Last Part
The Harris murder seemed like it might never be resolved in court. Each defendant had a court-appointed defender already dealing with a mountain of work, and the original prosecutor had transferred to his agency's juvenile division after working on the case for two years. His replacement was Harned, who was determined to give the Harris family some resolution.
The youngest of the five arrested suspects had pleaded guilty to ensure he would be tried as a juvenile, and he agreed to testify against his cohorts, who would all be tried as adults. Each defendant had a separate jury. Christopher McKinnie and Roosevelt Jermaine Coleman were accused as accomplices, Brown and the remaining suspect, Samuel Maurice Proctor, were tried as the triggermen.
In the end, three were found guilty on murder and murder conspiracy charges, and given life sentences. Proctor was acquitted. The Harris family was distressed to see anyone go free but happy to see the case end, finally. Four years had passed between the arrests and the final verdict.
X-Raided now says he did not testify about what really happened the night of the Harris murder because he adhered to the gang code of silence. "I could have testified and gone home," the rapper said. "But I kept it real." He says he was present at the attack but did not pull the trigger.
For Harned, closing the case built on a successful law-and-order career that began with a high school job as a clerk typist at the state Department of Justice. By the time he graduated from Cal State Sacramento, he was working in the state agency's Bureau of Organized Crime. In December 1985, he had a law degree following night classes at Lincoln Law School, and a post in the district attorney's office of his hometown.
By 1996, he was one of the prosecutors who handled capital cases for the agency's homicide team and also prosecuted sex crime cases. He was a top gun, a genial workaholic known to friends and rivals alike as a candid but friendly voice; a judicial appointment was seen in the future. Then, on a summer morning in 1996, his computer crashed and his life's work went with it.
The repairman who pried open Harned's home computer reported to police that he found a CD-ROM inside with images of child pornography. The scandal quickly bloomed, and Harned was fired and charged criminally, a golden boy turned pariah. "My untimely demise," he says with a practiced casualness. "I've never been bitter. I've been unhappy about the way it turned out. I loved the office, I loved the people there."
Harned explains it like this: He ordered a CD-ROM from the Netherlands with hundreds of erotic images of young men. Among those images were models under 18, but Harned insists he was oblivious to that. Harned had never made it a secret that he was gay, but neither had he made it a visible part of his work life. Now he found himself explaining his private life and, more pressing, defending himself from criminal charges that might land him in prison for 10 years.
As he had so many times before, Harned won in the courtroom. A judge ruled that the detective who secured a search warrant for Harned's home had misrepresented the disc's content, both in the amount he viewed and in the nature of its explicit content. The charges were dismissed.
Harned retained his license to practice law, but the episode cost him more than a few friends. One day in 2000, though, Harned found a surprising new one in the morning mail. "I got a letter from Anerae Brown. He said he saw on TV news what had happened. He wanted to tell me to stay strong and that he knew I would be OK. I could not have been more stunned."
The rapper explains that he respected the prosecutor's strength and appreciated that during the murder trail, Harned's attacks were damaging but never seemed personal. The correspondence between the unlikely pair continued, and then, when Brown left Black Market Records to start Madman, he asked Harned to handle the paperwork.
"My answer was no for a variety of reasons," Harned said. "It seemed more than a little strange. It is not an area in which I'm professionally trained. I've always worked in criminal law. But what bothered me most was my previous relationship with him. I explained to him very clearly that this would look very unusual to a lot of people and raise a lot of eyebrows."
Brown answered that Harned was the only attorney he trusted. That was enough for the disgraced prosecutor. "I cannot afford, morally, to judge my clients. I can't decide if they are morally bankrupt or evil or good or bad. I am not a moral arbiter. I am a lawyer. If I took only good decent people who did no wrong, these doors would be shuttered, I guarantee you."
Still, Harned, now 43, admits that the faces of the Harris family flashed through his mind. When told that the family will be finding out very soon, the attorney looked like he was waiting for a jury to return a verdict. "If you speak to them," he tells his visitor, "can you let me know what they say?"
Agonizing memories
Patricia Harris has been reduced to a name in archived court documents, but the closer you get to her home, the more powerful her memory lives. The people remember her, said Betty Scroggins, a volunteer at Meadowview Community Center where Harris was a fixture. "There was a lot of pain at her loss," she said. "As for the one who did it, and the thing he does, well, I'd rather not comment on that."
The front door of the Harris home shows no sign of the violence that took place a decade ago, but the man who opens it is not far removed from that painful night. William C. Harris was married for 25 years, but he was not home the night his wife was taken away.
"The first two or three years it was an illness," he said. "My mind would get bad."
Moving slow, he walks through his home mapping out the madness of that 1992 night. "She came all the way to here, that's when they shot her," he said pointing to a spot near the living room. Then he points again, to a spot beneath a framed copy of the Lord's Prayer. "They found the splashes of blood on the wall, there."
As the grim tour ends, William Harris points down the hall that is off-limits to visitors. "They found her in the bedroom. She crawled all the way back. That's what bothered me. She wanted help. She was dying, in a panic. She wanted help. And there was no help. I wasn't here. I was lost in my guilt."
William Harris is willing to talk, but he's not sure what to say. He offers snapshots, real and remembered, of his lost wife. He was a young saxophone player from Stockton working in R&B clubs and she was the sister of a singer. She was 17 when they married. Through the years, she worked with the PTA, had five kids and, at the time of her death, 11 grandchildren.
The widower rarely leaves home. He has a hard time sleeping in their bedroom. The kids are gone now, moved out, and he says he is of little good to them. "I taught them life is a minefield," he says, "and it's stacked against you."
He spends his hours toiling on a community newsletter. The content is political and feisty, a transcript of a talk show in his head. One issue has a blurry photo of man with a gun pressed to his head -- it's the cover of X-Raided's first album. The adjacent essay is about black-on-black crime. There is no identification of the man in the picture, no mention of his role in the essayist's life. The hazy image is, like the crime, inseparable from the life of William Harris, but defies explanation or even acknowledgment.
When X-Raided was on trial, Harris accused him of killing purely to promote a rap career. Later, when the albums recorded in prison were released, the widower lashed out publicly at the injustice of it all. Now, though, his rage is seeping away.
Harris did not know Harned was working for X-Raided. When told, he paused for a long moment and then shook his head. "I don't know what to say about that. Harned did all right by us. But I don't understand that. There's a lot I don't understand anymore." He seems to want to say more, but instead he shrugs and guides the visitor back past the crime scene and out the door.
Later, Harned accepted that vague verdict. Then he changed the subject to the future. X-Raided wants to set up a new label, Gangway Records, and minimize the role of Madman and Jaz Brown (instead of minding the money, a frustrated X-Raided said, she mothered the acts, lining up personal finance or anger management classes for them). Harned's role, if any, is uncertain. Last week, he said that if Gangway gets off the ground, he might consider an in-house job as an executive.
"I've never been one to rule things out," he said.
And what of X-Raided's dream of cashing in with his rap and hiring a hotshot defense attorney for an appeal -- did Harned's new friendship with his onetime quarry persuade him that the rapper might have been wrongly convicted? "We've never really discussed it, but no," Harned said, suddenly sounding like a prosecutor back in a world with sure footing and straight lines. "He did it. He's guilty. It was a good case."