“Sounds like a stump speech,” Reacher said. “But I’m not registered to vote.”
“I know,” Walker said. “I checked, finally. That’s why I’m talking like this. If this was politics, it would be too hokey for words. But this is for real. I want to be a judge, because I could do some good. You familiar with how things work in Texas?”
“Not really.”
“Judges in Texas are all elected. They have a lot of power. And it’s a weird state. A lot of rich people, but a lot of poor people, too. The poor people need court-appointed lawyers, obviously. But there’s no public defender system in Texas. So the judges choose the poor people’s lawyers for them. They just pick them out, from any old law firm they want. They’re in control of the whole process. They determine the fees, too. It’s patronage, pure and simple. So who is the judge going to appoint? He’s going to appoint somebody who contributed to his election campaign. It’s about cronyism, not fitness or talent. The judge hands out ten thousand dollars of taxpayer money to some favored law firm, the law firm assigns some incompetent lackey who puts in a hundred dollars’ worth of work, the net result being nine thousand nine hundred dollars unearned profit for the law firm and some poor guy in jail for something he maybe didn’t
do. Most defense lawyers meet their clients for the first time at the start of the trial, right there in the courtroom. We’ve had drunk lawyers and lawyers who fall asleep at the defense table. They don’t do any work. They don’t check anything. Like, the year before I got here, some guy was on trial for the rape of a child. He was convicted and went to prison for life. Then some pro-bono operation like you went and proved the guy had actually been in jail at the time the rape happened. In jail, Reacher. Fifty miles away. Awaiting trial for stealing a car. There was paperwork from here to there, proving it beyond any doubt, all of it in black and white in the public record. His first lawyer never even checked.”
“Not too good,” Reacher said.
“So I do two things,” Walker said. “First, I aim to become a judge, so I can help to put things right in the future. Second, right now, right here in the DA’s office, we act out both sides. Every single time, one of us assembles the prosecution case, and another of us does the defense’s work and tries to tear it down. We work real hard at it, because we know nobody else will, and I couldn’t sleep nights if we didn’t.”
“Carmen Greer’s defense is rock solid,” Reacher said.
Hack Walker looked down at the desk.
“No, the Greer situation is a nightmare,” he said. “It’s a total disaster, all ways around. For me personally, as a man, as a DA, and as a candidate for a judgeship.”
“You have to recuse yourself.”
Walker looked up. “Of course I’ll recuse myself. No doubt about that. But it’s still personal to me. And I’m still in overall charge. Whatever happens, it’s still my office. And that’ll have repercussions for me.”
“You want to tell me what your problem is?”
“Don’t you see? Sloop was my friend. And I’m an honest prosecutor. So in my heart and in my head, I want to see justice done. But I’m looking at sending a Hispanic woman to death row. I do that, I can forget about the election, can’t I? This county is heavily Hispanic. But I want to be a judge. Because I could do some good. And asking for the death penalty against a minority woman now will stop me dead. Not just here. It will be headline news everywhere. Can you imagine? What’s The New York Times going to say? They already think we’re dumb redneck barbarians who marry our own cousins. It’ll follow me the rest of my life.”
“So don’t prosecute her. It wouldn’t be justice, anyhow. Because it was self-defense, pure and simple.”
“She got you convinced of that?”
“It’s obvious.”
“I wish it was obvious. I’d give my right arm. For the first time in my career, I’d twist and turn to make this go away.”