Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  A state-ordered furlough day due to budget cuts would put off the trial’s conclusion for one more day. The defense felt the walls closing in. A glum Zeke Perlo summed up week two: the prosecution, he said, “was building a monster of a case.”

  But Phil Stirling was still nervous. The central problem—proving Starks’s culpability—remained elusive. Everything, including Midkiff’s testimony, had gone as well as possible for the prosecution. But there was no telling how the jury saw it. Like Skaggs, Stirling was unnerved by the stony faces in the jury box. If the jurors thought Jessica was more involved than she let on, or that Davis had taken the initiative to kill on his own, the case against Starks could still be weakened. The long, hot furlough day fell on a Wednesday and prolonged the suspense.

  On Thursday, when the trial resumed, Devin Davis initially refused to come out of his cell. He was despondent. Five deputies were stationed in the courtroom to watch him in case he misbehaved.

  Then Perlo stood and delivered a thunderbolt.

  “The defense calls Derrick Starks,” he said.

  Perlo had spent the previous day and night pleading with his client not to take the stand. Perlo had a plan. It was not to tear apart the prosecution’s case—he had gone through the pages and pages of Skaggs’s investigation without spotting a hole—but rather to build a credible alternative theory of the murder, enough to sow doubt and confusion in the jury’s mind. If Jessica’s testimony could be called into question, there were plenty of other ways that the car and the gun and Bryant Tennelle might have come together without Derrick Starks. Chiefly, he planned to show that Bobby Ray Johnson, the cousin of the man in the wheelchair, had had access to all of them. He did not want any facts to come out that would conflict with the alternate theory, a strong possibility if the prosecution got hold of Starks.

  He saw another danger: that Starks’s testimony could open the way to the admission of evidence the judge had excluded. He hadn’t had high hopes for the case before this. But at least he had a defense. An argument. Starks’s testimony could ruin it.

  But nothing he said made any difference. Starks, watching the prosecution take shape before him, had decided his attorney was incompetent. So now he swung his way into the stand, scooted around a little in the chair to get comfortable, and took a deep breath. Perlo, questioning him, did his best to conceal his dismay from the jury.

  Starks had been working on a goatee during the trial. It was brown and neatly trimmed, with a little peak that ran up the middle of his chin. He wore a tan shirt, a maroon tie, and a small, self-confident smile. His mustache clung to the corners of his lips and his collar did not quite lie flat. His eyes had deep shadows above and below. From where the jury sat, the little tattoo under his eye looked like a birthmark. His face softened for an instant when his eyes fixed on his mother.

  “Are you a member of the Blocc Crips?” Perlo asked. “Yes,” Starks said, and they were off.

  Starks was taking the “I’m no angel but I didn’t do it” tack. He was all that the gang “experts” alleged, he said, but he had been out of town in North Carolina at the time of the murder. He had left a week before Bryant’s death and heard about the murder after he returned. He had gone east to help a cousin move. She lived near Charleston, was pregnant, he said, and needed his truck. He was not in the Suburban when Jessica had the accident, he said. He had come running to see what had happened and got arrested.

  Perlo took his time between questions, his expression flat. Starks rocked and swung slightly in the chair as he answered. At the noon break, Starks walked away from the stand with a little rolling step.

  After the break, Devin Davis sauntered into court. His shirt was untucked, and now he was joking with bailiff Hardy and with Applebaum. Perlo resumed, and Starks offered the version of the case that Perlo had hoped to make plausible: Johnson had sold his cousin the gun. Johnson had been running with Jessica at the time of the murder. Starks was still swinging slightly, as if he heard music in his head. He seemed relaxed, rocking his head back and forth between questions, glancing periodically at the clock. Perlo finished and bowed his head.

  Phil Stirling stood up. He crumpled a piece of paper in his hand and flung it down with a flourish.

  Then he pounced.

  Everything was fair game. He brought up Starks’s recent criminal history—robbery, attempted burglary—and then laid into his story. He forced Starks to recount every detail of the trip to North Carolina, what he’d done every day, what he had eaten, whom he had stayed with. Starks grew noticeably tense. He pressed his lips together between answers, and he stopped swinging in his chair.

