Excerpt from 'Four Trials'
By John Edwards
Chapter One: E.G.
"I trust you."
E.G. Sawyer didn't speak these words. Instead, he typed them out on a plastic spelling board that had become his only means of communication since the day his life had changed six years before. It was a December evening in 1984, and my client and I sat on the ninth floor of the Buncombe County courthouse in an otherwise empty courtroom that overlooked the art deco cityscape of downtown Asheville, North Carolina. Only an hour before, I had completed my closing argument in an intense two-week trial where we had sought to prove that E.G. had been permanently disabled as a result of the medical malpractice of an Asheville doctor and the local hospital.
The next morning, the jury would begin deliberations. But for the moment as I sat beside my client, I wondered if I had done everything possible to make those twelve men and women understand the damage E.G. had suffered. Could they see the man he had once been ? the real E.G. lost somewhere in the hunched and colorless figure that now slouched in a wheelchair? Back then this man hadn't needed a chair to get around or a spelling board to speak. This man had once been the freest of movers, the easiest of talkers; the kind of guy whose good looks and easy smile would always shield him ? or so it seemed ? from misfortune.
???
Howard E.G. Sawyer ? those middle initials were an Appalachian quirk and stood for nothing ? had long been accustomed to the power of his striking black-Irish good looks. He had known his charm pretty well, and he loved to talk and knew people loved to talk to him. He was a natural salesman, and a good one. When he drove his Chevrolet pickup around western North Carolina selling chemicals, slapping backs, and handing out gifts, he did more than distribute the usual fifths of Crown Royal or Jack Daniel's. He stocked up on baseball cards, penknives, and the like ? for clients' kids and even for friends of their kid's.
E.G. Sawyer lived for the human exchange, and he loved the freedom his job gave him. No office, no time card ? just a monthly quota he easily met but seldom exceeded. As soon as E.G.'s professional obligations were fulfilled, he hit the golf course. When he expanded his sales territory to the golfer's paradise of Florida, his boss, Charles Tate, could hardly complain. E.G.'s sales charm knew no state boundaries, and besides, E.G. took Tate's son along as his caddy.
The Tates had more or less adopted E.G., who lived in a neatly kept double-wide trailer just north of the Asheville city limits. He was a frequent dinner guest and a reliable presence during holidays. The Tates affectionately referred to him as "our bachelor."
Of course the ladies liked him too, for why shouldn't they ? even if he was a hard man to hold down, with all that moving and all that charm ? and all that golf ? which may have been his greatest passion of all. His first wife, Betty, continued to be fond of him even after she had left him, although she had long accepted that his real loves would always be the road and the links. And although he faithfully picked up their young children, Chad and Kim, each Saturday morning for swim- ming or baseball games, he loved his role as the Tates' bachelor at least as much as he enjoyed his role as Saturday dad.
But as E.G. entered his forties, as his sales chums and golfing partners abandoned him each evening for the tediums and glories of married life, bachelorhood lost its luster. In 1976, E.G. married again, a woman who was young, beautiful, and spirited ? too spirited, it turned out, for the life E.G. envisioned. The marriage did not last a year.
His friends had never known him to drink ? at all. While the others passed a whiskey bottle, an Orange Crush always sufficed for E.G., but when loneliness was accompanied by bitterness and humiliation, the once carefree man began a descent. In the privacy of his trailer, he began to drink whole fifths of vodka. For a full year, he kept his new addiction to himself, embarrassed by this latest failing. Then his sales performance began to slip. One day Charles Tate found E.G. in his trailer surrounded by empty bottles. He checked his employee and friend into St. Joseph's Hospital on Saturday, September 9, 1978.
???
I had just told E.G. that the defense attorneys had approached me with a settlement offer that he would need to accept ? or refuse ? before the jury returned for deliberations the next morning. It was an offer of $750,000. E.G.'s fingers immediately stumbled onto the rickety plastic slab that sat just above his lap. That spelling board was supposed to prompt a synthesized voice for each word typed, but it constantly malfunctioned, so to understand what he was trying to say I generally had to watch E.G.'s once powerful fingers fumble against the letters. It was agonizing for him, and wrenching for anyone who watched him.
"Take it," he wrote, and although nothing had changed on his deadened face, I could feel his excitement.
