I was finding that, even though Beck was not my favorite client in the entire world, I was still getting my trial mojo back. Whenever I had a client I wasn’t fond of, I still gave it my all, because I enjoyed the game. The competition. The chance to best the other opponent. That was a flaw of mine, and I knew it. I knew that there was going to be at least one or two clients that I would go balls to the wall defending, knowing that they were guilty. Knowing that they would probably go out and commit more crimes once they were acquitted. But that wasn’t my concern – my concern was winning the game. I was required to give every one of my clients zealous advocacy, and that was what I did. Win, lose or draw, I was always going to go down swinging.
“Okay,” Judge Grant said to the two of us. “Unless there’s more motions for me to entertain, I think it’s time to get the show on the road. Let’s pick a jury. I’ll bring in the potential jurors, the two of you will work your magic, and hopefully we can have a jury impaneled by lunch time. Do you guys think that’s a possibility?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure that’s a doable timeframe.”
Judge Grant nodded her head. “Okay then, I’ll start calling everybody in.”
The jury came in in batches of 50. This was something I usually wanted Harper to do when she second-chaired me. She was the one who was almost an empath when it came to reading people, in trying to find out what their true natures were. That was because Harper was so sensitive to what other people were feeling. She was a master at picking up on tics, facial expressions, and general body language to decide if someone was telling the truth or not.
I had found that almost everybody, when asked, would say out loud that they would be able to judge the case on their merits. No matter what kind of experience they had in their lives, they always said that they would not prejudge the case. Harper and I both knew, as did every attorney, that this wasn’t true. Even if the juror thought that he or she could be an unbiased observer, this simply wasn’t true most of the time. They simply gave the answer that they thought was socially acceptable – they would not be prejudiced against our client, whomever the client happened to be.
Harper was a master at deciding when people’s unconscious biases were going to dictate how they looked at the case. If their unconscious bias helped us, she made sure that she got that person on the jury. If the opposite was the case, she made sure that she would use her peremptive challenge on that person.
Alayna started the questioning of the potential jurors. She asked the usual questions about whether anybody knew any of us, including the defendant, and if anybody’s relatives were in law enforcement. She give a brief statement about what the case was about and asked each person if they would be able to judge the case on its merits. Her list of questions were perfunctory, but they did the job.
Then Harper got up and asked her questions. Her voir dire questions were always slightly left of center, because she was looking for something very specific from her people. In her case, she wanted to weed out people who might be unusually sympathetic to transgendered people. Someone who closely identified with the transgendered person might want to go ahead and convict our client, based on that reason alone. Especially if they had experienced some kind of prejudice themselves in their life, related to their sexuality. Harper didn’t want those people on the jury. So she had questions about whether anybody in the jury had a close relative, friend, or lover who is transgendered or gay. Several people raised her hands, including two different people who were transgendered themselves.
One was a 6-foot tall transgendered female. She was in full makeup and wore big earrings and a long dress worn with tennis shoes. She walked with a cane. When she opened her mouth, it was clear that she was pre-op, at best, but most likely had never fully transitioned into a female.
The woman, whose name was Carmen, talked about how she was treated throughout her life. She talked about the bullying, the name-calling, and all the times that she had felt threatened by people who hated her for who she was. I saw Harper had tears in her eyes, as Carmen told her story, but I also knew that Carmen was not going to be on the jury panel.
The other one was a transgendered male by the name of Christian. He explained that this was his given name, because when he was a female, he was also named Christian. “Well, that’s not entirely true, it was actually Christiana. It was simple enough just to drop the final A, though.” He, too, told stories about how he had been treated throughout his life. He had a slightly better story than Carmen, however – his parents were very accepting of his identity, and they never forced him to be somebody else. “I just think that’s so important,” he said. “Parents just don’t know what kind of damage they do to their children when they try to force them to be someone that they’re not. And when the parents don’t force them, society does.” He shook his head. “But I can judge this case on its merits, absolutely.”
Those were the only transgendered people, but quite a few others had people in their lives who were struggling with some kind of sexuality issue. This was a double-edged sword for us, considering our client was apparently either gay or bisexual, and the victim was transgendered. We had every designation of the LGBT group, aside from the L.
When it came time to pick a jury, I was surprised to see that Harper was advocating for Carmen. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said.
“I do. I just have a feeling about her.” That was all she said about that.
That was one thing about Harper - if she had a feeling, I didn’t question it. I thought for sure that Carmen would be one of her first peremptory strikes, but she knew something I didn’t. On some level, she knew something.
By noon, we had a jury selected, and it was time to get the show on the road.
The game was about to begin.
Chapter 30
Alayna gave her opening statements first. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you very much for being here, and performing your civic duty. I appreciate every one of you.” She walked over to the jury, and paced back and forth in front of them, and looked each one in the eye. Alayna was trying to connect with every person there. She was trying to communicate with everybody individually. She had a knack for that, I had to admit.
