“Boiling in oil would be nice,” Tony Callis said. “Or perhaps drawing and quartering.”
Mr. James Howard Leslie, by profession a burglar, had been recently indicted for murder in the first degree. It was alleged that one Jerome H. Kellog, on returning to his home at 300 West Luray Street in Northwest Philadelphia, had come across Mr. Leslie in his kitchen. It was further alleged that Leslie had thereupon brandished a blue .38 Special five-inch-barrel Smith & Wesson revolver; had then ordered Kellog to raise his hands and turn around; and when Kellog had done so, had shot Kellog in the back of the head, causing his death. It was further alleged that after Kellog had fallen to the floor of his kitchen, Leslie had then shot him again in the head, for the purpose of making sure he was dead.
When Leslie had discussed the incident with Sergeant Jason Washington of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, Leslie had explained that he had felt it necessary to take Kellog’s life because Kellog had seen his face, and as a policeman, would probably be able to find him and arrest him for burglary.
The question Hormel was really asking, Callis understood, was whether the City of Philadelphia wanted to go through the expense of a trial, seeking a sentence that would incarcerate Leslie for the rest of his natural life, or whether Leslie should be permitted to cop a plea, which would see him removed from society for, say, twenty years, which was, in practical terms, about as long behind bars as a life sentence would mean.
Ordinarily, there would be no question of that. The full wrath and fury of the law would suddenly descend on the shoulders of anyone who had in cold blood taken the life of a police officer. Or even someone who had shot a cop by mistake, while in the act of doing anything illegal.
Ordinarily, Callis himself would have personally prosecuted Leslie. For one thing, he really believed that letting a scumbag get away with shooting a cop really would undermine the very foundations of civilized society. For another, press reports of the vigorous prosecution of such a villain by the district attorney himself would be remembered at election time.
It was not much of a secret that District Attorney Callis would be willing to serve the people of Philadelphia as their mayor if called upon to do so. And neither was it lost upon him that one of the reasons the incumbent mayor of Philadelphia, the Hon. Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, had been elected and reelected with such comfortable margins was his reputation of being personally tough on criminals.
But the case of Leslie was not like, for example, that of some scumbag shooting a cop during a bank robbery. For one thing, Officer Kellog had not been on duty at the time of his tragic demise. Perhaps more important, Leslie was going to be represented at his trial by the Office of the Public Defender, specifically by a lawyer whom Callis most commonly thought of—not for publication, of course—as “The Goddamned Nun.”
Ms. Imogene McCarthy—who had been known as Sister Luke during her ten years as a cloistered nun—had two characteristics that annoyed Callis, sometimes greatly. She devoutly believed that there were always extenuating circumstances—poverty, lack of education, parental abuse, drug addiction—which caused people like James Howard Leslie to do what they did, and which tragic circumstances should trigger not punishment but compassion and mercy on the part of society; and she was a very skillful attorney, both in the courtroom and in the appeals processes.
Tony Callis was determined that The Goddamned Nun, as good as she was, was not going to get her client off on this one. Indeed, in her heart of hearts, she probably didn’t want to see him walk. What she didn’t want was for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to put James Howard Leslie into handcuffs and march him off to Rockview Prison in State College for what the judge had just told him would be incarceration for the rest of his natural life, thereby destroying all of his hopes to be educated, rehabilitated, and returned to society as a productive, law-abiding member thereof.
What, Callis believed, McCarthy saw from her perspective as a reasonable solution to the case of James Howard Leslie was that he be allowed to plead guilty to Murder Three (voluntary manslaughter), a lesser offense that, she would be prepared to argue, would not