For a moment I didn't respond. "Take it," his fingers wrote again ? as if I hadn't understood.
I could hardly blame him. It was a lot of money ? not just to my client, but to me, for E.G.'s working-class world was the world I knew. E.G.'s father drove a bus in Weaverville, just north of Asheville; my own dad had spent much of his life in the textile mills of North and South Carolina, where I was raised. In Raleigh, my wife Elizabeth still wore the $11 wedding ring I had bought for her seven years before. So when he said "Take it," I understood. I understood completely.
I had already talked with my partners and they were impressed with the offer and at first they seemed happy with it, but we all soon realized that in the long run it wouldn't be nearly enough to give E.G. any kind of life. The figure may have represented the sum of his lost potential wages, but that hardly meant anything for someone who could no longer walk or talk or drive, or cook for himself or dress himself, or even keep himself clean, or buy anything in a store or turn the pages of a newspaper or make any kind of plan for a different tomorrow. The settlement would merely house and clothe him, but E.G. ? who deeply loved the freedom of his life on the road ? could no longer function at all on his own. And the offer didn't come close to approaching the mountain of expenses for the medical and physical challenges that lay ahead as he grew older, feebler, and surely, more and more alone. They were hardships that we, and even E.G. himself, could hardly begin to imagine.
I had seen photographs of a tall, broad-shouldered man with big, muscular arms and a ready grin for the camera, but now he was the kind of embarrassing figure who one might turn away from on the street, eager to forget that kind of misery. He bore almost no resemblance to the winning fellow who once could have talked his way onto a golf course or into a woman's arms. It wasn't just that he was now fifty-one years old. It was that the armor he had worn into the world ? the handsome face, the deft instinct for slapping a friend on the back or bending down and slipping a pocketknife to someone's shy son ? had been stripped away. His black hair was now thinning and streaked with gray. His wide shoulders sagged inside the sports jacket I had wrestled him into that morning. His chin was damp; and his once lively eyes were vacant. And yet, he had this: the ability to make you believe in him and want to fight for him because, without any reservation, he believed in you in a way you did not yet believe in yourself.
He typed it out a third time: "Take it."
I told him it was not what he deserved, and it was not what he needed. "And let me tell you something," I added. "The jury knows it too."
E.G. sat there, his otherwise expressionless eyes welling up under the fluorescent lights. Then in a slow and halting manner, he began to move his hands.
"I trust you."
I trust you. I'll never forget how I felt at that moment, for E.G. Sawyer's message was the single most terrifying thing anyone had ever communicated to me. With those three words, he was putting his entire life in my hands. Trust me? I was thirty-one years old. Good grief, what did I really know?
I was telling this ruined man to turn his back on what must have seemed to him, what was to him, a fortune. And I was claiming to know what was in the jury's head. If I was wrong, E.G. would suffer even more miserably for the rest of his life ? and I'd go home to my house and wife and children in Raleigh. And then on to my next case. I was all he had, and God help him, he trusted me. I felt scared.
But I had grown up knowing the world of E.G. and the strength of people in that world. They worked, and took hits, and they rarely complained. In bad times, sometimes the best they could think to do was turn inward ? as E.G. did when he went back to his room ? and sometimes that was in fact all they could do. My world is different now, and of course people close to me still suffer in real ways, but now many of them are powerful, and they have the privilege of knowing what to do and how to do it when son, daughter, mother, father, friend finds the whole world coming down. They pick up the phone and make a call, and it is often the right call. And then other calls are made that night, while they sleep or at least try to sleep. And sometimes ? perhaps often ? it does much good. Yes, this is my world now ? I know that ? and I can't deny that in many ways I am happy that it is. But all my life I have known people like E.G. or people like neighbors of E.G. I haven't forgetten what they are up against ? in part because when I was young, I really saw what they were up against. And it is impossible to forget. When E.G. said he trusted me, I was genuinely afraid, but I knew that what we were trying to do was right. I genuinely believed that what we were trying to do could make a suffering man's life into some kind of better life.
My father, Wallace Edwards, worked for Milliken, the textile company, and since he was frequently reassigned to different mill towns throughout the South, we moved often when I was growing up. We'd pack up what we could from a mill house, and what we could not afford to move we'd leave to the church or to the next tenant. We'd drive off in our packed Ford sedan, and though she thought we didn't notice, my mother Bobbie would always turn to catch a last look at the house. We left half a lifetime's memories in sandy-lotted homes across the South.
