Love, Joy, Feminism
A Review Series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris
Pp. 271-283
First, there’s one paragraph I forgot to give you last week:
Gwen sat silently. She stared into Peter’s eyes. She knew she would love to fall in love with this man. But his indecision hurt her more than anything had in a long time.
That came right before Peter said “Gwen, what do you want me to do?” Much has been made in the comments over the fact that Gwen is not yet in love with Peter, but feels she could fall in love with him. I agree with the commenters who have suggested that Farris is intentionally not making her too assertive. She has to be more passive, more waiting, more willing to go with what the man says, and not too forthright or or direct or pushy in her own right. She is the object of a man’s love, and that only.
Anyway, with that out of the way, let’s get to today’s segment.
We start out in Peter’s conference room, which we’re told was “rather small” but still “large enough for the deposition of Donna Corliss, scheduled for Wednesday, July 27, at 9:00 in the morning.” Basically, Peter is going to ask Donna questions. Farris tells us that Peter spent three hours the previous day going over everything to make sure he was ready, and that he was trying not to let the “glamour” of the discovery of tampering “distract” him from the remainder of the case.
So.
Corliss spent the evening in agony worrying about her upcoming session with Peter Barron. At nine-thirty, she received an unexpected and pleasant surprise. Stephen Stockton called her from Seattle. They hadn’t talked in over a week.
Ah yes, the boyfriend. Donna and Stephen exchange pleasant niceties, and we learn that Stephen is going to be home in todays and that he “started the Bar Exam” that morning. Stephen says that it was “grueling” and that he’s “really happy my dad made me study so hard” and that he “is not going to flunk this exam.” Donna says she wishes Stephen were already a lawyer, and it comes out that Donna hasn’t told Stephen anything about the recent developments in Peter’s civil rights suit. “It’s too complex and too distracting,” she says, and promises to tell him when he gets back.
I don’t see that going well, because as you remember, Stephen wasn’t happy Donna embellished the bruises bit when she told him about that way back when.
So anyway. Deposition.
Gwen shows up at 8:35 on Wednesday morning, and Farris tells us that
Other than a brief “hello” at church on Sunday, it was the first time she and Peter and talked since the brunch on Saturday.
This is awkward.
When they finished their discussion of the case, Peter glanced nervously at his watch. It was ten until nine. He was not nervous about the deposition, but about being alone with Gwen.
“After I blurted out everything on Saturday, I don’t want to go into territory I shouldn’t,” Peter said, “but I just want to know if you are doing okay.”
“I’m OK, Peter,” she replied with a hint of a smile. “How about you?”
“I’ll make it. I’m glad for this deposition; it gives me a lot of work to focus my mental energies on.”
At this point the intercom buzzes and Sally the secretary announces that everyone is in the conference room and ready to get started, but I’m still wondering what Gwen’s hint of smile meant.
So they all get into the conference room. There’s a court reporter and Donna and Gail, and Peter and Gwen. Gwen sits next to Peter, who sits across from Donna. The court reporter swears Donna in. Next Peter asks Donna whether she testified under oath at the two previous hearings, promising to tell the truth, and Farris tells us that Donna “was already becoming nervous” because “questions about her truthfulness were her deepest fear.” Gail stops Peter as he starts asking Donna whether her answers today would “be the same as in those state hearings” or different.
“If you are trying to discredit her by showing that she said one thing one time and something different now, it would be more appropriate to have you ask her about something specific.”
This whole thing is just weird, because Peter says he meant to ask whether what she would say about “her training, background, and experience” had changed at all, and Gail is like, no duh, they haven’t changed, so Peter decides to move on. This goes on for pages and pages, though, and I don’t want to bore you with it, so let me summarize.
Peter first gets into the question of when Donna learned of the report. She says she first learned about it on Wednesday, May 11, when she came in to work in the morning. Peter asks why that is the case when the report actually came in six days earlier. Donna says she has no idea. She says she didn’t check the report’s date, that she had been out sick on Friday and leading training on Monday and in juvenile court on Tuesday, and it would have been Blackburn’s job to find someone else to take an emergency report if it was called in and assigned to her while she was not in the office. She says Blackburn called to give her a verbal report of the case when she got into the office on Wednesday morning, and that she also read the report in her email. Weirdly, Peter does not ask her if Blackburn told her the report was an emergency.
Remember that the original report came in Thursday, May 5, and was not marked as priority 1. After the civil lawsuit was filed, Blackburn had Donna change the report to state that it came in on Tuesday, May 10, and mark it up to priority 1. This was to justify Donna’s pushing her way in to Gwen’s home and strip searching Casey. If the report was a priority 1 report and had just come in, there would be reason to believe Casey might be in immediate danger. If it was not priority 1 and had been allowed to sit for nearly a week, the same urgency would not be there.
Personally, I think Peter’s asking questions in circles here. He’s correct that there are questions here that need asking, but I don’t think he’s getting at the right ones. Why would Blackburn have lied and said it was a priority 1 report? Did Donna think it was a priority 1 report? These are questions that should be asked, because in further questioning, Donna tells Peter that she believes Blackburn probably did the computer tampering, because he was the kind of guy who was never okay with losing anything ever, and because he was frightening and had a temper and had told her and Rita that he would “fix everything” after the civil lawsuit was filed.
