Murder in the Courthouse
Page 26
The jury had to do the right thing. They had to convict Todd Adams. Next would be the death-penalty phase. When a death penalty was sought by the state, the trial was bifurcated, or tried in two halves. First was the guilt-innocence phase. Assuming a guilty verdict was returned, the same jury moved on to the sentencing phase during which the jury would decide his ultimate fate and sentence the defendant themselves. If they locked or mistried at that phase, the judge would either sentence the defendant himself or the state could re-try the sentencing portion of the trial.
Hailey replayed the closing arguments and the testimony of Dana Love again in her mind. There was no way this guy was going to walk.
Just then, a burst of whispers rippled across the courtroom when the calendar clerk went to sit briefly at her position near the judge. She would be present when any verdict was reached, as it signaled the disposition of an indictment assigned to her courtroom. But it was short-lived. She merely gathered a stack of papers pertaining to another plea and arraignment calendar and left by the same door through which she entered.
At this point, no one, reporters, families, press, or court watchers, dared leave the courtroom or its near vicinity for fear of missing the verdict.
There had to be at least twenty armed sheriffs around the courtroom’s perimeter. Stationed in front of every towering window, door, and in between, they kept stern faces, their service revolvers in plain view. Their presence and demeanor only added to the atmosphere.
And then, it buzzed. An electric surge coursed through Hailey’s body, lasting less than a second . . . a physical response to her immediate realization. This was it. It wasn’t a question, they didn’t want to halt deliberations for another day, they didn’t want another exhibit brought back to the courtroom, no read-backs of testimony, and no soft drink orders. They had reached a verdict. She knew it in her bones.
There was a moment when everyone and everything seemed to freeze, standing still in their places followed by a mini-pandemonium. Papers rustling, reporters sending frantic emails and texts, movement in general.
The door to the right of the judge’s bench that looked exactly like the paneled wall, blending in without so much as a doorknob to suggest it was in fact a door, opened from within. Out came Todd Adams in handcuffs with two armed sheriffs on either side of him. This was typically a time many defendants would make a run for it . . . just before a jury verdict that would likely send them to jail for life. Or in Todd Adams’s case, to a punishment-phase trial and about a decade on Georgia’s Death Row followed by the electric chair.
But as always, he looked undaunted. Head thrown back, shoulders wide in what looked to be a Gucci suit, he looked for all the world like a winning quarterback strutting across the field. A half smile was playing at one corner of his lips. What did he know?
He looked calm, cool, and confident. He didn’t seem worried about a thing! Not in the least, actually. Hailey’s eyebrows knitted together. How could this be?
Hailey stretched around the man in front of her to check on the Love family. They sat motionless with stricken looks on their faces. Dana Love couldn’t stand, draped forward and to the side, crying into a white handkerchief.
On the other side of the well, Tish Adams, clutching the top of her portable oxygen tank as if to bolster herself, steadily held the gaze of her son as he passed just feet from her, his dad’s arm around Tish’s shoulders. They stood rooted to their spot.
It took only a minute or so before the bailiff pounded loudly with the gavel. “Hear ye, hear ye! The Superior Court of Chatham County is now in session! The Honorable Luther Alverson on the bench! All rise!”
Everyone in the courtroom, without exception, stood as Alverson blew onto the bench, his long black robes billowing out behind him.
Dana Love had to be helped up in order to stand, her husband, Malcolm, keeping a firm arm supporting her waist on her left side, the other holding her at her right elbow. Her head had lolled slightly back, her face white. She looked as if she were reliving her daughter’s horrible death, being forced to remember the beautiful, pink, pristine baby girl who’d been set free from Julie Love’s uterus underwater.
The baby she’d never hold. The daughter she’d never see alive again . . . all the happy years to come, gone . . . vanished . . . disintegrated like dust that slipped through her hands and into the wind. Gone. Forever.
The pain of reliving it in the courtroom had been too much to bear and now . . . now . . . Todd Adams and his mother both exchanged smiles. No one near the front of the courtroom could miss it. What did they know? Hailey wondered again.