I was surprised to find that mama had held on to an essay I'd written when I was eleven: "Why I Want To Be A Lawyer." Rereading it today, I'm struck first by the revelation that at one time in my life, my handwriting was actually somewhat legi-ble. Once I get past the essay's half-decent script ? like many in my office and home, I often can't come close to reading my penmanship today ? I soon arrive at what I am sure was my key sentence: "Probably the most important reason I want to be a defense attorney is that I would like to protect innocent people from blind justice the best I can." Of course at that tender age I had no command of legal terminology. To an eleven-year-old, the concept of justice being "blind" sounded ominous, not one bit virtuous. Be that as it may, from early boyhood, what drew me to the law was the chance to "protect innocent people," to "give advice" ? and even, I wrote rather grandiosely, to "save lives."
There were no lawyers in my extended family. There were millworkers, grocery clerks, ministers, Marines, boxers ? but not lawyers. And though I barely knew Doc Smith, who was the only attorney in town, television brought all kinds of dramatic justice, and injustice too, into my small world.
As a boy I was moved, and I was shaken, by The Fugitive, that series where the wrongfully accused Dr. Richard Kimble escapes prison and roams the land in search of his wife's true killer. The show's depiction of "an innocent victim of blind justice" made a powerful impression on me, as it did on my whole family, and I remember my building fury when ? week after week ? no one ever bothered to take Dr. Kimble's side and make things right for him, or even try. Instead there was that constant grim detective whose only job, bankrolled by some remarkably lush federal budget, I later realized, was to find this one, single man.
And I was at least as fanatical about Perry Mason, but there I found real comfort in the show's last four and a half minutes when ? week after week ? that truly fine lawyer yanked yet another explosive confession from yet another cold, evil, and wily villain.
An optimist by nature, I always waited, in needless suspense, of course, for that final moment when wrongs would be righted, and righted in a flash. Now I don't even remember what happened in the last episode of The Fugitive, and although I suspect things turned out well for Dr. Richard Kimble, in my mind's eye he is still roaming the land and still searching for justice.
Of course it would be a few years before I made any connection between the people I grew up with and the glamorous victims I saw on Perry Mason ? people whose hardship and suffering never lasted, of course, more than the sixty minutes allotted to each episode, minus the commercials. As an eleven-year-old I had no sense of how a man injured in a factory, or even just a regular salesman like E.G., might have the scales tipped against him as much as Dr. Kimble or the parade of clients lucky enough to have the services of Raymond Burr. In such cases those scales might remain tipped for life ? especially if there was no one from their ranks who would stand up for them and provide them with a voice.
My dreams of righting wrongs yielded to dreams of buying a car. Then I found myself, as a high school student, working beside grown men building mobile homes. I thought I was earning the down payment on a red Duster, but I was in fact doing something else I did not realize until years later. I was imprinting the lives of those men on my sense of who I was and where I came from. I did the same at the mill when I swept the floors around the looms or when I painted markings on rural highways while I listened to a fellow named Brady tell me the woes of his life. By the time I left my parents' home to go to college, I had taken with me more than funny stories about the different colors Brady had dyed his hair ("Orange? You dyed your hair orange, Brady?" or "Dyed your hair black now, Brady?" "Naw, it's shoe polish"); I had also taken a sense of the dignity of hard work and the struggle of good men and women.
In 1977, ten years after the last episode of The Fugitive, I passed the state bar exam and on that same weekend married my law school sweetheart, Elizabeth Anania. We loaded up our small car and drove to Virginia Beach (where Elizabeth was to serve a one-year clerkship with Judge J. Calvitt Clarke, Jr.). And then I returned to Raleigh to begin my own one-year clerkship with U.S. District Judge Franklin T. Dupree, Jr. I regarded it as a small miracle that I'd gotten that far. It had taken hard work and, on the part of my parents, plenty of sacrifice. But I also had to believe it had taken some special grace to get me from the backyards of Robbins to a paneled federal courtroom in Raleigh.
