Office of ADA Mike Cutter
6th Floor, One Hogan Place
7 pm Sunday May 13th 2007
"I hope you haven't wasted my time in the mistaken belief I'm interested in a plea," McCoy said the second he walked through the door into Mike Cutter's office. Without waiting for an invitation, he dropped into the visitor's chair as casually as if he were EADA McCoy there to read the riot act or hand out an attaboy to a bureau chief.
Regan gave Cutter a non-committal nod of greeting and found herself a chair. McCoy clearly thought the old saw about lawyers representing themselves having fools for clients applied in the courtroom but not case conferences. Fine. One-on-one with Mike Cutter wasn't a place she much wanted to be anyway.
"Now, Jack, I wouldn't waste your time when I know how busy you must be trying to make bricks without straw for tomorrow morning," Cutter said.
"That's what Emil Skoda would call 'projection'," McCoy said. He stretched out his legs and leaned back in the chair, giving Cutter a steady look, entirely at his ease. "So what do you want?"
Cutter mimicked McCoy's pose, not quite catching the air of confidence but doing pretty well, Regan thought, for a man who must know by now that his case is built on three parts air and one part quicksand. "Cards on the table time, Jack."
"I'm not required to give you a preview of my defense."
"I'm not asking you to, Jack. Just stop and think for a minute. We're all of us jammed up in this and right now, I can't see a way for anybody to come out without losing a hell of a lot of paint. I'm trying to figure out a way to do the right thing here and I'd like you to help me."
"Jack …" Regan put a little warning in her voice. Cutter was a damn good snake-oil salesman and he almost had her believing him. Don't fall for his bullshit, Jack.
"Does that work often?" McCoy asked, nothing in his voice but professional curiosity.
Cutter let out a breath and then smiled, looking a little embarrassed, and Regan was surprised to find herself liking him for a second. Half a second, anyway. And 'like' might be a little strong. "Sometimes."
"Let me guess," McCoy said. "You're going to admit your case isn't as strong as you hoped, then tell me you still have a lot of confidence in the jury's sympathy. Point out how I can't be sure of an acquittal."
"Yeah, that's about it," Cutter said.
"Then we'll get on to the damage the case is doing my reputation and by extension, the office. How a conviction will pull the ambulance chasers and celebrity lawyers out of the woodwork to re-litigate every one of my old cases with even a tiny crack for their fingernails. How that will tie up the office for months, years, even, not to mention blowback down the line in diminished respect for the system."
"That is all true," Cutter said.
"You should have thought of that before you decided to paint me as a drunken philanderer in open court in a case based on forged documents and a witness you can't put on the stand without running foul of EC 7-26."
"No, Jack," Cutter leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. "You should have thought of that before you rushed the office into a prosecution against you. Let's not forget we're at this clambake at your invitation. So why don't you give the righteous indignation a rest for ten minutes and let's figure out what's what."
McCoy was still a long minute. "What do you want, Mike? Why are we here?"
"I want you to explain to me why, if my case is so weak and you're so confident of an acquittal, you were ready and eager to plead guilty. Hell, Jack, the complaint is in your handwriting, even if Ms. Markham here signed it." Cutter spread his hands. "Help me out here, Jack. Explain to me how that's the behavior of an innocent man."
"Good luck getting that in front of the jury," McCoy said. He was apparently unmoved by Cutter's plea but from where she sat, Regan could see a muscle jumping high up in his cheek.
Fuck me, she thought. Two sentences would turn Cutter into an ally. "My father beat women. For a few days there, I thought it was hereditary."
Two sentences McCoy hadn't even brought himself to say aloud to her, even though she'd as good as told him she knew. Two sentences he'd never say to Mike Cutter, and two sentences she couldn't say either without breaching lawyer-client confidentiality.
Not to mention friend-friend confidentiality.
"Jack … " Cutter said cajolingly. Regan could see he was going for an we're-all-ADAs-in-this-together tone. Won't work.
Right this second, Jack McCoy wasn't in anything together.
He got up, face set. "So you were wasting my time, after all."
"Oh, come on, Jack. We might be on opposite sides of the aisle right now but you've been this side of the desk for long enough to know I'm not the bad guy." Cutter was standing too, following McCoy toward the door. "Ask yourself what you would have done in my shoes. What you'd do now. Jack!"
McCoy was gone.
"Shit," Cutter said, turning back to Regan, raking one hand through his hair. "Stubborn S.O.B."
"You can't blame him for not wanting to dig you out of your own hole," Regan pointed out as she stood up.
"His hole, Ms. Markham, as well you know."
"You didn't have to push him into it quite so hard, though, did you?" Regan said. He took a step toward the door, but Cutter didn't move to let her past. "Every trick in the book and a few more that would melt the pen and burn the pages if you tried to write them down."
"You think I went too hard?" Cutter asked. "I went exactly as hard as I would with any defendant and you don't know Jack McCoy all that well if you think he's not prepared to go as hard as necessary to get a conviction. I'm presenting my strongest possible case to the jury and that's my job."
Another step brought her face to face with him. "What about justice?"
Cutter shrugged. "As a successful prosecutor once said to me, justice is the byproduct of winning."
"Don't you quote Jack McCoy at me!" Regan snapped, poking him hard in the chest with her finger. "Jack would never ignore exculpatory evidence – "
Cutter didn't step back. "If you read the complaints about him to the ethics board, you'll know he's not only ignored it, he's suppressed it."
"If you're talking about Andrew Dillard, that wasn't Jack, and you know it." Claire Kincaid proved it in open court. "And the lawyer who was responsible did six months and lost her license."
"It wasn't just Andrew Dillard though, was it, Ms. Markham?" Cutter said. "If Jack McCoy can send a witness out of the country to get them away from the defense and walk, I'm pretty sure I'm still on the right side of the line."
"If you can find me an example where Jack McCoy found out that the complainant and only witness was a serial liar with a history of forgery and false complaints fitting exactly the pattern of the charges and went ahead with the case, then fine, walk back in that courtroom and do your best to ruin the life of a man you know damn well is innocent." Regan realized she had a fistful of Cutter's shirtfront and released him. "But I bet you won't find one, Mr. Cutter. So the question you really need to answer is not, 'what's the best way to win this case'. It's – do you want Jack McCoy's job, Mr. Cutter? Or do you want to deserve it?"
.oOo.
A/N: In "Under the Influence" McCoy encourages the airline employer of a flight attendant witness whose testimony would weaken the prosecution case to assign her to an international route so she is out of reach of the defense.
In "Competence", McCoy withholds turning over the statement of a witness to the defense. The statement would have aided the defense's case by showing strong motive to another individual for the crime, casting a reasonable doubt.
In "Trophy", Andrew Dillard is the man who was wrongly convicted after Diana Hawthorne suppressed evidence so McCoy could get a conviction.
