Last Dance, Last Chance

one.
    Debbie had asked to testify before Anthony was sentenced. She had always been fearful on the witness stand before, but this time she needed to speak. She didn’t talk for very long, but her words were powerful as she described the few years just past.
    “He has taken away part of me that I will never get back,” she said softly, looking down at Anthony. “He put his own children and me through a living hell.”
    Anthony seemed stunned that Debbie could speak so well in front of a crowded courtroom, and that she would speak against him. She was his last and best hope for mercy.
    Judge Rossetti explained that he had read the presentence report, the letters attached, the victim impact statement, a presentence memorandum that Joel Daniels had submitted, the letter from Anthony, and one from a minister writing on Anthony’s behalf.
    Joel Daniels spoke to what he had seen as prejudice against his client by the probation department. “First of all, he’s paid a price for the Sarah Smith case—he went to jail for four months in the Erie County pen. He got out; his probation was revoked by Judge Tills. Judge Tills gave him another whack—he maxed him, gave him one and-a-third to four…The point is, he’s paid his price to society for whatever he owes on the Sarah Smith case.”
    Four months for the life of a young wife and mother. If Daniels’s reasoning hadn’t reverberated so tragically, it might have been laughable. Four months was a slap on the hand, and for Anthony it had been almost a vacation as he read books, took illegal drugs, and jogged around the exercise yard.
    Daniels characterized Pignataro as being “victimized by word processors…regurgitating everything up about the Sarah Smith case from the old report.” That was old news, Daniels implied, and had nothing to do with the current conviction.
    Joel Daniels pulled out all the stops for his client, suggesting that the District Attorney’s office was wrong when they insisted that Debbie had received more than one dose of arsenic. His was a scatter-shot technique, and he was a very good orator. He commiserated with the judge over how tough his job was.
    “But look at the defendant, his family, everything about him…You know Anthony Pignataro—he has a wonderful family. His mother is here today. I didn’t realize it, but she just had a birthday on February 1. She’s seventy-one years old now. His two brothers are here from Florida; Ralph is here. Steven is here. His sister, Antoinette, I talked to her—but she couldn’t get up here. As the Court knows, she’s a doctor, and she’s very, very busy.”
    Daniels began to wander, but Judge Rossetti let him talk. He spoke of how wonderful Dr. Ralph had been, of Anthony’s schooldays, his boxing career, his years of training to be a physician, his children. “He was a devoted father to those children. Those children came first with him.”
    Now, incredibly, Daniels visualized a time in the future when Ralph might throw a 40-yard football pass, if he should get into St. Francis. “If he [throws that pass], I hope he pauses for a minute and says to himself, ‘Thank you dad. Without your help, your confidence, I don’t think I would have been able to do that.’”
    Lena Pignataro’s emotional pain had clearly gotten through to Joel Daniels. “She’s a very, very nice lady. She’s a fine human being…a good solid mother. She would come up to my office and she would cry…and say, ‘Joel, when can I bring him home?…Joel, do you think he’s going to be out before I die?’ And I said, ‘I hope so.’”
    Daniels admitted that Anthony had just gone downhill, but he had no explanation for it.
     
    Finally, the time had come for Anthony to speak, if he chose to. Most felons don’t say a word at sentencing; some blurt out a paragraph or two. But Anthony held several sheets from a yellow legal tablet. His words weren’t new to Debbie or to anyone who had seen the snowstorm of letters and cards that had come to her and her children since his guilty plea in November. But he turned them now into a dramatic soliloquy. His hands trembled, and his usually deep voice lost its timbre as he began to speak. Tears wet his face, and he choked as if he couldn’t bear to go on.
    Perhaps he was having trouble; he faced what, for him, was unthinkable. He certainly had the full attention of the courtroom onlookers, including reporters with their pens raised, waiting.
     
    “What does one say?”