A native of tiny Angier, North Carolina, Judge Dupree had already built a reputation as an excellent defense lawyer when President Nixon appointed him to the federal bench in 1970. He was the epitome of the old-school Southern establishment lawyer. He called his elegant and white-gloved wife "Miss Rosie" and pretended not to dote on her, though even to me, it was clear that he was both completely devoted to her and sure that he had married above himself. Many of his law clerks, particularly on his gruff days, agreed. He was at turns coldhearted and grandfatherly. And one of his joys was his annual birthday party, supposedly a gift from his former law clerks, who ? now as lawyers who often practiced before him ? knew to attend and pay their share of the Judge's and Miss Rosie's dinner. It was a command performance but few people minded.
Obtaining my clerkship with Judge Dupree was difficult not only because competition for the positions was always fierce, but also because of an additional hurdle: the Judge instructed me to show up for my job interview with my tennis racquet. It turned out that the sixty-four-year-old jurist was an avid tennis player who sometimes needed a partner when he was trying cases away from Raleigh. So we concluded the interview with a brisk set. I don't remember who won, but since I hadn't gotten the job yet, I'm going to guess that the Judge was the better player that day.
As I sat in Judge Dupree's courtroom, I came to understand how a presiding judge's philosophical leanings ? the Judge was himself an ardent conservative ? could shape the outcome of a trial in countless ways. A judge's influence is subtle but powerful. The parties and particularly the jury look to the judge as a rigorous protector of the law and take everything the judge says as serious, important, and impartial, whether it is the last of these or not.
In my year of watching trials at Judge Dupree's side, I also came to recognize those lawyers who did an exceptionally fine job and those who were less competent. I learned that knowledge is indeed power, but, most important, I learned that trials are about credibility ? that if a jury is to believe in your case, the jury must believe you. You have to earn their trust, and after you have earned it, you have to earn it again, every day.
The twelve souls who spend full days, full weeks, or sometimes long months sitting only a few feet from you get to know you almost as well as you know yourself. They rarely miss a trick, and probably never when it really is a trick. They take in every movement, fact, word, hesitation, and glance. My faith in the wisdom of ordinary people took root in the mill towns of my youth. But the juries of my adulthood deepened that faith.
Juries seek the truth, and even as a clerk I learned that neither silver-tongued cunning nor hapless bungling will find it for them. They do not want to be manipulated, and they deeply distrust anything that makes them feel bullied ? or hypnotized ? into rendering a verdict. So the best lawyer must be honest and in a way plain in answering any doubts or confusions, and you must know the facts ? all of them ? for otherwise the jury will lose faith in you. As it should.
????
In September 1978, the same month in which E.G. Sawyer's boss drove him to St. Joseph's Hospital, I entered the law offices of Dearborn & Ewing in Nashville, Tennessee ? my first job as a licensed attorney. Less than a month into that job, I began to learn some basic lessons I would need to learn if I was to be E.G.'s voice, and those lessons were not always easy.
The firm had just become engaged in litigation concerning a train derailment in Waverly, Tennessee. The derailed train was loaded with explosives, but it had lain seemingly harmless for days until, without warning, it exploded into flames. Nearly one hundred unlucky bystanders were killed or injured. The finger-pointing among the potentially responsible parties started right away, and one of the fingers was pointed at the manufacturer of the train's brake shoes. The manufacturer hired a firm out of Chicago to lead the company's defense and hired Dearborn & Ewing to help with the local depositions and with the byways of local Tennessee legal procedure.
The Chicago lawyer had been conducting a lengthy deposition of a key witness. When the other lawyers in the case started questioning the witness, the Chicago lawyer, who had to be in court elsewhere, called Dearborn & Ewing to get a local attorney to sit in on the remainder of the deposition. Although I knew little about the case, and even less about this witness, I was the only lawyer Dearborn & Ewing could spare at the moment, so off I went to my first solo deposition, and unwittingly to my first important lesson as a lawyer. In a deposition, a witness ? who could be a party to the lawsuit, or someone who knows the facts, or an expert of some kind ? takes an oath to tell the truth and then answers questions by the lawyers in the case. Depositions can last an hour or days. The Chicago lawyer's questioning of this witness had already taken a couple of days.