  Stirling had calculated distances and driving times. He asked Starks how much gas his tank held and tested him on when and where he had stopped for gas. Starks was trapped into insisting he had driven at eighty miles per hour all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana barely stopping, amped up on energy drinks and NoDoz before heading up to North Carolina. Stirling asked about people he had seen on the way. Starks recalled some relatives but said he couldn’t remember others.

  The situation played to Stirling’s strengths. He barely glanced at his notes. He did not bother to point out that Charleston was in South Carolina, that no one could drive that fast, that a man facing murder charges might be expected to at least try to corroborate his alibi. He didn’t need to.

  Starks said a cousin picked him up for the last leg of the journey from Louisiana to North Carolina. Stirling prodded. Starks said he couldn’t recall in what type of car they rode. He mentioned another passenger. Stirling pressed. “I can’t recall his name,” Starks said. “You have been in jail two and a half years. Have you made an effort to learn that person’s name?” Stirling asked.

  By the end, Starks was asserting that he had stayed in houses in places he couldn’t remember, occupied by people whose names he didn’t know. He couldn’t say who he was carpooling with, he said, because “I was pretty much inebriated through the whole way,” drinking Courvoisier and smoking marijuana. He said he couldn’t recall whether it was day or night when he departed.

  Starks was stiff, but he faced Stirling squarely. Once, between answers, he drew a hand over his forehead in a gesture of exhaustion. Perlo suffered silently through his client’s self-destruction, a finger over his lips, one leg jiggling.

  Davis, watching from the defense table, appeared relaxed and jovial, as if he had given up. Skaggs went out to take a phone call and returned smiling a little irrepressible smile. A bunch of DAs had filed into the courtroom. Something was up.

  But first, Stirling took Starks to task on all the recorded material from jail that up until now had been kept out of court. He was now able to introduce Starks’s jailhouse reproach to Davis that “you should have kept your mouth shut,” and his “bitch be squealing” remark in reference to Midkiff. “I was talking about somebody else,” Starks said. But his voice was weak.

  Finally, Stirling introduced Starks’s threat against Skaggs on the jail tape. He displayed the transcript and asked Starks to confirm that he had said, “If I were to kill a copper, it’d be Detective Skagg”—the “tall white boy” he described as wearing only a shirt and a tie but no jacket.

  “I don’t recall,” Starks said. Through it all, Olitha Starks kept gazing at the ceiling, a trace of a wan smile on her face.

  The Starks jury at last betrayed a faint emotion: impatience with Starks’s routine. Perlo noted it. The defense disaster was nearly complete.

  Stirling returned to Starks’s alibi, got him to insist again that he had been out of town on the night before the killing when Midkiff said they had stayed at the Desert Inn.

  Then, without fanfare, Stirling laid a small slip of blue paper on the overhead projector.

  It was rectangular and lined—an old-style motel receipt. It bore the Desert Inn logo, the hotel’s name in a retro font with a palm tree. And it was dated 5-10-07. Also on the receipt were the printed name D. Starks, a driver’s license number, and a signature.
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  The jurors peered. Stirling pointed to the slip and forced Starks to admit that it was his driver’s license number and, grudgingly, that “it looks like my signature.”

  “Nothing further,” Stirling said, and sat down.

  After court adjourned, John Colello couldn’t contain himself. “That’s it!” he cried, rising from his seat and turning toward his fellow DAs in back. In the corridor, Stirling gave John Skaggs one of his awkward hugs. “A seven-year-old could have done that,” he said. “A seven-year-old could have tried that case!”

  The motel receipt was Skaggs’s final contribution to the case. Prompted by Starks’s testimony, he had sent Matt Gares, one of his young detectives from Olympic, down to the Desert Inn at the break. Gares had driven the length of the city in search of the receipt. Skaggs had given Gares no particular instruction for this assignment, except the usual one: “Do whatever you have to do.”

  Gares did. It meant searching through scores of tiny, flimsy receipts in the back office of the motel.

  The management bundled the receipts in little stacks for each day. But when Gares looked, there was no stack from May 10, 2007.

