Judge, what you have been handed is very similar to a Chinese menu. The District Attorney wants you to choose one from column A and one from column B, and to come back with a verdict.
Now Mr. McGill said in his argument at the demurrer stage that he wanted you to accept everything [White and Scanlan said].73 But Your Honor, you could not accept everything, because to do so would leave you in such a befuddle, because the stories are diametrically opposed. There is no one who listened to that evidence that was presented by Miss White and Mr. Scanlan that can reconcile the differences in them. The only similarity is that they involve a police officer and a male. Beyond that there is no similarity whatsoever.74
Of course there was another similarity, namely, that both White and Scanlan claimed that a man struck Officer Faulkner, even though their description of that event differed radically. But beyond that, Alva delivered a scathing critique of ADA McGill’s methodology of picking one single point of what one witness said while disregarding all the rest (column A), and adding it to an entirely different story that lacked that crucial point (column B), merely to get a conviction at any cost: “Your Honor, you can’t just take the identification of Cynthia White, and the substantive story of Mr. Scanlan, and put them together to equal C.”75
Unfortunately, this is what the court finally ended up doing, because less than a half hour later, Judge Meyer Rose found “the defendant …, Mr. Cook, guilty of the two crimes, aggravated assault and resisting law enforcement,”76 on exactly the logic Alva had so trenchantly criticized.
What was true for White’s and Scanlan’s descriptions of Cook’s alleged assault was of course also true of their descriptions of the Faulkner killing. With regard to the latter, one of the witnesses McGill had on offer was demonstrably vulnerable to police pressure and her account raised more questions than it answered, but on the other hand, she claimed to be able to ID the armed assailant (column A), whereas the other witness who gave a totally different description of the events but, as “a businessman … who is intelligent in his own right,”77 instead of a prostitute with multiple arrests and several open cases, was not as assailable as White but was unable to identify the shooter (column B).
But once one was ready to accept that strained logic, as was apparently the case with Judge Meyer Rose who otherwise behaved in no way as unfair as the Abu-Jamal Judges Paul Ribner and Albert F. Sabo, the fact that Scanlan and White contradicted each other not only with regard to the assault but also with regard to the shooting couldn’t add anything to Cook’s defense anymore: Here, too, McGill’s Chinese menu strategy worked, even though, on account of the weakness of White as a witness, only barely:78 I pick what I like from column A, add to it what I like from column B, and together, they will yield a fine meal that leads to a conviction.
Since he was defending Billy Cook and not Mumia Abu-Jamal, it can not be held against Alva that he didn’t investigate Scanlan’s story of the shooting quite as meticulously as he happened to have White’s. All the same, it is unfortunate.
Beyond the contradictions between the witnesses – which as we just saw were offset by the acceptance of the A + B = C logic by the court –, his demonstration of the bizarre character of White’s description of that crucial event had clearly worked in his advantage, to a point where White’s credibility as a witness was on the verge of collapsing.79
But we have seen in the preceding pages that while Scanlan’s description of the alleged Cook assault may have been tenable at least in principle, the same is not true of his description of the shooting of Officer Faulkner. That description was definitely absurd and made no more sense than White’s account did. But once we are at this point, we go beyond talking about the technique of cobbling together a prosecution on the model of Joseph McGill’s Chinese menu – we are now talking about the ingredients of that menu.
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