for a hearing based on what Myron learned about Harrelson’s report on Bello’s lie detector test. Leopizzi swatted us away: “Let’s get to the sentencing and stop all this nonsense,” he said.
At every sentencing hearing, the defendant can say whatever he wants before the judge renders his or her decision. We decided to use the opportunity to plant the seeds of our appeals by talking about the racist underpinnings of Humphreys case against Rubin and John. All four of us would have a say.
Rubin cut straight to the bone. He and John were condemned on the basis of their race, plain and simple. What happened to them was no different from what had happened to the Jews in Germany. That could be trouble, I thought. He was going too far, and might harm our chances with Jewish judges down the line. But Rubin’s analogy was no surprise. The millions who died under slavery and the millions more who have led stunted lives under the American version of apartheid are sometimes equated with the Holocaust by African Americans. I have tried to be open to these claims, but when I think about the Holocaust I see slavery and the American postslavery experience as different. Despite their horrible cruelty, the plantation owners needed their slaves alive. After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, although a brutal terrorist organization that penetrated every level of society and functioned above the law, like Hitler’s SS, did not advocate a “Final Solution” as far as I knew. Blacks had not only survived the Klan’s one hundred years of terror, they had created their own institutions in the South; hundreds of thousands had migrated to the North, and the progress of the civil rights movement gave hope that the nation could at least reduce the racism and prejudice that Rubin was talking about. After his final words Rubin would once again be alone in a world that demanded obedience. Imagining Rubin as he would be in only a few short minutes, I understood he was announcing his defiance.
“You executed three people without a trial, so you have no right to bring up Nazi Germany,” Judge Leopizzi shot back after Rubin sat down.
Then he turned to John, whose remarks were less provocative yet equally pointed. The case required two black men as defendants, and if John Royster hadn’t gotten out of the car first, he would be going to prison, he told the judge.
When John talked about himself in more general terms, Leopizzi interrupted him to acknowledge that he had risked his life to rescue a group of trapped prison guards during a riot, and that he had also almost completed a four-year college program while in prison: “You have been rehabilitated,” Leopizzi told him.
But John would have none of it. So the judge and the wrongfully convicted man stood there hashing out their mutually exclusive versions of a story that was ruining John’s life. When it came time to close, John took on the racial revenge theory.
“If I wanted a racist motivation,” John said, “four hundred years of my great-grandfather’s ancestry is enough motivation for what we blacks have suffered here in this country, not the mere fact that one white man—no disrespect—killed one black here in Paterson.”
When it was my turn, I stood, tongue-tied.
“I couldn’t do it,” I managed to say. “I couldn’t sentence this man.” My words seemed to take Leopizzi aback. It was obvious that he was deeply ambivalent about John.
“I beg you not to ask how many days you need to be punished,” Leopizzi said, his voice a little shaky. “If you do,” he continued, “I will ask you about the persons who are buried beneath the ground.”
Imposing the same judgment that Judge Larner had pronounced after the first trial, Leopizzi directed that both John and Rubin serve three life sentences, with the proviso that John serve his sentences simultaneously while Rubin would have to serve two out of his three life sentences, one after the other consecutively. John and Rubin were credited with the 3,497 days they had already spent in prison. John would be eligible for parole in 1981, and Rubin fifteen years later. The “Sixteenth Round” was over.
* * *
In the dog days after John and Rubin were sentenced, the state court system gave every indication of closing ranks. It took more than a year to get a copy of the trial transcript, and what the court sent was incomplete. Legal papers we filed with the clerk got lost,