Justice on the Side: Flying Horses, Loopholes and Ernie Hunter’S Law

By Nino E. Green

This book takes Ernest Hunter, known to his colleagues in the legal profession as Ernie the Attorney, from the streets of Detroit to the back roads of Michigans Upper Peninsula. Faced with a series of challenges that will test his courage, creativity, and luck, he discovers that the law is as fickle and imperfect as those who enforce its mandates. When judges and juries impose their own brand of justice, the laws predictability becomes an illusion.

Ernie is forced to think on his feet as he attempts the seemingly impossible, searching for imaginary loopholes and trying to teach proverbial horses to fly. Justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and Ernie sees justice through the eyes of his clients. Whether justice has been done will depend on which side you are on.

Ernie begins his career as a lawyer defending an arsonist and a sexual predator, both of whom he knows to be guilty.

How can you defend someone who you know is guilty? some would ask.

How can I not? Ernie would answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524523558

Nino E. Green

A 1963 graduate of Wayne Law School, he began his career in Detroit in 1964 and practiced law in Common Pleas and Recorder’s Courts, the Circuit Courts for Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Ingham, and several other lower Michigan counties and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. He left Detroit in 1966 to become the first executive director of Upper Peninsula Legal Services, a position that he held for two and a half years. In 1969, he entered the private practice of law in Escanaba and ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the US House of Representative un 1970. In 1976, he became the senior partner in the Escanaba-based law firm of Green, Renner, Weisse, Rettig, Rademecher, and Clark. He has appeared before all the district and circuit courts in the Upper Peninsula as well as in the United States District Courts for the Western District of Michigan and the District of Minnesota, the Michigan Court of Appeals, the Michigan Supreme Court, and the US Sixth and Eighth Circuit Courts of Appeals. He has also practiced before National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Merit Systems Protection Board, Federal Aviation Agency, United States Department of Agriculture, and Michigan’s Employment Relations Commission, Workers’ Compensation Board, Employment Security Commission, Department of Civil Rights, Civil Service Commission, Department of Natural Resources, Department of Corrections, and State Employee’s Retirement System. He has been a member of the Mackinac Island State Park Commission and the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. He was the 2003 recipient of the John W. Cummiskey Pro Bono Award and has been recognized by the Legal Services Corporation for his involvement in delivering legal services to the poor. He recently retired as chairperson of the board of directors of Legal Services of Northern Michigan.

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Copyright © 2016 by Nino E. Green.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016911045

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-2357-2

      Softcover         978-1-5245-2356-5

      eBook         978-1-5245-2355-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 08/26/2016

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CONTENTS

Part One

Lex Urbanis

Chapter 1 The Objection

Chapter 2 The Loophole

Chapter 3 A Rose By Any Other Name

Chapter 4 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Chapter 5 The Long Shot

Chapter 6 The Man Of Few Words

Part Two

Lex Rusticus

Chapter 7 The Eye Of The Beholder

Chapter 8 Two Sides To Every Coin

Chapter 9 The Horse That Flew

Chapter 10 Two Men For All Seasons

Chapter 11 One In A Million

Chapter 12 Hands Off

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T HANKS TO CHRIS Leonard and Joan JoJo Rust for the encouragement that inspired me to stay the course as I ventured from the solemn sophistry of the law to the refreshing informality of fiction, and thanks to Naomi Green-Neal who helped capture the point of these pages in the illustration that adorns the c over.

To the memory of my wife, Marsha: minä rakastan sinua.

Athena: There are two sides to this dispute. I’ve heard only one half the argument. (…) So you two parties, summon your witnesses, set out your proofs, with sworn evidence to back your stories. Once I’ve picked the finest men in Athens, I’ll return. They’ll rule fairly in this case, bound by a sworn oath to act with justice.

—Aeschylus, Eumenides

Don’t count on it.