  So he went through the next day’s receipts, and then the next. No luck. He went back in time. It was like the way Skaggs went back to knock on a door again and again. Just keep going, keep pushing, until that door opens. In the end, Gares resigned himself to searching randomly through box after box.

  At length, he found the missing receipts. They had been filed by mistake under May 27. Gares pulled out what he was looking for: the little blue slip marked “D. Starks.”

  Court convened that Friday, the nineteenth of March, a cloudy, cool day. Stirling sported a shiny yellow tie that looked like trim from a bridesmaid’s dress, and Colello was finally healthy. For the first time since the trial began, the pair appeared relaxed. Devin Davis had spent Starks’s time on the stand nudging Applebaum over and over to confirm his suspicion that Starks was badly muffing it—“That’s bad, right?” Now he, too, seemed relaxed, ready for it to be over. Even Starks seemed looser than usual, smiling at his family in the back, as if relieved.

  Skaggs was called to confirm that he was likely the “tall white boy” wearing a shirt and a tie but no jacket that Starks had mentioned. Yes, he said, that’s how he dressed on the job. Yes, he said, he did wear a jacket sometimes: for court appearances and always at the scene of a murder. His face was grave: to Skaggs the homicide dress code was a serious matter.

  By 10:45 A.M., it was over, except for closing arguments. Yadira Tennelle looked exhausted.

  Closing arguments stretched over two days, since each of the two juries got a separate rendition. John Colello closed the prosecution’s case against Davis. He had a touch of color in his neck and cheeks, heightening the emotion in his delivery as he pounded home to the jury, once again, each and every element of the prosecution’s massive case. He was a tad bathetic and indulged in prosecutorial clichés. He held up an imaginary gun and yelled “bam, bam, bam” to reprise Davis’s motions.

  Applebaum rose, stroked his beard, and leaned on his beloved lectern. He began speaking, his hands in his pockets, a watercooler pose, jiggling coins or keys in one pocket as he talked. He sought to address the emotion of the case, acknowledging how charged it was to be defending Devin Davis in sad circumstances such as this, and he deftly sought to neutralize the trial’s most affecting moment. “It’s hard,” he said. “John Colello here was almost in tears. All of us were almost in tears. Including me! Nothing worse than to see a hardened RHD detective … up here with tears running down his face.” But he begged the jurors to be dispassionate.

  He argued for second-degree murder on the basis of intent. Starks’s intent had been to kill, but Davis, Applebaum said, had no idea of what he had gotten himself into until the last instant. He proceeded to hammer at what points he could. There weren’t many—that Midkiff had testified to Starks’s controlling ways, that nothing about the shooting suggested that Davis was particularly intentional or focused, and that much of the evidence suggested he was drugged out of his mind, terrified of Starks, and acting under pressure.

  Applebaum mentioned that “Devin had snot coming out of his nose” and was crying for his mother during the confession. The image effectively reminded jurors of Davis’s age. Applebaum used John Skaggs’s relentlessness against him. “Because he was a police officer’s son, they are not holding back,” he said. Finally, Applebaum attacked Stirling’s tedious use of clicking slides, a point guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser, since the jurors had endured two weeks of remorseless PowerPoint torture at the hands of the prosecution. “I don’t need to show you a slide show,” Applebaum said contemptuously. “I want to talk to you about this.”

  But for all his skills, Applebaum’s most effective argument was sitting at the defense table. Jurors had watched the big-eyed, moon-headed, overweight Devin Davis fidget, fuss, yawn, and chuckle throughout the trial. The prosecution was trying to portray him as “sophisticated, smart,” Applebaum said. As he spoke, Davis sat back, his legs stretched out, feet poking out from under the defense table like a bored schoolboy. Applebaum motioned toward him once or twice. “If he is so smart, why would he put the tattoos on after he is in jail?” More likely, he was just trying to survive, Applebaum said.

  The unspoken implication was clear: to suggest that Davis was a calculating criminal capable of premeditated first-degree murder was ridiculous; just look at the kid.

  Phil Stirling’s rebuttal was so repetitive—he even reprised the pantomime of gunfire, “boom-boom-boom!”—that the judge chastised him for being redundant.

