Posted by: Ed Chernoff
September 02, 2007
Topic: Brownsville, Part Dos

I had seen the call come in, but the caller ID represented as a private call, and more often than not that means someone is trying to sell me something. I was interviewing a potential client at the time, which was infinitely more important than a sales call. When I checked the message an hour later, it was 4:45pm. I cursed the situation. I doubted he would still be in his office, and found it unlikely that we would be able to connect during the weekend. That meant that Matt and I would be on the road to Brownsville Sunday afternoon wondering what the hell was going on. I was wrong.

Two rings into my call, he answered his own phone. Skipping the pleasantries, he got right to the point. "Ed, all six of the other co-defendants have agreed to plead guilty and testify against your client", he said. The cat got my tongue.

As of Wednesday, nobody had hinted that they intended to plea, much less cooperate with the Government in their prosecution. I knew that offers had been made earlier in the process, but that had resulted in nothing. In fact, we had already started one trial after those offers had been made, so what had changed? And how did it change so fast?

After a sufficient silence, the prosecutor began explaining the deals each defendant was getting. Some of the offers seemed generous. Several others struck me as the usual pie in the sky government nonsense. Then he offered us our own slice of the pie. I still had nothing to say. The plea offers didn't seem much different than what had been offered months earlier. I couldn't wrap my mind around what could have happened to influence the pleas.

I've got to hand it to him. His timing was impeccable. Only sixty hours remained before we were scheduled to pick another jury. The first trial had ended in a mistrial, after four jurors dropped out. Two had admitted to reading and being influenced by mid-trial publicity. One had decided that he was too fearful for his family to be fair. The fourth admitted to having dreams about one of the defendants slicing her neck.

I could sympathize. The trial was enormous, with large implications. It was an intimidating experience, for lawyers and jurors alike. The seven defendants sat around two large conference tables, half of them wearing earpieces for the Spanish translation, and each accompanied by at least one lawyer. We barely had room to turn our heads. It reminded me of the grainy films I had seen of the Nuremberg trials.

The evidence was also intimidating. The Government claimed that our client and his brother made up the hub of a huge drug enterprise, connected to an even larger cartel in Mexico. The head of that cartel had been turned over by the Mexican government. All of the jurors lived on the border, and were intimately aware of the name of the cartel and its propensity for violence. Every time the government mentioned the cartel, it was like pushing into a bruise.

So in this phone call, an offer was made to our client that would make a new trial unnecessary. All he had to do was agree to cooperate with the United States Government. Perhaps, by testifying against his brethren and anyone else the Government deemed offensive, he could cut a good percentage of his sentence. This would all be promised to him in a sealed plea agreement. I had heard it before. I politely declined and told the AUSA I would see him on Monday.

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