—Ernest Hunter

PART ONE

Lex Urbanis

E RNIE HUNTER HAD forsaken the hairstyle that he had meticulously cultivated and nurtured during his late teens and early twenties. As a young professional approaching his twenty-seventh birthday, the ducktail and long, thick sideburns were abandoned in favor of hair neatly trimmed and combed straight back from his broad forehead, with his ears visible behind neat, modest sideburns. His face featured soft brown eyes that matched the color of his hair. Of average height and unimposing physique, he was not likely to be noticed in a crowd. But with prominent, high cheekbones and a square chin, he presented a pleasant demeanor and might even be considered handsome although not compellingl y so.

Being a lawyer had not been Ernie’s first ambition during his college years. But soon after he entered law school, he knew that his career path had been set before him. As a lawyer, however, he would discover that in order to succeed, he would need chutzpah and luck as well as an understanding of the limits of the law.

Ernie Hunter’s family was of European immigrant stock. His parents and grandparents had come to America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Ernie’s father, Jacob Grzeskiewicz, was five years old in 1907 when he and his family left Lublin, Poland and landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Days later, Jacob’s parents, Boyzdar and Agnieszka Grzeskiewicz, and their children left Nova Scotia and travelled south through Canada on their way to Detroit, Michigan.

The youngest of the five Grzeskiewicz children, Jacob, was raised to adulthood in a cramped three-bedroom apartment above a Twelfth Street storefront on Detroit’s west side. As a young adult, he worked at a variety of menial jobs and became a union member while employed as a milk delivery truck driver. A political dissident, Jacob was often at odds with the more conservative values and political views of his parents and older siblings. An admirer of Samuel Gompers, A. Phillip Randolph, and John L. Lewis, Jacob mesmerized his children with his anecdotal accounts of the exploits of Joe Hill and Big Bill Haywood. He believed that Sacco and Vanzetti were victims of political repression.

Ernie’s mother, Nancsi, spent her teen years in Chicago after her family came to the United States from Bekéscsaba, Hungary in 1912. Born Nancsi Silberstein, she was a dark-haired, dark-skinned beauty who sometimes declared that she was a gypsy, which she was not. Nancsi loved the music, dance, and folklore of her native Hungary and claimed that she had seen Count Dracula during her childhood near the Transylvania border. She boasted that a Hungarian could follow someone through a revolving door and come out in front. She also smoked cigarettes in public, a habit concealed by most women until the 1940s when they were needed to work side by side with men in the defense factories of World War II.

As they prepared to enter the United States, Ernie’s paternal grandparents were advised to register and enter under a more practical surname. It was explained to them that their Polish surname, Grzeskiewicz, was too difficult to spell, impossible to pronounce, and would be likely to impede their assimilation. They were assured that it would be better to be named after a color such as Brown or Green or a respected occupation like Carpenter, Farmer, Baker, or Cook.

In Poland, Boyzdar and Agnieszka had owned a furniture factory. But Mr. and Mrs. Furniture sounded, well, wooden would be one way to describe it. Chippendale or Hepplewhite seemed a bit too pretentious. Smith and Jones were considered, but they wanted a name that would reflect something of the spirit of their new homeland. When it was brought to their attention that they would reach their destination during Michigan’s firearm deer hunting season, the problem was solved, and they entered the United States as Boris and Agnes Hunter.

Once settled in Detroit, Boris Hunter was quick to add some of what he earned doing odd jobs for friends and relatives to the modest savings that he and Agnes had brought with them from Poland. As a result, they were able to purchase a small retail furniture and appliance business on busy Gratiot Avenue on the city’s east side. Hard work during long hours, coupled with frugal living, allowed them to enjoy a modest lifestyle as they raised their four sons and a daughter. When they grew old and decided to retire, they brought their youngest son, Ernie’s father, Jacob Hunter, into the business.