She was quiet for a few minutes. She narrowed her eyes. Nodded her head. Finally, she began with her statement. “I’d like to tell you the story of a young woman by the name of Adele Whittier. She wasn’t always known by that name. In fact, up until a couple of years ago, she was known by her birth name – William Page. But, for the sake of this court case, I will simply refer to her as Ms. Whittier.”
I knew that my motion in limine being sustained was tying the hands of Alayna. I knew that she wanted to tell the jury her theory about how my client killed Adele out of hatred of himself, which manifested into loathing of Adele. But she couldn’t go there. So was she was going to have to discuss the circumstantial evidence, which was much less powerful.
“Ms. Whittier, and the defendant, Mr. Beck Harrison, were friends.” She shook her head. I knew that she was having trouble. The facts in this case were suddenly not on her side. She was in a struggle to show motive on my client’s part. Originally, of course, the motive that they were going for was that my client was prejudiced against transgendered people in general. That my client killed Adele because he didn’t know that she was transgendered, then, when they went somewhere to have sex, he found out, freaked out, and killed her. That was their original theory.
Then, once it came to light the true relationship between Beck and Adele, the motive switched to the self-loathing thing. While I knew that Alayna was going to do her best to try to show the self-loathing thing by getting witnesses on the stand, who allegedly would be able to say that Beck told them how he felt, I knew that was going to be baloney. Beck was not the kind of person who was going to confide in his friends that he hated himself for being gay. That much I knew about him. I felt pretty confident that I was going be able to knock her witnesses over with a
feather. Other than that, she had nothing. She was just going to have to throw spaghetti against the wall, and hope that it stuck. I felt fairly confident in knowing that I had a better argument.
She cleared her throat. “They were friends, but they had a fight. On the night of June 5 of this year, they had a fight. A fight that ended up with Ms. Whittier dead.” She bowed her head. “You will hear evidence that Ms. Whittier and Mr. Harrison left the Zoo Bar together at around midnight. on the morning of June 6. The bartender that night can testify that they were together all night, and that they left together. You will hear testimony that this was the last time that Ms. Whittier was seen alive.” She paced back and forth, looking at every juror. “Let that sink in. Mr. Harrison was the last person to see Ms. Whittier alive. That morning, her body was found by the dumpster in the alleyway next to the defendant’s apartment. She had been strangled, and her body was just left there for the rats to eat. She was thrown away like so much trash. In fact, her body probably would’ve been thrown into the trash, except that the regular dumpster was full. So she was left by the dumpster as if she was a couch that was to be thrown away.”
“You’ll hear evidence that the defendant and Ms. Whittier had a complicated relationship, to say the least. You’ll hear evidence from friends of Mr. Harrison, who had no idea that Mr. Harrison was gay. However, these friends will testify how hard it was for a man like Mr. Harrison to be gay. These friends will testify that because Mr. Harrison had deep-seated dark feelings about the way he felt about men, he was prone to lash out at people.”
I knew that at that moment, Alayna was kicking herself for not lining up an expert who could testify what self-loathing does to a person. I knew, as well as anybody, that when you hate something about yourself, you might lash out at the people who display the trait that you hate. If you struggle with addiction, and hate that part about yourself, you’re going to lash out at other druggies. If you grew up poor, and you’re ashamed of that, and you get out of poverty, you might have a loathing for poor people. And if you were secretly gay, and you really hated the fact that you were, you would be more likely to lash out at gay people. I knew that if Alayna had tried, she probably could have found a good psychologist who could testify that some people who hated that they were gay, especially if they had authoritarian parents who were anti-gay, would end up being homophobic. But she didn’t try. She was just going to have to let the jury draw their own conclusions.
I knew the truth. I knew that, while Beck did struggle somewhat with his homosexuality, it wasn’t anything that was too debilitating for him. He didn’t appear to me to have any kind of animosity towards gays or transgendered folks. I knew that this murder had nothing do with any of that. I was just going have to show that.
She continued on. “You’ll hear evidence that just before Ms. Whittier and Mr. Harrison went to the Zoo Bar that night, they had words in the car. The evidence is that Mr. Harrison and Ms. Whittier had a conflict regarding some illegal things that Ms. Whittier was into. Mr. Harrison, as a parolee who spent 5 years in prison for a robbery, had no desire to go back to prison and he wanted no part of that life. Ms. Whittier, however, did not want to go straight, for her current drug activities were just too lucrative. You’ll hear evidence about a conversation about that, which gives Mr. Harrison another reason to kill Ms. Whittier. Ironically, he killed her because he didn’t want her bringing him down.”
I thought that that was probably the prosecutor’s weakest argument. Beck didn’t want to go to prison, so he murdered somebody? That made no sense at all, especially since, if the prosecutor’s argument was true, he didn’t even try to hide the murder. According to the prosecutor, he just left her body by his apartment dumpster. Wouldn’t that alert the authorities to the fact that he was involved in this? That is, if the prosecutor’s theory was true. At this point, I knew that they were just grasping at straws.
She was coming up on the close of her opening argument. She paced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “Once you hear the evidence against Mr. Harrison, you will return a verdict of guilty. I ask for this verdict of guilty in advance. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Your service is appreciated.”
