to the county jail for up to six months served only to provoke me more. The first two rows of the spectators’ gallery were filled with press people who were following the showdown. As I continued to argue, it seemed to me that Leopizzi realized he could be the target of some fairly damaging news stories. Whether or not that was true, he loosened the reins. For the next two hours, while the jury remained tucked away in its little back room, Myron and I took turns hammering away at the prosecution’s theory.
“Stop double-talking,” Leopizzi commanded us every now and then. Other times he tried to reason. “Let’s assume it’s a tavern where black people go and they did become completely enraged over the type of homicide that Conforti committed. What’s wrong with that?”
“You honestly believe that each of the blacks felt the same way, that each and every one of them—”
“Let’s assume,” Leopizzi cut me off, “that maybe five or six felt that way out of a crowd and say—”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor, but that’s the nightmare,” I said, interrupting him.
It really was unthinkable. Our clients were up against the “fact” of angry black patrons from a different bar where a white-on-black murder had occurred the same night as the shooting at the Lafayette. Turning that into Rubin and John gunning down four people was madness.
“When people are not treated as individuals and are lumped together and called ‘angry blacks,’” I told Leopizzi, “that triggers an emotional response.”
“Is that evidential?” Leopizzi asked. “Talk from a lawyer’s standpoint and not from not any other standpoint.”
“We are talking about stereotypes,” I said, almost begging the man to understand what was at stake.
Amazingly, Leopizzi seemed to weaken.
“How can these defendants who allegedly knew nothing about an angry black mob be bound by what it did?” Leopizzi, visibly irritated now, asked Humphreys.
It was not the right question, but it illustrated the situation. Leopizzi didn’t get that the angry black man was a stereotype. It was a cipher, interchangeable with vague racial fear. Humphreys’s vision was of a universal black mob. It presupposed that black anger toward whites was everywhere, like oxygen. That Leopizzi formulated any question at all, however, signified a willingness at least to give us a foothold—not much of one, but better than nothing.
“Without that,” Humphreys replied, “Carter and Artis—both of them guilty men—stand a good chance of being acquitted.”
When Myron and I attacked Humphreys’s reply, Leopizzi became enraged. His moment of weakness behind him, he shot us an “I see through you shysters” sneer: “Be lawyers!” he barked. “And stop pretending you don’t understand why the racial motive theory makes sense!”
He was going to allow it. It didn’t matter that the killings could have been a robbery gone awry. Or that they could have been the result of a mob hit on a numbers bar that had withheld the take. Of all the possible explanations, racial revenge was the most far-fetched, especially as Humphreys had no evidence that either Carter or Artis had ever been in the bar or even knew it was there.
I had to fight the impulse to sag a little when the jury reappeared after lunch. Leopizzi apologized for the delay, explaining to the jury that that was how the system worked to ensure that both sides got a fair trial. It was an ironic thing to say given the situation he was describing. The system needed no advocate—it needed a watchdog. Rubin and John had just forfeited their presumed innocence to a cultural stereotype.
And so it began. A cop who was on duty when Waltz Inn owner Roy Holloway was killed talked about the outpouring of anger among the bar’s black patrons. Humphreys drew out all the frightening details of the bloodthirsty black mob. Myron and I were dead in the water. We used our cross-examinations to establish that Rubin and John were not a part of the crowd, and to insert the shadow of a doubt in the form of a suggestion that perhaps not everyone there was angry, or even black. It was useless. The die was cast, and the vibrations of black rage had infiltrated the courtroom. We could nibble away at the edges at best.
It got worse. Two more police officers testified that some people from the Waltz Inn went down to the police station to demand action. Ed Rawls, a bartender who worked at the Nite Spot, where Rubin and John had been that same night, was part of the crowd.