But if the tampering didn’t come until the lawsuit was filed, why would Blackburn have told Donna the report was a priority 1, or that it had just come in, when it wasn’t and it hadn’t—and before the investigation had even been carried out? And isn’t it relevant whether or not Donna thought there was imminent danger? And wouldn’t getting at that require finding out what version of the report Donna had seen or been told about? Isn’t it worth determining whether for some unknown reason, Blackburn might have changed the report before ever passing the information on to Donna? It matters whether the report was changed sooner or later.
If Donna was fed a faked report, and believed there was imminent danger, Gail could argue convincingly that she did nothing wrong pushing her way in and forcibly strip searching Casey. This could be a defense against Peter’s allegation that Gail violated Gwen’s constitutional rights. This alone makes finding out when the report was changed important. But instead, Peter only cares about who changed it.
There is this part, of course:
“Does CPS have a policy about getting warrants to enter people’s homes?”
“No. At least I’ve never heard of such a policy.”
“On what basis do you go into someone’s home?”
“Whenever we receive a report that could be child abuse or neglect, if the allegations re true, we are required by law to do a face-to-face investigation. That means when child is in the home, we are required to go into the home and look at the child and the child’s physical circumstances.”
“Did you believe there was an emergency in this case—that Casey’s life or health was in imminent danger?”
“I wasn’t sure. That is what I was there to find out. The allegations were certainly serious. And the fact that she twice refused to cooperate made me very suspicious that she was hiding something.”
This is the point where Peter should follow up. What were the allegations, as Donna understood them? Were they the actual allegations, which did not include any mention of bruises, or were they the doctored allegations, which alleged severe bruising? We know the answer to that, of course, but Peter doesn’t, and Judge Stokes doesn’t. But no, Peter doesn’t follow up at all. He lets that go, instead arguing that because Donna refused to tell Gwen the allegations when she showed up at her door, she was the one hiding something, not Gwen. Donna responds that it’s CPS policy not to divulge the allegations, because “it might give a guilty parent a reason to change their story.”
Let me finish by getting to the meat of what Peter feels he achieved. At one point Donna says this, and Peter asks the court reporter to mark the statement:
“Mrs. Landis refused to cooperate with me that day. If she had cooperated with me, this whole thing probably would never have gone any further. She made a big federal case out of something that should have lasted only ten or fifteen minutes.”
Many pages later comes this line of questioning:
“Under any circumstances, if you found bruises that you believed were related to spanking, would you ever close a file at that point?”
“No, I would not. We would seek voluntary treatment or go to court under such circumstances.”
“If I can phrase it another way, would you ever have closed this case in fifteen minutes if you had found bruises?”
“We did find bruises, but the answer to your question is no. The case was certainly going to last longer than fifteen minutes.”
“Ms. Corliss, isn’t it the truth that you never found any bruises, but you simply were angry at Mrs. Landis because she stood up for her constitutional rights and refused to let you in her house? It was her so-called lack of cooperation, and not any bruises, which led to her being charged in state court. Isn’t that true?”
“No, Mr. Barron, that is not true. And I resent your remarks.”
“You can resent them all you want, Ms. Corliss, but you still have to answer them. You told me just a minute ago that if you found bruises, you would never close the case in fifteen minutes. And you also say that you definitely found bruises. But today you told me, and this court reporter, that if Mrs. Landis had cooperated that first day, this whole thing would have been over in fifteen minutes. How does your early statement today square up with your later statements today?”
Gail objects that they can’t possibly expect the court reporter to go back to find a specific statement made that much earlier in the deposition, but Peter reminds her that he had the court reporter mark it, and then has the court reporter pull it up and read it. Then there is silence. Peter asks the court recorder to note the silence. Gail asks whether there’s an actual question and suggests that the silence is on Peter, and then Peter restates his question, and finally Donna says this:
“Mr. Barron, you are reading things into my comments. When I said that, I had my mental state on the first day in mind. I didn’t expect to find bruises at first. And given that expectation, if she would have cooperated, it would have lasted only ten or fifteen minutes. I didn’t have bruises in mind when I said that. You are taking it out of context.”
Farris tells us that Peter “was happy with the results” but that “there was no certainty that the judge would be convinced she was lying.” But this, as Farris positions it, is Peter’s biggest potential win of the deposition. Absolutely absent is any line of questioning as to the content of the report Donna was given to act on. At least, though, Farris admits that this supposed admission is tenuous, because it does sound so—there are all manner of adequate explanations.
There’s other stuff that goes on in the deposition too—Donna explains that her description of the bruises in court differed from Rita’s because Casey was struggling and they’d forgotten the camera and didn’t want to hold her down and draw a picture, because she was so uncomfortable and they wanted to let her go. Donna also says the officer on the scene probably misunderstood her statement vis a vis the case being closed if she would cooperate, and that she probably just said things would go better for her if she cooperated.
And that’s the end of the deposition. Your welcome for not giving you a more thorough blow-by-blow.
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