  So much talk. John Skaggs had work to do. Forced to sit still through these overly long closing arguments was the worst kind of punishment imaginable for him. As the long day in court wore on, Skaggs had gone from irritated to seething without moving any part of his body except his mouth, which had grown steadily tighter. Wasting time appeared to affect even his circulation: his skin had grown pale.

  The next morning, the Starks jury got their closings. Stirling stood up, his voice ragged and hoarse. He adjusted his jacket, yanked his chair around, and began by saying that he would try not to be too redundant, then was, repeating the prosecution’s case once again, giving due spotlight to what he called the “Perry Mason moment” when the D. Starks motel receipt had gone up on the screen.

  Then Zeke Perlo stood to give the last closing of his career under circumstances that could only be described as a defense rout. He had been unusually quiet all morning.

  Maybe the jurors felt for his predicament, for they seemed especially attentive. Like Applebaum, Perlo was relaxed, mature, conversational. His pen in one hand, folded glasses in the other, he gestured naturally. He began his attempt at damage control by saying, “I wouldn’t expect you to believe Derrick Starks’s testimony—but don’t decide based on that.”

  He argued that the jurors needed to evaluate how much of the mountain of evidence that had been heaped on them really pertained to Starks’s presence at the scene. This critical point, he said, was thin. The man in the wheelchair had reason to lie. Midkiff was not the innocent she pretended to be, he said. Was she an accomplice? He methodically sifted through the eyewitness testimony, noting the inconsistencies. Applebaum, who had come in late to observe, wore a look of quiet sympathy. Perlo was making the best of it.

  When it was over Perlo walked out of the courtroom into the half sunlight, his forty-six-year career as a trial lawyer over.

  Throughout the trial, the prosecutors had worried most about the case against Starks. But in the end, the case against Starks was concluded faster than the one against Davis. His jury deliberated only two days. With the Davis jury still out, they came back at 3:25 P.M. that Thursday with a verdict.

  The afternoon was moist and cool. Wally Tennelle was on a training day. He came in response to the call wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the lone member of the family to appear to hear the verdict. Sixteen RHD detectives also s
howed up. “The question arises, who is patrolling the streets of L.A.?” Perlo murmured, surveying the phalanx of business suits milling in the courtroom.

  His coworkers had come to support him, but Wally Tennelle did not mingle with them. He sat off to the side, an invisible wall around him, one arm draped along the back of the bench in a casual pose contradicted by the tension in his face. As the judge called the court into session, the prosecutors sat hunched together, flushed with emotion, Colello with a fist in his mouth. Skaggs did not attend, but Farell did.

  Skaggs never went to hear verdicts, on principle: it was not part of his job. To attend would be a waste of time.

  The jury filed in. As Judge Bowers began to read, Tennelle lifted his chin with an effort.

  “Guilty,” Bowers said. “Murder in the first degree …”

  Starks stared straight ahead. His rib cage expanded with a deep breath followed by a heavy sigh. Tennelle swallowed hard. His eyes reddened. He appeared swept with weariness, holding himself up with effort, tired, sad, and hollowed out. The jurors were polled in turn, every one of them wearing an expression of profound seriousness. None showed relief, or triumph. None so much as glanced at Wally Tennelle.

  Olitha Starks did not get to the courtroom in time to hear the verdict. She arrived at the courthouse door with her husband just after the rest had gone. Told that her son had been found guilty, she nodded, her face full of resignation and disgust.

  Corey Farell sent a text message on his cell phone to John Skaggs to apprise him of the verdict that Skaggs had refused to come and hear. Farell’s phone buzzed immediately with a blasé response. It was vintage Skaggs—one word: sweet.

  The Davis jury came back the next morning. This time the courtroom was empty except for a gaggle of prosecutors, friends of Stirling and Colello. Wally Tennelle did not attend. Davis watched the envelope intently as it traveled across the courtroom in the clerk’s hands from the jury to the judge. When the guilty verdict was announced, he put a hand over his mouth, swung his head upward, and stared at the ceiling as the long list of findings was read. As court adjourned, Davis sat shaking his head.