“When you live in a small town like Turlock, it’s hard to get away.” “He’d be doing really good, but those people seemed to find a way to just move back into your life,” said his mother, Terri Hutson, who lived out of state. Turlock - a small town down Highway 99 from Modesto - has about 73,000 people, with a Foster Farms turkey plant, almond orchards and a Cal State campus. Kauffman was a minor player in the area’s busy narcotic ecosystem. There, for 17 months, Carson had taken his seat at the defense table - not as the attorney but as the accused.Ĭarson portrayed the case against him and his codefendants as a monstrous fiction based on lies, coerced testimony and a tunnel-vision obsession with winning, confirming what he had been saying all along about the men and women sworn to guard justice in Stanislaus County. There, a brutally protracted murder trial was unfolding, one of the longest in California history. Carson would eventually make his way to the courtroom at the end of the first-floor hall. As he shuffled between courtrooms, cops stared. His broad shoulders had shrunken in his Size 48 jacket. And he was here, as always, to spite his enemies with the raw fact of his survival. He was here to do the work of defending the wrongly accused, the thoroughly guilty and clients at every point in between. Now it hurt Carson just to get up the steps, and his Vicodin had not kicked in. In better days, he swaggered, the flamboyant terror of cops and prosecutors and judges.

At 64, the wiliest and most combative criminal defense lawyer in Stanislaus County had made this trip thousands of times. Frank Carson, with his cane and a black leather satchel, was struggling up the courthouse steps in downtown Modesto.

Ramp walk games with judges