“Madame Calendar Clerk, does the jury have a verdict?”
“Yes, they do, Your Honor.”
“Sheriffs, bring in the jury.”
Two sheriffs headed to the jury deliberations room as the bailiff called out in a low voice that carried across the courtroom, “All rise for the jury.”
In they came. All eyes locked on the twelve jurors entering the courtroom. From the moment the deliberations door opened, Hailey’s radar went berserk.
They came out in knots of two or three at a time. Two of the middle-aged men actually looked angry. An older man Hailey remembered from voir dire as a veteran was methodically clenching his fists then unclenching them. Hailey had pegged him as a possible foreperson. Two of the lady jurors came out with eyes red and teary. The four alternates were rousted from somewhere deep within the judge’s chambers to file into the jury box along with the twelve.
They sat as if exhausted and, in unison, so did the audience. Hailey noticed they did not all sit together as a group but split into groups of two or three, leaving spaces between them.
There was complete silence; Hailey could have heard a pin drop. She and Fincher sat side by side, their backs ramrod straight, eyes on the jury. The judge turned toward them.
“May I ask the foreman of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
A pale young man of medium height, his dark hair disheveled and sporting a matching goatee, answered from his seat, “Yes, we have.”
“You will stand when you address the judge,” the sheriff growled out, taking several steps toward the jury foreperson.
The pinched white face of the foreman screwed into a scowl, but facing the angry-looking sheriff, whose face never once collapsed into a smile, stood up. Smoothing down his sweatshirt, he looked irritated he was asked to stand.
“Yes, we have reached a verdict.”
“And has it been signed by the foreman?”
“It has.” He practically stuck out his tongue at the judge when he answered, his demeanor so irritated. This was a factor Hailey had worried about since she learned at the get-go that this was the foreperson. Who in their right minds would elect such a brat to lead the jury deliberations and why?
The judge seemed to ignore his bratty manner and calmly addressed the sheriff. “Mr. Bailiff, please hand up the verdict to Madame Calendar Clerk.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” The sheriff did so, taking the indictment which was folded longways in three sections from the foreman and without so much as glancing at it, strode across the courtroom and handed it to the female calendar clerk seated in a low desk below and to the side of the judge’s bench.
“Is the verdict in order, Madame Clerk?”
Without responding, the middle-aged woman who had been Alverson’s calendar clerk since she graduated from high school stared at the document. She stood and handed the indictment up to the judge.
The judge took the indictment and studied it. Removing his glasses, he looked at it again and then turned a cold, questioning stare on the jury. “I understood you to say you have reached a verdict in the matter of The State v. Todd Adams.”
The foreperson, visibly upset that he had to stand again, launched into a diatribe. “We have Your Honor . . . our verdict is . . . there is no verdict! You put a bunch of morons out for blood on the jury . . . what’d you expect? I mean . . . this is just a vendetta by the state over some cheerleader .
. .”
Sharp screams rose from the Love camp. Dana Love fell back onto the bench and let out a cry of anguish. In stark contrast, clapping and shouts of victory rang out from the other side of the aisle, the Adams camp as well as from the defense table itself.
DelVecchio managed to yell out two words as his fleet of defense minions leaped from their seats around the defense table, surging toward their leader in victory. “Appeal bond!” DelVecchio practically screamed it.
“Oppose bond! We demand a new trial immediately!” A beat behind, the state’s lead attorney stood at his seat and finally found his voice but he was immediately drowned out by the judge.
“Silence! There will be order in this courtroom!”
Luther Alverson was standing at the bench now as sheriffs from all around the courtroom closed in on the defendant and the sources of the outburst. Alverson was looking directly at the lead defense attorney. “And you sir, Mr. DelVecchio, are hereby held in contempt for your outburst in this courtroom. And I will have silence from the foreman!”
