Legal Stories--the Surprise Witness

     I remember the real name of my surprise witness very well, but I’m not going to say it. I’m going to call her by a name that is totally made up, “Marlena Marie Boxer.”  She used all three names because that's  what was on her rap sheet, and all criminals are known by all three names. Think of James Earl Ray or Lee Harvey Oswald. However, her crime was just misdemeanor prostitution. She may have been convicted more than once.

     The case arose when the City of Seattle fired a police officer for demanding services from prostitutes for free under threat of arrest. The officer, whom I’ll call “Roger Johnson” and which is also a made-up name, had no support from his union, so his attorney duly filed an appeal to the Civil Service Commission, but then asked for a delay of proceedings. Somehow, the case fell through the cracks, and several years passed without a hearing's being scheduled. "Johnson" moved out of the area, then returned and asked for his hearing.  I was assigned to prosecute the case, and a pair of vice cops began searching for the women who had been the witnesses against him during the internal investigation that had gotten him fired in the years previously.

     Two were found right away.  One was a blonde teen-ager from the middle-class suburbs of Bellevue, who had been adventuring or slumming when she worked the streets. She didn’t stay with the business. She testified that a uniformed officer had made her get in his car—had driven her out onto a pier—and threatened to throw her into Puget Sound  in if she didn’t perform. But she looked at “Johnson” and was unable to identify him.

     The second young woman was a pathetic creature. She was a mousy-looking woman who was ill with kidney disease, and she had defense-wound bruises on her arms. She testified with some hesitation.  Defense counsel—normally an affable, pleasant man with a resemblance to Woody Allen—cross-examined her sternly. He asked about the bruises and made it clear that she was under the control of a violent pimp, although I’m not sure that affected her credibility.

     But “Marlena Marie Boxer” came through for us. She had not been a witness before. The City had no idea that she even knew "Johnson."  The vice cop testified that the night before our hearing, he and his partner had been on a routine midnight patrol around 4^th Avenue and Union Street, near the post office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It was a well known area of prostitution loitering.They saw “Marlena,” who hadn’t been around for a while, and pulled over to chat. She recognized them at once and jumped in their unmarked car to visit.

      She had a clear-eyed view of the law against what she was doing. If an officer fooled her into thinking he was a john and fooled her into “Offering and agreeing to an act of prostitution” then she agreed that when she got arrested, she had it coming. But she knew the exact legal parameters of “Offering and Agreeing,” and if an officer couldn’t honestly establish every last element of the crime, then that was not a righteous bust, and it made her indignant.

    “Hey, what ever happened to ‘Roger Johnson’?” she asked.

    “Why do you ask?”

    “Well, he used to make me get in his car and go to his apartment and work for him, and he wouldn’t pay.”

    “Do you think you can find that apartment?” the officers asked.

    “Sure,” she said, and she named the street intersection that was nearest to it. They drove up James Street, the main route from downtown to Capitol Hill, but when she looked around, she couldn’t find it. “Can you guys get off the road and go down alleys?” she asked.

     Sure they could.  And with “Marlena” directing their route, they started their trip all over again. This time they followed a twisted course through back streets and alleys, obviously designed to conceal a destination, then she had them stop. She pointed to a door and said “It’s that one.”

     The officers got out and walked along the porch of a row of street-level apartments that opened onto the alley.  At the door she pointed to, there was still  a neatly printed little nametag: “Roger Johnson,” it said.

     “Marlena” showed up at the hearing wearing in an aqua-colored satin dress that hugged her beach-ball figure, and false eyelashes that were so thick and long they cast shadows on her cheeks. “Why did he choose you?” defense counsel asked.

     “Why? Why? Because it’s me!” she said. She stood up and extended her dark-chocolate arms and danced a little shimmy. The attorney and I smiled, but the three Civil Service Commissioners looked stony cold sober. They were looking into “Johnson’s” face, which had flushed deep red.

     At the end of the hearing the Civil Service Commission sustained his firing. He was also considered as a possible suspect in the murders committed by the Green River Killer.

       When I wrote this post, I decided not to state the true name of “Marlena Marie Boxer” because in her own way, she was an honest woman who helped rid the force of a bad cop. She appeared to be older than I, so now she would be a woman in her 70s. Who knows, maybe she is the sweet old grandmother to little children who would not understand her profession. I’d rather think of her thriving than think that she fell into the scourge of heroin addiction that was common among women who worked the streets by the time I retired.

       I almost wrote the true name of “Roger Johnson,” which I also remember well, and who was not an honest man. However, I don’t know that he was ever convicted of any crime.