they weren't done. During the initial search, they had discovered some concrete patching my dad had done a few months before in the basement--my parents were always fighting seepage--and the cops returned and opened up the walls with jackhammers. Then they came back with another warrant and tore up the backyard, because one of the neighbors said he was sure my father had been out there digging around the time my mom died. He had been, too, planting that rhododendron for her the day the four of us had dinner. Furthermore, the prosecutors were not only jerks about ransacking the house, they also refused to release anything they seized, meaning my father basically had no wardrobe, no personal PC, and not so much as a pot to boil water in the kitchen for months.
The computer in particular was a point of warfare, because my dad, who worked a lot at night, regularly downloaded court documents to the home PC. There were dozens and dozens of draft opinions on there, many of them involving appeals in which the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office was a party, as well as lots of memorandums reflecting the internal workings of the court of appeals, in which the judges sort of dropped their shorts and shared candid thoughts about lawyers, arguments, and occasionally one another. The appellate judges were gonzo when they realized this had come into the prosecutors' hands.
George Mason, who became acting chief, didn't want the court of appeals to be seen as shielding my dad, but he would have had to go to court to calm his colleagues were it not for a twist I couldn't help finding amusing: There was no judge to settle the dispute. Everybody in the superior court had already declined to hear my dad's case, and even when a judge was appointed, there was going to be nowhere for the loser to appeal since the appellate court itself was one of the parties. Eventually Molto agreed with George that the PAs would image the hard drive, making an exact copy, and then examine the drive under the supervision of George or someone he appointed, so that no internal court documents were viewed. They made the same agreement about the computer that had been in my dad's chambers.
After my dad's personal PC was analyzed, the home computer was turned over to Judge Mason, and both computers, from home and court, remained in George's chambers side by side for the month it took before Judge Yee was appointed. During that period, my father was allowed to get what he needed off the hard drives to finish his pending opinions or keep his calendar, but only when George or his delegate could witness this and make an exact log of every keystroke. My dad went over there once and found his return to the realm he used to rule far too humiliating to repeat under these conditions. After that, the prosecutors agreed that any further copying from the PCs could be done by emissaries approved by Judge Mason and the PAs, who turned out to be me or, at Judge Mason's suggestion, Anna, whom he knew and trusted as my dad's former clerk and a minor tech guru. Once Yee was appointed, he sided with the prosecutors and ordered both computers turned over to them. The computer from my dad's chambers had nothing of value on it--just like my mom's. But my dad's PC was kind of a gold mine for the PAs and they haul it up to court each day in the same pink shrink-wrap in which it's remained ever since their expert, Dr. Gorvetich, came to the court of appeals to retrieve it in December.
"Now the day before your wife died, Judge, you shredded several e-mails on your home PC, didn't you?"
"I did not do that, Mr. Molto."
"All right," says Tommy. He nods as if he had expected the denial, and walks a little bit, with the grim air of a parent about to give a spanking. "Your Internet provider is ClearCast, is that right?"
"Yes."
"Now, just so we're all on the same page, when someone sends you an e-mail, it actually goes to ClearCast's server, and you then pull it down to your home PC through your e-mail client. Right?"
"I'm not a computer guy, Mr. Molto, but that sounds about right."
"And going back to Professor Gorvetich's testimony, you set up your account at ClearCast so that e-mails were deleted from the ClearCast server after thirty days, correct?"
"Not