“Order in the courtroom! Order in the court!” the chief bailiff shouted out, and suddenly the courtroom quieted. Except for the low moans of Dana Love, not a breath could be heard.
Reporters, TV and print alike, were silently thumbing texts as quickly as their hot little fingers could type on their iPhones’s mini-keyboards while Dana Love’s moans continued. The whole bunch hardly glanced over at her as she and her husband, Malcolm, now audibly crying, huddled together on the front pew.
While the press didn’t bother to notice them sobbing and shaking right in front of them, Hailey couldn’t drag her eyes away. Their suffering coursed through her, bringing back the gut-wrenching pain from Will’s murder and trial. A pain shot through her chest, and she felt like she had swallowed a big lump of charcoal that stuck in her throat. Hot tears leaped to her eyes.
Before anyone could fully take in what was happening, Michael DelVecchio strong-armed his defense minions away from a jubilant group hug despite the bailiff’s demands for order in the court and sprang to the center of the well. “Under threat of jail, I insist, Your Honor! Appeal bond, Your Honor! Appeal bond! This jury has all but exonerated my client . . .”
“No! We didn’t!” one of the lady jurors who had been crying jumped from her seat, found her voice, and shrieked at DelVecchio. “We didn’t! He did!” She pointed directly at the surly foreman, still sitting in his juror chair, his arms folded defensively across his chest.
He responded by not budging to turn around to look at the lady juror. Instead, he smiled thinly at the courtroom in general.
“Madame juror! Please be seated.” Luther Alverson had never, in his forty years on the bench, had such a display in his courtroom.
“You have to know . . . we are sorry, Mrs. Love. It was eleven to one for guilty, but he wouldn’t budge! He did it . . . Todd Adams murdered Julie! We are just so sorry . . .” The juror collapsed into her seat and cried unabashedly into a soaked hanky.
DelVecchio took her collapse as his cue to continue the dramatic delivery of his speech. “. . . and we hereby go on record demanding a bond while we appeal a new trial! It would be unconstitutional to hold him while these legal briefs go up to an appellate court!”
“Bailiff, send out the jury immediately! Order! There will be order or every single spectator in this courtroom will be held in contempt!”
Outside, the silhouettes of tall trees were now pitching wildly against the courthouse in the dark as rain dashed the courtroom windows and lightning pierced the night sky. The wind could now be clearly heard whistling and howling outside as a hush fell across the courtroom.
With the jury out of the room, some shred of quiet was restored but electricity charged just beneath the surface. “Your Honor, please do not grant him bond. The state is prepared to re-try him immediately.” The state stood at their massive oak table before the judge.
“Object! It could be months, even a year before retrial on a death-penalty case! The jury has spoken.” DelVecchio tuned up again.
“Counsel for the state, I have no doubt you will in fact re-try Todd Adams. But meanwhile, I believe the Georgia Supreme Court, knowing them, will demand I set a bond. Cash bond is hereby ordered in the amount of $1 million. Repeat, cash bond only.”
In a split second, DelVecchio leaped back on his feet. “But Your Honor, a million dollars cash bond is tantamount to no bond at all! That disallows the family using the family home as collateral! It’s in effect denying bond!”
“We’ll do it.” All eyes turned to the audience as a weak voice broke in. Tish Adams stood, leaning heavily on her tank. She inhaled deeply from the clear plastic tube that hung across her cheeks and just under her nostrils.
Before the judge could stop her, she went on, “We’ll raise the money tonight and have him out by the morning. I want my son home in his own room where he belongs. Where he’s always belonged.”
Although she spoke to the judge, Tish Adams only had eyes for her son. In stark contrast, Dana Love’s low sobs punctuated Tish Adams’s words.
“So be it. The defendant Todd Adams is hereby remanded to the Chatham County Jail unless and until such time as one million dollars cash bond is posted. At that time, he will be released to the custody of his parents Tish and Ron Adams where he shall be on house arrest until the time of his retrial. Conditions of house arrest are that he may not leave the premises of his parents’ home except to visit his lawyers’ offices and to attend religious services once a week. Court is adjourned.” Luther Alverson, barely disguising his disgust at the hung jury, swept off the bench and into his chambers.