As a teenager, Ernie worked with his father after school and on Saturdays. The furniture displayed at the Gratiot Avenue store was in constant need of dusting and polishing. The used stoves and refrigerators taken in trade for new ones had to be repaired and refurbished. Ernie, eager to please his father, worked with enthusiasm and learned quickly. By the time he reached the age of fifteen, he could manage the day-to-day routine of the furniture business without supervision. But he had no desire to succeed his father as a businessman.

When the work day at Jacob Hunter’s store ended at 5:00 p.m., father and son often stopped at Healy’s Tavern before going home. Healy’s was a small neighborhood drinking establishment, a block and a half east and across Gratiot Avenue from the furniture store. While Ernie enjoyed a cola and listened to the likes of Eddie Fisher, Doris Day, and the Ames Brothers on the neon-lighted Wurlitzer jukebox next to the bar, Jacob puffed on cheap cigars and downed shots of whiskey chased with nickel glasses of beer. Jacob took pride in his ability to hold his liquor, a talent that he displayed fairly often.

Buck Healy, the tavern’s proprietor, was a portly sixty-year-old silver-haired Irishman with thick chest curls that protruded from this t-shirt like a fur muff. Healy catered to a small but dependable clientele that included a couple of clerks from the post office on nearby Arndt Street, several detectives from the Hunt Street station, an elderly Catholic priest, and a few local businessmen including Ernie’s father. Except for the detectives, who occasionally fired their service revolvers at the tavern’s tin ceiling, Healy’s customers were generally quite easy going or one might say, sedated. Young Ernie was a sort of mascot to the tavern’s regulars, one of whom once favored him with the unsolicited advice, You should always inhere to your father’s idiosyncrasies. Ernie occasionally inspired the nobler but undecipherable sentiments of Healy’s patrons.

Ernie’s father was an outspoken champion of political freedom and ethnic and racial equality, which he advocated often and with fervor. He despised bigotry, which he attributed to the misguided tenets of religious faith, but he did not protest gender bias because it never occurred to him that anyone could consider Ernie’s mother to be less than her husband’s equal.

Anna Hunter shared her husband’s convictions, sometimes describing herself as a Bolshevik—risky business in the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a young adult, she had been arrested and briefly jailed in Chicago during a strike by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. She considered her arrest a badge of honor. But she also frightened young Ernie with her description of what it was like to be locked inside a Chicago jail.

Unlike his parents, Ernie had little interest in ideology or politics. He saw politics as mostly a refuge for scoundrels, and his ideological curiosity had never led him beyond the Golden Rule. Although he agreed with his parents’ convictions and echoed their pronouncements regarding justice and righteousness, he never could work himself up to their fervor. It seemed to him that everything that they stood for was summed up in the Golden Rule. He considered religion and the existence of a supreme being or the lack thereof to be irrelevant.

Ernie earned decent grades in high school and continued to do well throughout his college studies at Wayne University. He took to heart his father’s simple advice, Do the work, and the result will take care of itself. But he lost interest in sociology and psychology, which he considered too speculative and imprecise. He switched to literature and decided that Shakespeare demanded too much work. The poetry of Shelley, Byron and Keats was schmaltz, and the early American writers like Emerson, Poe, and Thoreau were boring. Frustrated by his lack of interest, Ernie decided to give law school a try.

Law school was the challenge that he needed. The answer to every legal question seemed to raise more questions that needed to be answered. While many of his classmates memorized the names of the cases that they studied and the legal principles for which those cases stood, Ernie focused on the way that courts reasoned. He learned that to find the right answer, one had to ask the right question. With the answer, one had knowledge. But to ask the right question required intelligence. Find the right question, and you will find the right answer. Do the work and the result will take care of itself.

During his second year of law school, Ernie took a part-time job doing legal research for Ignatowski, Lefkowitz, and Cryderman, a law firm in downtown Detroit’s Cadillac Tower, a short ride by bus from Wayne’s law school. His classes, homework, and job left him little time for socializing, and after four grueling but productive years, he graduated in the upper ten percentile of his law school class. Although he received several offers of employment, he decided to try going it alone. After passing the bar examination, he took a one year lease of office space on the thirty-fourth floor of the Cadillac Tower.

