286. Touchy, touchy

Indignation is the most pleasurable of human emotions. 

People sometimes laugh when I say that, but how else can you explain talk radio?  Listeners tolerate three-minute blocks of ads and callers who really ought to be telling these things to a therapist, all for the chance of experiencing the thrill of righteous fury.  If love were anywhere near as pleasurable as indignation, the people who make Rush Limbaugh rich would spend three hours a day, five days a week, tending to their marriages instead. 

So I was pleased to read the words of a judge acknowledging that "indignation is the most gratifying of emotions."  That's New Jersey's Judge Bill Mathesius, and the many insightful things contained in his article in the New Jersey Lawyer shouldn't be missed amidst the jokes (I'm especially fond of footnote 73) and the expressions of well-earned disrespect aimed at certain high-ranking members of New Jersey's judicial bureaucracy.

The story begins a week before Christmas, 1992, when a man named Ambrose Harris grew weary of walking in the rain.   "He decided to 'carjack' someone so that he and [his companion] would not have to walk through the rain to the luncheonette they planned to rob."  They saw a young woman parking a Toyota.  Harris said to his companion, "I'm going to get that bitch."

He commandeered the car at gunpoint, forced the woman into the trunk and drove to a deserted area where he raped her, then shot her and covered her body with an old mattress.  He went to his mother's house for a shovel, then returned and shot the woman again, and buried her.

He nearly got away with it (which, of course, makes you wonder how many others he did get away with).  Helpfully, however, he arranged to be videotaped at an ATM while attempting to use his victim's debit card the night of her murder.  He even succeeded in getting himself arrested on an unrelated charge with the murder weapon in his possession some six weeks before police found the body.  (I'm not sure I've ever heard of another case in which the police seized the murder weapon such a long time before learning a murder had been committed.)

Police found the body only because Harris's companion took them to it, pretending to be acting on a psychic vision while inquiring about the reward money.  Harris's big mistake, you see, was killing a woman whose parents could afford to put up a big reward.

Judge Mathesius didn't preside over the trial, but six years later he heard Harris's petition for post-trial relief (what many states would call a petition for habeas corpus).  At an evidentiary hearing, one of Harris's lawyers recalled a memorable moment from the trial.   The victim's father was on the stand, describing the last time he saw his daughter, when his eyes filled with tears. 

Harris pulled out a handkerchief and, in full view of the jury, pretended to dab both his eyes in mock sympathy.  His lawyer, reflecting on the moment years afterward, called it the single most "reprehensible thing [he'd] ever seen a defendant do in a courtroom."  (That testimony was quoted in Judge Mathesius's opinion, in footnote 15.)

One of the New Jersey Supreme Court's various opinions in the case described another memorable moment.  This one occurred during Harris's sentencing hearing when he spoke directly to the victim's parents, in defiance of  "repeated instructions" from the trial judge . That phrase, "repeated instructions", tells you a lot about Harris.  How many other defendants have to be repeatedly instructed not to talk to witnesses in court?  But what tells you even more is what Harris said to the parents: "they owed him an apology because of his conviction."  

Harris claimed in his petition for postconviction relief that his trial counsel was incompetent for not encouraging him to address the jury.  Harris, who faced the death penalty, certainly had the right to talk directly to the jurors (something that lawyers, with their love of antique jargon, call the right of allocution).   Harris's lawyer explained at the evidentiary hearing why he thought he would have been "insane" to encourage his client to exercise that right:

[H]e was of the belief that one of two circumstances must be present before allocution could in any way be delivered effectively: "A, that one be capable of true remorse and really sorry; or that B, at least you be able to fake or least get up in court and pretend that you are sorry.  Mr. Harris was incapable of doing either of those things."

At the death penalty hearing, Harris's attorneys presented evidence of his wretched childhood.  While obviously their intent was to produce an emotional reaction rather than present an objective picture (that's not a criticism, they're advocates) nonetheless I think it's a safe assumption that Harris was severely damaged in his early life.  America's tolerance for violence against women and children ensures our stockpile of psychopaths never runs low.

So far, so ordinary.  A seriously damaged person terrorizes and kills a person physically more vulnerable than himself.  Although the victim was young and female, which judges usually count in a defendant's favor, those factors were offset by the fact that she was -- as the New Jersey Supreme Court was at pains to tell us -- a virgin when Harris raped her.  (The stereotyped sexual morality of teenage slasher movies finds real-world expression in our criminal courts.)   And she was white, and from a higher social class.  So the objective markers tipped against Harris, and his death sentence was upheld on direct appeal.

Next came the petition for postconviction relief.  Judge Mathesius rejected it with a painstaking 64-page opinion.  I read the whole thing, but I admit I was looking for the good bits.  You see, the New Jersey Supreme Court found the opinion so horrible, so utterly vile, that it could not even bring itself to quote more than a single passage from it.  Justice LaVecchia explained with a theatrical shudder:

We find the comments of [Judge Mathesius]... be wholly devoid of any function in the judicial discourse of our death penalty jurisprudence.  Hence, we will not quote any other portion of [Judge Mathesius]'s oral or written statements that inform our present analysis, as we conclude that such statements deserve no place in the published decisions of this State.

Not only that, but the "balance of the court’s statements contain what only can be described as outrageous, sarcastic, and pejorative comments".  Sounds promising, doesn't it?

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I reached page 64 and my hair still hadn't curled.  I wondered if I had accidentally read the wrong opinion.  The only thing that struck me as particularly noteworthy about the opinion is the vividness of Mathesius's prose style.  The writing style affected by Justice LaVecchia and her colleagues might be compared to the computer-flattened prose found in middle school social studies textbooks. If Mathesius wrote a social studies textbook, it would read more like Tim Cahill.

I went back and searched for the nasty bits more closely, and found two or three sentences that a sensitive soul might think went past vividness into sharpness.  But that was it.  It only then, after I'd wasted all that time, that I finally understood what should have been obvious from the beginning: the reason the New Jersey Supreme Court refused to quote from Mathesius's opinion was that it wasn't outrageous. 

The justices had just enough sense to realize that if they tried to back up their highly-wrought characterizations of the opinion with actual excerpts from it, their indignation would have come off as interestingly defensive.  By declining to prove the validity of their characterizations, they encouraged gullible readers (such as myself) to let their imaginations go.

It's at this point that the story begins to reveal a great deal about the New Jersey Supreme Court.   Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.