Because the case was so complicated and because there were so many plaintiffs and so many defendants, the deposition was held in a hotel ballroom, with white-linen-covered banquet tables. It seemed as if at least forty attorneys were working on the deposition, and they all appeared competent, confident, and unfazed by the surroundings. I was to listen to the other lawyers' questioning and to report what the witness said in case ? well, I didn't really understand what I was supposed to do, so I just tried to listen and look as if I belonged. Fearing that I looked instead like a new and inexperienced lawyer, which I certainly was, I took a seat, scribbled down the brief conclusion of the deponent's testimony, and ducked out. I may have given my name to the court reporter, but other than that I did not say a word. When the Chicago attorney later asked me what the witness had said in his testimony, I gave what I thought was a reasonably accurate summary.
What I didn't know at the time was that the deponent's testimony that last day differed from what he'd said when the Chicago lawyer had asked him questions. I had not learned this from studying the transcripts or from reviewing the file or from listening closely to every turn in the witness's testimony.
I learned this, unfortunately, from the Chicago lawyer, who ripped into me: "He testified to something different when I was questioning him than he did when you were there! And you didn't think to tell me that? What the hell were you doing in there? You're nothing more than a warm body!"
By the time he had finished with me, I was certain I had picked the wrong profession. But the man was right: in a deposition, as in trial testimony, a lawyer's got to listen to every word. A lawyer's got to be prepared, because a lawyer is the client's only eyes and ears, and voice. It was not easy to take that flaying, but I learned a lesson that made me a better lawyer in every other case I tried.
???
Nashville was good to us during our three years there. We bought a Southern colonial home with a lawn that spread under magnificent old oaks ? and it all seemed like a palace to me. There in 1979, Elizabeth gave birth to our first child, Wade, and there we spent many late afternoons under those oaks watching him walk and run and grow. We would spend Saturday mornings roaming the Nashville flea market and Saturday nights at the antique auction in nearby Lebanon looking for furniture that we could refinish for our new home. And we made wonderful, lifelong friends.
Not long after we moved in, my parents took the ten-hour drive from Robbins to get a glimpse of our new life. I made a point of taking them to the City Club restaurant that topped the First American Bank Building and hovered over the glitter of downtown, the Cumberland River, and beyond. To be able to splurge like that for my folks, both of whom had worked long hours to put me through college, was tremendously gratifying. As we sat there and they remarked about how they'd never been up so high and never seen so far, I knew they were pleased with my life. I had no trouble imagining my dad at church the next weekend telling anyone who'd listen about the fancy place Johnny had taken them to in Nashville.
Still and all, the city never quite felt like home to Elizabeth and me. In the spring of 1981, we sent out resumes to various law firms in North Carolina, and by Memorial Day weekend, we were back in Raleigh.
It occurs to me, looking back now, that returning to Raleigh and taking that new job changed the course of my life ? and not in small part because the job I took brought me to E.G.'s side. Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove in Raleigh was a small but dynamic law firm with a personality defined by two brothers, Wade and Roger Smith. The firm mostly handled criminal, family, and education law but was looking to expand its reach into civil litigation ? a division that Wade Smith promised I could spearhead. I would be working on behalf of people, not big companies. The work sounded perfect ? and I confess that I was taken by the Smith brothers. Who wouldn't be? Both had been captains of the football team at UNC and now both were outstanding trial lawyers. Roger was a poet, Wade played the banjo, and they understood how to practice law because they understood how to live a good life.
During my first three years there, the plaintiffs' cases that came our way weren't exactly monumental or even newsworthy. One involved a widow whose husband's will had bequeathed to her a life estate in his house along with a small sum of money. I saw the widow as a leaner Aunt Bea, who reminded me of my own grandmother, and I immediately liked her. And in fact, before the trial I discovered that she was a grandmother, the grandmother of our son's day-care teacher ? and Wade saw the same sweetness in the young "Miz Dav'port" that I saw in her grandmother.
But the widow's stepdaughters, one of whom was executrix of the will, did not see it at all. They refused to honor the will and evicted her from her home. Not only did my client make me feel somewhat like Perry Mason, her stepdaughters played the roles of villains particularly well. We won the case. Fifteen years later, when I became a candidate in the 1998 U.S. Senate race, one of the sisters indicated her fond memories of me by proclaiming, "I would vote for O. J. Simpson before I would vote for John Edwards."