`In 1964, white flight was already taking its toll on the City of Detroit. In the 1950s, the city had proposed to build affordable housing for low-income, inner-city families, mostly African American, displaced by the construction of the John Lodge Expressway. New and modest housing was to be scattered throughout the city. The intent was to promote racial integration and cultural assimilation in the city’s neighborhoods and public schools. But the plan was vigorously opposed and defeated by a well-organized and well-funded group of white home owners.

Instead of integrating the city’s schools and neighborhoods, displaced families were crowded into clusters of high-rise, ghetto-style apartment buildings in the inner city. Those who could afford to leave moved into middle-class neighborhoods where unscrupulous realtors panicked white homeowners into believing the self-fulfilling prophesy that property values would collapse if they hesitated to sell and take flight to the suburbs. Blight spread steadily outward from the inner city, the suburbs boomed and the realtors prospered. The stage was set for the turmoil that would follow a decade later.

The two-room office that Ernie leased was part of a larger suite of offices shared by several other lawyers, including the law firm for whom he had worked while in law school. Ignatowski, Lefkowitz, and Cryderman held the prime lease of the entire thirty-fourth floor and sublet excess space to others. Ernie had declined the firm’s offer of full-time work but agreed to help out on an as needed basis. His outer office would serve as a waiting area and accommodate a secretary. The inner office he would furnish with a desk, some chairs, and a bookcase for his modest law library. Ignatowski, Lefkowitz, and Cryderman had invited Ernie to use their more elaborate collection of law books and legal publications as a privilege of his lease and his willingness to provide assistance when needed.

When he launched his career in January of 1964, Ernie was living in a third floor, one bedroom, Dexter Boulevard apartment that he rented for $65 a month, utilities included. He drove a 1952 Plymouth sedan that had set him back $350 but ran well most of the time. He owned a blue pin-striped suit, a couple of white shirts, a modest necktie, and a pair of black dress shoes. The rest of his wardrobe consisted of jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, and sneakers. Although he enjoyed the company of women, he had never had time to practice, let alone master, the art of seduction.

Eager to begin greeting clients, he was sorely in need of an experienced secretary, one familiar with the subtler protocols of the practice of law. He had interviewed several less than promising prospects before hiring a forty-nine-year-old hard-featured, gum-chewing, red-headed divorcee who had been recently fired by a lawyer on the twenty-eighth floor. Rita Slutsky had provoked the wrath of her employer’s wife by responding too willingly, too generously, and at least once too often to her employer’s lewd advances. But as Rita explained to Ernie, How was I supposed to know better? I’m just a lay person.

CHAPTER 1

The Objection

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PITCHER EARLY WYNN WON HIS 300TH AND LAST GAME AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE. A ROCK MUSICIAN GROUP, THE KINGSMEN, RELEASED LOUIE, LOUIE, WHICH SOME RADIO STATIONS LABELED OBSCENE. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DELIVERED HIS I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH. LYNDON B. JOHNSON WAS SWORN IN AS THE THIRTY-SIXTH U.S. PRESIDENT AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY.

I N 1964, CRIMES committed in the City of Detroit were prosecuted in Recorders Court, located at 1441 Saint Antoine Street behind Detroit Police Headquarters. Recorder’s Court was a command post for a small gathering of lawyers who loitered near hallway telephone booths; their pockets stuffed with change. The fees earned by these veteran courthouse denizens were paid mostly from the court’s budget for lawyers appointed to represent indigent criminal defendants. The appointments were doled out by judges who were mostly white, elderly, and of Irish or Polish extraction. The defendants were poor, mostly male and disproportionately African American. The lawyers and bail bondsmen shared a commercial interest in the plight of those accused of c rime.