There was one moment of stunned silence before the media sprang to their collective feet and rushed out the door to begin live shoots in the dark of night on the front of the courthouse steps for news cut-ins. Hailey and Finch sat stock-still, taking it all in, trying to digest that the culmination of a year of investigation plus weeks of testimony and evidence was nothing more than a hung jury. Hung, apparently, by one surly juror.
The Adamses were now leaning over the rail separating them from the well, exchanging last words and glances before their son was led out of the courtroom. Malcolm Love had managed to get his wife to her feet and, leaning heavily on her husband, she appeared to be physically limping from the pain of the trial’s outcome. The two, never looking back, hobbled out of the courtroom, the swinging doors whooshing shut behind them.
“I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. That foreman ought to be tarred and feathered.” Finch’s first words came as he and Hailey stood and headed out of the courtroom. She still felt numb at a clear miscarriage of justice. She couldn’t rid her mind of the image of Julie Love in the grave, her dead arms holding baby Lily in death.
“I can’t believe it either. The evidence was overwhelming. The Loves have to be crushed, and all because of one nut job. Wait . . . shh. Here come the Adamses.”
Hailey nodded her head back over his shoulder and held the door open as the Adamses slowly made their way through it, the mom dabbing at her eyes with Kleenex. Hailey and Finch waited to let them pass through the doors and out into the hall. They all made their way into the hallway as the crowd just outside the courtroom doors was thinning.
“You know where they’re headed . . . home to try and raise a million dollars cash. Hey, let’s go get tea or coffee, OK?” Hailey said. The thought of going back to her empty hotel room after a blow like this was too much.
“Coffee? Are you kidding? I need a drink after this!”
“OK. You get a drink. I’ve got a tea bag with me. I’m gonna duck into the ladies room. You get the car and I’ll meet you in front of the courthouse?”
“Sure. Then I’ll take you to get your rental car and you’ll follow?”
“OK.” Hailey pushed the door open to the ladies room.
“And be careful when you come out the front door. I’m sure Mike Walker and Snoop are there to ambush you for a sound bite!”
She pulled out her cell phone to call home and tell her folks about the mistrial, but suddenly she spotted a lady’s feet next to a silver canister on wheels under one of the two stall doors. She clicked off. She didn’t want to say what she really thought about the Todd Adams mistrial with his mom in the very next stall beside her.
Hailey went into the remaining stall, balancing all her gear, and heard Tish Adams open the metal door beside her and roll the tank to the sink. The tiny, tiled bathroom was quiet now. The hall outside it was empty.
The night was dark outside the bathroom’s one tiny window. It was late, the trial was done, the courthouse closed, and all the court watchers who had, for weeks on end, packed the Todd Adams courtroom were all gone home and back to their lives. The show was over.
Hailey heard the metallic twist of the water faucet over the white ceramic sinks and the sound of water in the sink. Opening the door, Hailey saw Tish Adams looking into the mirror over the sinks. Her face was pale and white in the mirror, her lips the only color on her face. Lipstick in one hand, Tish reached to turn the faucet off with the other and, juggling, her purse slid down her shoulder onto the tile. Its contents—Kleenex, powder, pill bottles, checkbook, and a sprinkling of other items—poured onto the tile. Tish started to lean down to put it all back in when Hailey interjected.
“No, let me, Mrs. Adams.”
“Thank you, Hailey,” she said it in somewhat of a stiff voice, which Hailey totally understood, given Hailey had been on the state’s witness list in her son’s murder prosecution. Hailey got it. Nevertheless, she knelt down to help the woman who seemed literally at the end of her rope after the trial.
Hailey picked up the items one by one, placing them back into the purse. The powder compact had come open and the powder puff had gotten loose. Putting it back in, Hailey saw the compact’s mirror was cracked.