It was my turn. And I hoped to rip the prosecutor’s theory to shreds.
Chapter 31
It was time to begin my case. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t know about you, but I think that the prosecutor’s opening statement was a little bit, shall we say, short on substance? There’s a reason for this, and I think that you all know what that reason is. My client didn’t do it. He had no motive to do it. The prosecutor tells you that my client was struggling with his homosexuality, and his feelings for Adele Whittier’s former male persona, William Page. I can tell you that nothing can be further from the truth. My client is very confident in his sexuality. He has no problem with transgendered people, or gay people, or any members of the LGBT community. You’ll hear evidence from Mr. Harrison himself that he had no problem with the fact that Adele Whittier was transgendered. And it’s true that Mr. Harrison did have a romantic relationship with Mr. Page. But there was nothing contentious about the relationship. There was no reason that Mr. Harrison would ever want to murder her.”
“The prosecutor has also introduced a crazy theory that Ms. Whittier was killed because she was involved with drug dealing and that my client, Mr. Harrison, killed her because he didn’t want her to bring him down. The prosecutor herself admitted that my client has served time in prison, and he doesn’t want to go back. So, if you follow the prosecutor’s argument to its logical conclusion, my client killed somebody in order to stay out of prison.” I shook my head in wonder, and couldn’t help but smile a little. The argument was just so stupid. “Let that sink in for a second. My client has no desire to go back to prison, so he killed somebody. And he didn’t even try to cover it up, if you believe the prosecutor’s argument. No, he apparently, according to the prosecutor, killed Ms. Whittier and left her body by a dumpster by his apartment complex, all because he has no desire to go back to prison.” I shook my head again, rolled my eyes, and looked every juror in the eye.
“Now, if my client was so calculating that he would kill somebody because he didn’t want her to bring him down, and cause him to end up back in prison, don’t you think that he would try to cover up her murder just a little bit? I mean, seriously. The prosecutor would have you believe that my client planned out this murder, yet he did nothing whatsoever to cover his tracks. Do you believe that? No. I don’t believe that either.”
“Now, on the other hand, while my client had no discernible motive to murder Ms. Whittier in cold blood, there were several people who did have motive to do so. The first person that I’m going to present to you is Larry Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez had motive to kill Ms. Whittier because Mr. Rodriguez paid a lot of money and took a lot of time to transform my client from Mr. Page into Ms. Whittier. He paid for Mr. Page’s plastic surgery, which was hundreds of thousand of dollars, because his entire face was transformed to make it look completely different. Not to mention the fact that Mr. Page had to take expensive hormone injections, so that he could grow breasts and hips and obtain a more womanly figure. Moreover, Mr. Rodriguez hired somebody to steal the identity of Adele Whittier, who was an actual woman who lived and died in Boston, Massachusetts. In the end, Mr. Rodriguez spent close to a half a million dollars to transform Mr. Page into Ms. Whittier.”
I paced the floor, right in front of the jury box. “Now why would Mr. Rodriguez spend so much money to transform Mr. Page into Ms. Whittier? It’s pretty simple, really. You see, Mr. Page was an indispensable member of the Sharpelli crime family. This is a crime family that is headed by Vincent Sharpelli, and Mr. Page worked for this organization for five years. He knew the inner workings of the organization and he ended up stealing $200,000 from Mr. Sharpelli. Mr. Page’s immediate superior’s name was Jordan Kennedy.”
“So, here’s what happened with this. Mr. Page stol
e this money from the Sharpelli crime family, and he knew that he wouldn’t be long for this world unless he did something drastic. And so he did. Mr. Page partnered with Mr. Rodriguez, who had the money to transform him into a woman, and he stole the identity of an actual living person in Boston, Massachusetts. This cost Mr. Rodriguez a lot of money, but it was worth it to hire somebody who knew so much about a powerful crime family like the Sharpellis. That was the reason why Mr. Rodriguez spent all that money on Mr. Page.”
“And how did Mr. Page repay Mr. Rodriguez for his generosity? I’ll tell you how he repaid him. Once he became a woman, he decided that he didn’t want to be involved in a life of crime anymore, so he became a nurse. You see, Adele Whittier, the woman whose identity Mr. Page took, was a nurse. She had nursing credentials, a BA in nursing, and a Masters Degree as well. Mr. Page was a very intelligent man, so he was able to study up enough about nursing protocols that he was able to fool the staff at Truman Medical Center. William Page, in becoming Adele Whittier, actually realized one of his dreams – to lead a life that did not involve crime. At least not the kind of crime that Mr. Rodriguez was asking of her. And Ms. Whittier therefore left Mr. Rodriguez holding the bag. Not to mention holding the half-million dollars that he invested in her. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how angry this must have left Mr. Rodriguez.”
“Especially when you consider the fact that Adele Whittier was actually still involved in underground activity, but it was more subtle than the activity that Mr. Rodriguez wanted from her. Mr. Rodriguez wanted information about the Sharpelli crime family. He wanted to know all the inner workings of it, but he also wanted Ms. Whittier to be a drug mule for him.”
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