Ernie Hunter, fresh out of law school, had passed the bar examination and was admitted to the practice of law. But the clients, seeking assistance from his fledgling practice, were few, and his meager cash flow had dwindled from little to none. By Friday next, he would have to see his banker for a loan in order to pay Rita, his secretary. But first, he would visit Recorders Court. A criminal defense assignment would not solve his immediate problem, but it might help him keep his anemic law practice afloat. So, on a Monday morning, early, he was at Recorders Court, waiting at the desk of the court’s assignment clerk.

Got anything interesting to start the week? Ernie asked when the assignment clerk arrived.

The clerk was a gaunt, sleepy-eyed old-timer, clean-shaven but with wavy white hair badly in need of a trim, a bulbous nose, and a pocked ashen pallor. He glanced up at Ernie briefly, looked back down at the papers on his desk, and shuffled through them for almost a full minute before looking up again. He studied Ernie for a moment and stifled a yawn. You’re new here, he stated, revealing his grasp of the obvious.

Not really, said Ernie with a smile. I’ve been here before, a few times. Almost true, he thought. During a summer recess from law school, he had watched court proceedings with his father who had been summoned for jury duty but had been excused for no reason that Ernie had been able to discern. And I had a trial here a while back, he lied, but this is the first time I’m here to ask for an assignment.

The clerk wore an out-of-style, double-breasted navy blue gaberdine suit, no vest, a white shirt with a frayed open collar, and a pink tie with what appeared to be several small mustard stains just below a loose knot. Do you know any of the judges? I have to observe certain … uh … priorities—the judge’s, of course. Not mine.

Not personally. Like I said, I only had the one trial here, in Judge Koczinski’s court. It was for a paying client, he lied again as he waited while the clerk shuffled through more papers.

When the clerk looked up at Ernie again, he said with a resigned smile One of the judges must be pissed off at Jack Kaiser. He asked me to pull an assignment I was holding for Jack. I guess I could give it to you. It’s an arson. The defendant’s in custody. He’s supposed to have torched an apartment building on the west side. Dexter Boulevard, I believe. Arraignment is this morning if you’re interested. Are you?

Sure, Ernie replied without hesitating. I’ll take it, right up my alley, he added, in case it was necessary to reassure his new found benefactor. Where do I find the … uh … defendant?

Otto Cash was a thirty-one year old, white male, five feet and six inches tall, weighing 190 pounds. From his mug shot, Ernie would have guessed that he was much younger, perhaps even a teenager. His long blond hair spilled over his forehead, almost touching his pale, sparse eyebrows. He had a round pink face with barely visible wisps of immature fuzz hovering above his upper lip and dimpled cheeks and chin. His blue eyes were moist and darted nervously about as he was led into the barred holding cell adjacent to the courtroom. A plainclothes detective seated next to Ernie pointed him out. Yours is the one with the hanky to his nose. I made the arrest. Good luck with this one counselor. Ernie wondered how the cop had made him as Otto’s lawyer. Small world, Recorder’s Court, he thought.

The first unhappy souls to be brought before Detroit’s Recorders Court for arraignment on Monday mornings were those who had been arrested over the weekend for loitering, vagrancy, drunkenness, and similar offenses against public virtue. Next in line were those accused of offending public morality. The latter were mostly females charged with accosting and soliciting, the legal metaphor for prostitution. A few were males foolish enough to have made salacious overtures to a plainclothes detective stationed as a decoy in a public toilet, usually in an all-night theater. These encounters were sometimes initiated by an officer’s own unabashed offer of bathroom sex. Protecting the sanctity of public toilets was a mind-numbing assignment that begged for at least some minimal indicia of success before the end of a long, dull shift.

Ernie sat back in the courtroom’s spectator gallery and closed his eyes as Judge Elvin Davenport, the first and at that time the only African American elected to the Recorders Court bench, gaveled the room