Luke Cage sat in the reception area of Nelson and Murdock Attorneys at Law, looking around nervously. He wasn't sure if it was safe, constantly glancing left and right. When the door opened, he immediately turned his head and watched the bespectacled lawyer with a cane smile as he walked in.
"Oh, I'm sorry, are you..."
"Yes, I'm blind." Matt smiled and sat down, placing his cane on the table. "But that doesn't mean I'm not a good lawyer, Mr. Cage."
"I didn't mean it that way." The burly man named Luke Cage placed his hands on his lap. Matt sensed his movements, clearly recognizing it as a habitual gesture. This man, in prison, perhaps due to lack of space or not being allowed, had developed the habit of not placing his hands on the table.
However, Cage's words still surprised Matt.
"I mean, you actually exist. Some of the lower-tier inmates in Ryker's Island Prison always talked about a blind angel lawyer, a good person who operates from a moral standpoint."
Matt let out a slightly surprised "Ah," then understood: "That's why you came to me. You think I can help you."
"Yes, I mean, you might be the only one who can help me." Luke sighed. "How should I put it... from the beginning?"
"Start with how you ended up in prison. You claim you're innocent, so how did you get in?"
Luke Cage sighed deeply and began to tell his story.
As a typical Black New Yorker, Carl Lucas joined a gang from a young age, like most Black youths. A young hoodlum couldn't achieve much, and with Kingpin's rise at the time, Carl Lucas and his crew mostly just collected protection money in a few neighborhoods. He was tall and burly from a young age; he just had to stand there, no need for violence, and most people would obediently hand over the money.
In the gang, Carl Lucas met a friend, a good friend who brought him into the gang and taught him the rules. This man was Willis Stryker, a Black man from the slums like Carl, who had also been in gangs since childhood.
It was in the gang that Carl learned skills like driving. Later, with Willis's help, he successfully left the gang and became a truck driver at the docks. Although his income wasn't high, he had escaped that gang lifestyle. And because of his gang background, Carl wouldn't be questioned by others. However, Carl, who genuinely intended to leave the gang life behind, also refused proposals to transport smuggled goods for his former gang.
Until that day.
That day, Willis Stryker, who was still in the gang, called Carl, saying he had accidentally gotten involved in some big business, had been shot, and was about to die. Carl hesitated for a moment, then drove to find his friend, but the other party didn't get into the car. Instead, he frantically threw a box into Carl's car and said that even if the police caught him, he wouldn't die, but if this box was lost, he would definitely die. So, Carl absolutely had to protect the box and wait for him to come back for it.
"At the next intersection, I was caught by the police. They opened the box and found it was a whole box of high-purity addictive drugs. Plus, I knew a lot of people from my past in the gang, so they prosecuted me for assisting in smuggling."
Luke Cage himself couldn't help but laugh. He thought it was his good brother, thought he was just helping his brother escape. But what happened? In the end, it was gang retaliation. Because Cage refused to help them smuggle, they had Cage sent to prison.
Matt listened to the first half of Cage's life, when he was still called Carl Lucas, and frowned. Luke Cage was just Carl Lucas's name reversed and slightly altered, simple and convenient. And he quickly discovered the problem.
"And... you probably didn't have money to hire a lawyer, so the court must have appointed you a defense lawyer at the time?"
"Yeah, what else can I say? The gang's smuggling operations for the past few years were all pinned on me. Thank goodness our gang wasn't very capable, or else I'd also have a share in transporting, stealing corpses, and human trafficking."
"The problem here is that the police have eyewitnesses and physical evidence. You don't, and Willis won't come forward to defend you." Matt quickly understood the first difficulty in Cage's case. There was almost no evidence to overturn the case. The police caught him red-handed, and Willis wouldn't voluntarily defend Cage.
"Even more, we can't find new evidence to file an appeal."
Matt first explained the initial trouble, then reminded Cage: "And... that's not the only problem. Regardless of whether you committed a crime before, escaping prison is itself a serious felony and won't go unpunished just because you're innocent, Mr. Cage. Even if your smuggling charges could be dropped, you would still face charges for prison escape."
"But I'm innocent!" Luke Cage said indignantly. Matt, accustomed to all kinds of clients, clearly understood the other party's feelings, and from his heartbeat, he could tell the other party wasn't lying.
This was an innocent person, at least someone who believed himself innocent.
"What I'm telling you is not the facts, but the law, Mr. Cage. I hope you understand that. From a factual perspective, I believe the only situation in which you were guilty was that you wanted to help your friend, you wanted to take him to the hospital, and he might have been being pursued by the police at the time. And this... undoubtedly exceeds the sentence you were tried for." Matt's smile faded, but his tone remained quite gentle: "I believe we can agree on this point, right?"
Luke Cage sighed, then nodded: "You're right, lawyer."
"Good." Matt smiled, then continued his earlier statement: "And after that, it's also a fact that you escaped from Ryker's Island prison, isn't it? That's what you need to face now."
"I..." Cage sighed heavily: "I had to do it. If I didn't, I would have died."
"Excellent, that's the key point. What happened in prison seriously threatened your life."
Matt's unfocused eyes looked at Cage and stated the final strategy: "And what we need to do is prove that. Escaping prison was your only means of protecting your life, and for that, you'll need to tell us what happened next."