Read Online INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice by David Feige - Free Book Online

jail, but I had also never had someone whose mental health and addiction problems were as intractable as Cassandra’s. Downwind, Cassandra seemed to consider the question seriously, and there was a long pause before she answered.
     
           “Yes, David,” she said, “I think so --maybe two or three weeks, a month maybe, just to clean up, to sleep.”
     
           The idea filled me with self-loathing and a profound sense of failure --personal and systemic. It was bad enough that there might not be any better solution than locking Cassandra up at Rikers Island, but worse was that she could see it as a viable solution to her life’s problems. I felt tears welling up in my eyes.
     
           “Is there anything you need right now?” I asked.
     
           “Maybe some soup?” Cassandra said simply. “I’m a little cold.”
     
           Raiding the food usually kept for the hungry kids in the youth program, I found a can of Wolfgang Puck’s egg noodle and chicken soup --a fancy last supper in a can.
     
     
    - - - -
     
     
           With Cassandra considering a jail stint, I started thinking about just how to get her in. I needed to think of a crime minor enough that I could control the outcome, but serious enough that a cop who might not otherwise want to arrest a malodorous homeless person (rather than just issue a summons) would actually have to take her in.
     
           First I considered a ploy I learned from another homeless guy who used to come through the system at the beginning of almost every winter. When it got too cold and too hard to survive on the street, he’d take himself to a rib joint near Times Square --and order himself a feast. He’d eat slowly and deliberately, savoring his meal. When the check came, he would quietly but insistently refuse to pay or leave. When the police came, he was unfailingly polite, standing up and placing his hands dutifully behind his back so they could cuff him. When he saw the judge, he’d always plead guilty right on the spot despite his lawyer’s attempts to keep him from doing so --sometimes even asking for a little extra jail time, just enough to ride out the worst of the winter.
     
           Sadly, there wasn’t any place Cassandra really wanted to eat, and she was so smelly and disheveled there wasn’t any place likely to serve her anyway.
     
           “Is there something you’d like to do since you are going to get arrested anyway? Any crime that might at least bring you some joy?”
     
           “No, David,” Cassandra said in her flat, vacant tone. “I’ll do what you say.”
     
           Maybe turnstile jumping is the way, I thought.
     
           “Okay, we’ll go down to the train station together,” I told her. “I’ll find a police officer and try to explain that he needs to watch because you are going to violate the law. And then when I say so, but not before, you try to climb over the turnstile.”
     
           Cassandra just nodded.
     
           Just before we set out, I went over the pre-arrest checklist.
     
           “You know they’re going to search you when you get arrested,” I warned her, “so I want you to go through all your pockets right now and make absolutely sure that there is nothing in them that can get you in any extra trouble --it’s really important that we don’t have any surprises.”
     
           Digging around in one of her many pockets, Cassandra came up with a small, round chipped piece of glass. The crack pipe was short --around three inches long and about the width of the barrel of a ballpoint pen. The end was blackened and sticky from the flame and the tarry residue of crack, the rest smudgy but transparent.
     
           “I think we’ll need to throw this away, sweetie.” I sighed.
     
           After rummaging through the rest of her pockets, Cassandra came up empty --seventeen cents and some rough