The Cartel Lawyer by Dave Daren (popular books to read .TXT) 📗

had raged against the injustice of the sentence, a penalty imposed despite the prosecutor’s recommendation of community service.

The story sounded so familiar that I wasn’t surprised when I saw the name Travis Williams near the end of her post. She said that she’d tried to change the man’s mind, but that she hadn’t been able to get an appointment with him, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer for the appeals process.

Still, it was the word of a grieving mother against an officer of the court. She might have exaggerated the details of the story to make her son sound more like a victim. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a mother would go to such lengths, but the similarities with the harsh sentence and minor crimes were too much to ignore.

I saved the website to my favorites so I could reference it later, and then pulled up the county records page. The boy’s case was a little harder to find, but after a little math to figure out what year his first offense had occurred, I finally found it.

It had happened almost ten years ago, and the indictment charged the young teen with stealing milk and cereal just like his mother had described, though she’d left out the part where he’d stolen candy the week before. The record showed that the prosecutor had asked for community service, but Judge Travis Williams had ignored the request. Instead, the judge had sentenced the young man to two years at Everson Juvenile Center.

Judge Williams was hardly the harshest judge I’d heard about, but what was unusual was who received the long sentences. Most judges who dealt with juveniles, and even adults, wouldn’t impose the maximum unless there was an increasingly violent rap sheet that made it clear the perp wasn’t going to reform. But Williams had sentenced juveniles with no prior record or records with only minor offenses to full terms. It ran counter to everything I knew about the justice system, and I couldn’t figure out why Williams had suddenly become such a hard ass on the bench.

A quick search of public records showed that the judge had been on the bench for almost thirty years. He’d convicted and released thousands of people over the course of his career, so it would be a daunting task to discover any pattern. But I focused on the juvenile cases that found their way to his desk since his record with teens would be what could help my client most, and that helped to narrow it down to a few hundred.

I stared at the long list of names on my computer screen and decided it was time for some caffeine. I stood and stretched for a moment to work out the kinks, and then I turned the coffee machine on. It was going to be a long night of reading and note taking, and I wasn’t even sure that I was on to anything. Once I had a fresh cup of sweetened joe, I snagged a pad of paper and pen out of my briefcase, and then settled in.

The judge had been appointed when he was in his early thirties, an impressive feat to be sure. Before that, he’d been a defense attorney like me, though he’d worked with one of the large firms straight out of law school rather than mucking about in the Public Defender’s Office.

His first few years he’d been relatively fair with his juvie convictions, and the results matched up with what the other judges were doing. But about fifteen years ago he’d started to hand down longer sentences.

At first, the extended sentences had been for young offenders who had appeared in his courtroom more than once. But it was common for judges to become jaded when they saw the same person in their courtroom again and again, so that didn’t raise any red flags.

It was when I started to review the cases from the last ten years that a pattern began to appear. I almost missed it since the longer stints were dispersed among shorter ones. But when I looked at the tally sheet, it was clear that Judge Travis Williams had begun to send young teens to the Everson Juvenile Detention Center for the maximum sentence regardless of their record or the recommendation of the prosecutor.

The cases spanned race, backgrounds, and criminal histories. The only thing that they all had in common was that they’d come before Judge Williams, and they had all ended up at Everson’s. It was a private facility, which meant they made their money by headcount, and the longer a teen stayed, the more money they made.

If the judge was being paid off, then it would explain why he would send so many kids to the center. He was smart about it, though, since he’d sentenced enough teens to other facilities so that he wouldn’t seem biased, and it was common for judges to prefer one or two centers.

But if Williams was receiving kickbacks from the company that ran Everson’s, then I also needed to understand why some kids managed to escape detention. Armed with a list of those who’d escaped from Williams’ courtroom with only a minimum sentence, I started to poke around in the backgrounds of the kids.

It took some digging, but I finally found my connection. Each of the teens that had been released were from prominent families that would be able to help the judge with more than just a bit of campaign money. The old magistrate had made powerful allies with deep ties in the political community and even more with strong businesses that could give the judge a nice retirement fund.

By the time I read through the last case it was well past midnight, and my head spun with the information that I’d found. There was a pattern, but it was so well-hidden that it was unlikely anyone would find it