The Brass Verdict

asking the witness about.”
    The judge swiveled in his chair and looked at me.
    “Mr. Haller?”
    “Judge, if anybody is being sandbagged, it’s my client. This was a sloppy investigation that-”
    “Save it for the jury, Mr. Haller. Whaddaya got?”
    I opened the file and put a computer printout down in front of the judge, which positioned it upside down to Golantz.
    “What I’ve got is a story that ran in
Le Parisien
four and a half years ago. It names Johan Rilz as a witness for the prosecution in a major drug case. He was used by the Direction de la Police Judiciaire to make buys and get inside knowledge of the drug ring. He was a CI, Your Honor, and these guys over here never even looked at him. It was tunnel vision from the-”
    “Mr. Haller, again, save your argument for the jury. This printout is in French. Do you have the translation?”
    “Sorry, Your Honor.”
    I took the second of three sheets out of the file and put it down on top of the first, again in the direction of the judge. Golantz was twisting his head awkwardly as he tried to read it.
    “How do we know this is the same Johan Rilz?” Golantz said. “It’s a common name over there.”
    “Maybe in Germany, but not in France.”
    “So how do we know it’s him?” the judge asked this time. “This is a translated newspaper article. This isn’t any kind of official document.”
    I pulled the last sheet from the file and put it down.
    “This is a photocopy of a page from Rilz’s passport. I got it from the state’s own discovery. It shows that Rilz left France for the United States in March, two thousand three. One month after this story was published. Plus, you’ve got the age. The article has his age right and it says he was making drug buys for the cops out of his business as an interior decorator. It obviously is him, Your Honor. He betrayed a lot of people over there and put them in jail, then he comes here and starts over.”
    Golantz started shaking his head in a desperate sort of way.
    “It’s still no good,” he said. “This is a violation of the rules of discovery and is inadmissible. You can’t sit on this and then sucker punch the state with it.”
    The judge swiveled his view to me and this time gave me the squint as well.
    “Your Honor, if anybody sat on anything, it was the state. This is stuff the prosecution should’ve come up with and given to me. In fact, I think the witness did know about this and
he
sat on it.”
    “That is a serious accusation, Mr. Haller,” the judge intoned. “Do you have evidence of that?”
    “Judge, the reason I know about this at all is by accident. On Sunday I was reviewing my investigator’s prep work and noticed that he had run all the names associated with this case through the LexisNexis search engine. He had used the computer and account I inherited with Jerry Vincent’s law practice. I checked the account and noticed that the default setting was for English-language search only. Having looked at the photocopy of Rilz’s passport in the discovery file and knowing of his background in Europe, I did the search again, this time including French and German languages. I came up with this French newspaper article in about two minutes, and I find it hard to believe that I found something that easily that the entire Sheriff’s Department, the prosecution and Interpol didn’t know about. So Judge, I don’t know if that is evidence of anything but the defense is certainly feeling like the party that’s been damaged here.”
    I couldn’t believe it. The judge swiveled to Golantz and gave him the squint. The first time ever. I shifted to my right so that a good part of the jury had an angle on it.
    “What about that, Mr. Golantz?” the judge asked.
    “It’s absurd, Your Honor. We have sat on nothing, and anything that we have found has gone into the discovery file. And I would like to ask why Mr. Haller didn’t alert us to this yesterday when he just admitted that he made this discovery Sunday and the printout is dated then as well.”
    I stared deadpan at Golantz when I answered.
    “If I had known you were fluent in French I would have given it to you, Jeff, and maybe you could’ve helped out. But I’m not fluent and I didn’t know what it said and I had to get it translated. I was handed that translation about ten minutes before I started my cross.”
    “All right,” the judge said, breaking up the stare-down. “This is still a printout of a newspaper article.