THE COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS

By Oliver Houck

In the late 1960s, I served as an Assistant US Attorney in the District of Columbia. It was a wild affair. I began in the Court of General Sessions which handled all manner of crimes, some as innocuous as bad checks and street assaults, others as serious as burglaries and even homicides where the evidence was too shaky to charge as felonies. Inside the building, in the elevators, and even in the courtrooms, the government witnesses were often mixed with the accused and their families in a way that left prosecutors guessing which was which. There was virtually no time to prepare for the cases ahead of time. They simply walked in the door, and a police officer handed you the arrest report. You would often be reading it while the judge impounded a jury or, in a bench trial, told you to present your first witnesses.

Needless to say, some of the resulting cases were "a surprise a minute," and we would often swap stories at the end of the day. My last two years were spent in the "Big Court," which dealt with felonies in full. I was fortunate to land in the Major Crimes Unit, run by a prosecutor who was a legend throughout the office for his courage and his willingness to go to the top of a criminal chain. His name was Harold Sullivan, and I have dedicated this book to his memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684987665

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

The Court of General Sessions

Disneyland

First trial

Junior and the bed board

Blue-Miller

The gentleman

Step him back

The fine

Candlelight vigil

Red and green lights

Reconciliation

Molesting the bear

The Freezer

Getting paid

Racehorse

The girls

Two boys from Baltimore

The bunkie

Big Meat

Racehorse again and Code Red

Reflections

Riots

Big Court

Hilda Vogel

Rabbit and beaver

The murder of Ricky Parks

Insanity

Harold

The fence

Risks

Stakeout

Tantillo and Paladino

Enten and Lemonakis

Maceo Brown

Requiem

About the Author

cover.jpg

THE COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS

Oliver Houck

Copyright © 2023 Oliver Houck

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-68498-765-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-766-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Harold Sullivan, one of the most outstanding federal prosecutors in the United States and one of the most astonishing individuals I've ever met.

The Court of General Sessions

The District of Columbia courthouse sat in its litter like a well-used foxhole. A flat, charmless, two-story structure with large, blank windowpanes was surrounded by Keep Off the Grass signs, bottles, cans, and small trash that came from those attending the court with no place else to sit but out front and no habit of putting things in trash cans.

On the other side of the street and around the corner were lines of equally blank buildings with street-level walk-ins to lawyers, bondsmen, notaries public, legal forms, stationery, cigarettes, and a barbershop. All day long, taxis cruised the street to drop off and pick up an assortment of White attorneys past their prime in forty-dollar suits, bondsmen in sport shirts with two-days-ago shaves, winos set loose that morning, women with bandaged heads and children in tow, policemen coming off the night shift with haggard eyes and revved up on cigarettes, street dudes in green pants awaiting trial, and a handful of young White men in suits, walking briskly up and into the building. These were the prosecutors. Not one of them was Black in a city largely Black and a courthouse dominated by Black clerks, witnesses, defendants, their lawyers, and their families.

Back in the day, when Washington was an even more federal city, the US Attorney's Office had jurisdiction over all crimes, however big and hellacious, however petty and small. The big cases, felonies, were prosecuted in the US Federal District Court. The small crimes went not to the city (as they do now) but to the Court of General Sessions, where almost all federal prosecutors began their careers.

The result was that they dealt with the low and gritty side of crime. Street fights, family feuds, petty theft, nickel bags of marijuana, misdemeanors that led to sentences of no more than one year. At first blush, these were easy cases to prosecute—no forensic evidence, no defense lawyers of outstanding ability, and no complicated conspiracies or RICO. Few trials in General Sessions went more than a day.

One aspect of these cases, however, made them more dicey. Many were really felonies—big-time theft, assaults with deadly weapons, even rape—but the evidence was either questionable or terribly slender. Only one witness. A shaky photo identification. No forensics. Unwilling to drop these cases—real people had gotten really hurt—they were charged as one-year misdemeanors instead, attempted larceny, simple assault, attempted rape. In an odd way, this dynamic made cases in General Sessions court more challenging to prove than in the high-stakes federal district court.

There were two layers of the Court of General Sessions. The second floor housed the judges' chambers and the courtrooms themselves. Here, tranquility reigned, interrupted only by small bursts of lawyers and witnesses for a case going to trial.

Relatively few got that far. It was the last thing defense counsel wanted, and their objective was to stall off the trial for as long as possible. Over time, the prosecutor's witnesses might disappear, lose their recollection of events, go on vacation, and that could lead to an outright dismissal. But if the prosecution had kept its case together—largely the job of the arresting officer—the defendants faced the awful Day of Judgment. At which point, most of them agreed to a plea rather than risk a heavier sentence from trial. There were so many cases pending and waiting for juries that, without these pleas to clear the docket, the system would collapse. Everyone knew it and relied on it.

Meanwhile, downstairs on the first floor, a kind of semi-organized chaos reigned. Here is where the seminal decisions were made—whether to charge, whom to charge, and on exactly what charges—and they were largely dispositive. To walk into this process for the first time—no matter how many cop shows you'd seen on television (there were very few at the time)—was a bit of a shock.

Disneyland

My first day, a Monday, I walked into a welter of traffic, slow clots of bewildered people looking to pay traffic tickets, get married, find their lawyers, the elevators, the way to the restroom, with purposeful clerks, natty bailiffs, and no-nonsense police officers slicing through. I hailed a man in a green uniform that said DC Transit and asked if he could point me to the DA's Office. He said, Sure, he was going there himself, but he was no DA. He wouldn't be one either. Not in this man's town. Statements like that stick in the mind.

There was no one in the DA's Office. Instead, spread out before me was a large room with a rabbit warren of cubicles, each with a desk, a telephone, and a chair or two. At eight forty-five in the morning, most of them were occupied by a prosecutor, a police officer or two, a witness or two, and perhaps a defense attorney looking for a continuance or a plea deal. The noise level was several decibels above street traffic.

I was rescued by a tall man in a ready-for-court suit who said he was Doug Fine, the assistant chief of the office, and his first words were, Welcome to Disneyland… Am I the first one to say that to you?

Before I could reply, he was distracted by