out, Karl was trying to get the judge to let his client serve his time on weekends, but The Hermannator wasn’t in to letting people serve time on weekends, and I didn’t need to hear the rest. I went back to the lawyer’s lounge and told everyone there the gory details, and we all had a good laugh. When I got home that night my wife asked how did the case go, the case with that special plea.

“It went great, really great,” I said, and handed her a cheque for a thousand bucks. And it was great, actually, because that day the older lawyers in the lounge treated me like a peer. I felt their respect, and that made it all worthwhile.