Word: cucinotta
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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...write a brief urging it to uphold the appeals court's decision. He searches for precedents supporting his case, but finds few; his 45-page brief tells how the DEA and the prosecutor tried to pressure Morrison and him. The Government has also filed a brief, which Cucinotta studies before writing his. He scribbles indignant notes in the margins. To the Government's claim that it can control its agents without court interference, Cucinotta quips, "Like Herbert Hoover?" (He means J. Edgar Hoover, the late FBI director.) He reads The Brethren, the book on the high court...
Three days before his oral argument, Cucinotta is in the kitchen of his suburban home, stirring spaghetti sauce and expounding on the U.S.'s adversary system of justice. "People like me are the champions of liberty," he says. "Think if I lose. Does it mean that the Government can willy-nilly threaten harsher sanctions if a defendant doesn't drop the attorney of her choice? Think of the Spanish Inquisition! Or the Tower of London! Not everybody in there was guilty. Or the Willingboro Ten!" His wife Santa gently corrects him: "It's the Wilmington...
...truly believes his cause is to help save the adversary system. The son of a Sicilian-born father, who is a doctor, and an Irish-American mother, Cucinotta keeps little American flags around the house. After learning that the Supreme Court would hear his case, he went to Washington to look at the court building. "I was moved. I kissed the steps," he says. "Well, not really." He kisses his hand and slaps the kitchen stove. "Like that...
...next day Cucinotta returns to Washington to practice his oral argument before lawyers from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. Firing the kind of probing questions that the Justices are sure to ask, the N.L.A.D.A. coaches blow holes in Cucinotta's platitudes. "Grand gestures about the adversary system," says one. "But I didn't hear your points. You were too cosmic." Cucinotta looks deflated. He has been awake since 2:30 a.m. thinking about his argument. "My head is spinning," he says...
Over the next 48 hours, Cucinotta rebuilds his confidence as he reworks his argument. An hour before the big moment finds him munching an apple in the court's lobby. He has shaved his mustache and put on a dark blue suit, and by now he is flying. "Equal justice under the law!" he exclaims, waving the apple at the frieze on the ceiling. "Equal justice...