Other legal grievances came my way: a libel case for a small businessman who had been mocked by a competitor whose ads had turned my client's face into a monkey's face, a lawsuit over defective cable television boxes, even a case in which my client, a trucking company, successfully sued an insurance carrier that had denied coverage for an accident caused by a company trucker. It was good work, but I pined for a case that could swallow me up. I was restless when, in the summer of 1984, Wade Smith strolled into my office and plopped a thick file on my desk.
In his whiskey-smooth Carolina drawl, Wade said, "Senator Swain sent us this case from Asheville. He's about to settle it, but he wanted someone to look at it first."
I opened the file. Inside, I met E.G., and though I did not know it that day, I had found my calling.
???
The first time I saw E.G. Sawyer, on August 23, 1984, he was sitting in his wheelchair in a seedy one-room apartment on the east side of Asheville. The E.G. I had read about in the file, the sociable, good-looking charmer, was not one bit in evidence, and even the beaten E.G. who had turned his nights over to a bottle was not in the room. Slightly hunchbacked, with swollen legs and an unshaven face, E.G. Sawyer appeared to have been left there to rot. The room was his life: no family photos, no adornments of any kind, only creeping filth. The floor was blanketed with fast-food wrappers and cigarette ashes. A number of blue plastic cartons brimming with E.G.'s bodily fluids sat off in a corner, and the room smelled of urine. His fingernails were long and yellow. He wore a towel around his neck that he used to wipe off the saliva that constantly collected at his mouth, but because the saliva moved faster than his hands did, the front of his shirt was soaked. Mercifully, there was no mirror in sight.
E.G. had several good friends who brought him his hamburgers, paid his bills, and trimmed his hair ? though the bleak spectacle of him was hard on them, and they'd begun to visit less and less. Each week a social worker dropped by to administer a sponge bath, empty the collection of urine containers, and pick up the garbage. E.G. could do almost nothing for himself ? and was only the barest echo of the intrepid salesman who had always taken pains to keep his trailer neat and dress nice for the ladies. I shook his twisted hand, and he fought to say a few words, which did not quite make it out of his throat.
I don't remember exactly what I said to my client that first day. But I know what I was thinking. It's what I thought for the rest of that day, and in the weeks and months to come: I'm going to get E.G. Sawyer out of this hellhole.
???
How he arrived there was a tale that began with an act of kindness. On September 9, 1978, his boss, Charles Tate, insisted on driving E.G. to St. Joseph's Hospital. Neither Tate nor any of E.G.'s friends knew that E.G. had already visited the hospital six times that year for various ailments relating to alcohol abuse ? after his second wife had left him, E.G. had slowly succumbed to his demons. In those earlier outpatient visits, his doctor, a skilled general practitioner in his forties, recognized the severity of his patient's condition. E.G. was wasting away.
Five days after Charles Tate checked E.G. into St. Joseph's, the doctor recommended aversion therapy ? which would mean that E.G. would be given disulfiram, a drug better known by its brand name, Antabuse. If E.G. drank any alcohol, the Antabuse would make him nauseated and perhaps even profoundly ill, and ultimately, it would keep E.G. from drinking and allow the eventual repair of his liver function. E.G. acknowledged that the approach sounded like a good idea, and his boss and several other friends pledged that they would be there to keep up his spirits. So, on September 14, 1978, the doctor initiated the aversion therapy by prescribing the maximum daily dosage, 500 milligrams of Antabuse.
The next day, the fifteenth, the doctor prescribed double the maximum daily dosage of Antabuse for E.G., and on the sixteenth he tripled the dosage to 1500 milligrams. The doctor had attended a seminar in Atlanta in which this kind of aggressive therapy was discussed. The hospital's pharmacists dutifully filled the prescriptions, and the nurses dutifully administered them to E.G. Each day for the next two weeks he received three times the maximum daily dosage. Although at first he seemed cheerful and resolute about defeating his alcoholism, soon there were alarming signs that something had gone wrong. He complained of headaches and became increasingly drowsy and confused, and his blood pressure went up. On the evening of October 1, a nurse found him unconscious and lying crosswise on his bed. When Libby Tate, Charles Tate's wife, phoned the hospital the next day to see how the salesman was coming along, she was informed that E.G. Sawyer had been transferred to the intensive care unit. He was in a coma.
Facebook
Twitter