Sly Fox

by Jeanine Pirro

  Having finished, I walked back to my chair and got a thumbs-up from my beaming mom.

  Neal Kent looked every bit like the successful Manhattan lawyer that he was when he addressed the jurors. Clean shaven, naturally blond, he came across as a patriarch in a thousand-dollar Italian suit and five-hundred-dollar shoes. Like me, he did not refer to a single note.

  “My client,” Kent declared in a confident voice, “doesn’t want your compassion. What he wants is justice. What he wants is for you to know that he did not sexually abuse his daughter as the state has charged. He is not a rapist. He did not whip her. He is a good father. A respected businessman, a self-made man who came to our country with nothing, worked hard, and made something of his life.”

  He hesitated for dramatic purposes and then said in a sad voice, “I’m sure you are asking yourselves, well, if Mr. Gonzales is innocent, why he is charged with these horrific crimes—offenses that I am now telling you that he did not commit?” Kent glanced over at me and then returned his gaze to the jury. “The prosecution just told you that this trial is about betrayal. Ms. Fox is right. It is about betrayal. Only it is not Carlos Gonzales who betrayed his daughter Carmen. It is his daughter who is betraying his love, his devotion, and the years and years that he fed, clothed, supported, and loved her. William Shakespeare said more than three hundred years ago in King Lear, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ Carlos Gonzales is the victim of a serpent here. His own daughter. We will show that Mr. Gonzales was the victim of a failed extortion attempt. This is not a case of incest and rape. It is a sad tale about revenge, greed, and a psychologically impaired teenager who needs professional mental help.”

  I looked at the jury and had a pained thought: All it would take is one. One shred of reasonable doubt and we would lose.

  32

  My first witness was Dr. Theodore Campbell, a Harvard Medical School–educated physician with an impeccable reputation. At my request, the gray-haired, bespectacled sixty-five-year-old doctor had given Carmen a complete physical.

  “Doctor Campbell, are you licensed to practice medicine in the State of New York?”

  “Yes, and I am board certified as well.”

  “What is your medical specialty, Doctor Campbell?”

  “Dermatology, but I later returned to Harvard and became a forensic dermatologist. There are only about a dozen of us in the country.”

  “What does a forensic dermatologist do?”

  “We’re skin specialists. Many people do not realize that the human skin is the biggest organ of the body. I’ve been trained to detect and identify what sorts of instruments have been used to make marks and wounds to the skin.”

  “What did you find when you examined Carmen Gonzales?”

  “This young woman’s skin showed signs of deep scarring—caused by what we call ‘open wounds,’ especially on her back and buttocks. There was also evidence of scars that had been caused by ‘penetration wounds.’”

  “What’s the difference between open and penetration wounds?”

  “We divide wounds to the skin into two types: open and closed. Open wounds are incisions or incised wounds, caused by a clean, sharp-edged object such as a knife or a razor. A laceration is an irregular tearlike wound caused by some blunt trauma; they can be linear—regular—or stellate—irregular. The terms ‘incision’ and ‘laceration’ are often misused. In addition to incisions and lacerations, there are other types of open wounds, such as abrasions, where the topmost layer of the skin—the epidermis—is scraped off. There are also puncture wounds, caused when something goes into your skin. And, of course, there are gunshot wounds and penetration wounds. All of these are open wounds because they open the skin. An example of a closed wound would be a contusion, more commonly called a bruise, and hematomas, caused by damage to a blood vessel under the skin.”

  I wasn’t sure whether jurors were following Dr. Campbell’s lecture but that didn’t concern me. He sounded exactly like the Harvard-trained expert that he was. Picking up a half-dozen color photographs that Dr. Campbell had taken of Carmen’s back and buttocks, I said, “Your Honor, with your permission, I’d like to have these photographs marked for identification.”

  His court officer stepped forward and carried the photographs from my hand to Judge Williams. Meanwhile, I handed an identical stack to Neal Kent to examine.

  Judge Williams was in his early thirties and had been on the bench less than a year, having just been elected in November. He’d practiced mostly civil litigation and I knew this was his first sex-abuse trial. He scanned the photographs and said, “Counsel, approach the bench.”

  Introducing photographs of wounds was routine in criminal cases, so I wasn’t certain why Judge Williams needed to speak to Kent and me. Keeping his voice low, Judge Williams said, “I’m not going to allow you to introduce these photos. They’re so graphic they’ll prejudice and inflame the jurors.”

  I was dumbstruck. Every prosecutor knew that judges sometimes refused to allow gruesome autopsy photographs to be shown to jurors. But I had a legal right to submit these photographs as evidence.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “these are not autopsy photographs. They’re crucial to our case.”

  Just to make sure Judge Williams understood, I cited the Court of Appeals case of People v. Pobiner, which clearly showed that my photos could be admitted. In fact, I would have been derelict as a prosecutor if I hadn’t asked for them to be entered.

  “Ms. Fox,” Judge Williams replied, “I find these photographs too graphic and therefore they are prejudicial and I am not going to allow them as evidence in my courtroom.”

  “With all due respect, there is no legal basis for your decision. In fact, your decision is contrary to the law. Photographs may only be excluded if their sole purpose is to arouse the emotions of the jury and prejudice the jury, and that is not the case here. This physical evidence simply corroborates the testimonial evidence.”

  If Judge Williams had been irritated before, now he was angry. “Don’t lecture me on the law, young lady. I’ve made my ruling and I’m not changing it. Now let’s proceed.”

  “But your ruling is wrong. This is basic stuff.”

  “Do you want me to hold you in contempt, Ms. Fox?” he snapped, his face starting to turn red. It seemed he was so keenly aware of his lack of experience that his ego demanded he substitute his power for his incompetence.

  “No, I want you to follow the law.”

  For a moment, Judge Williams didn’t speak and I thought, My God! He’s going to do it! He’s going to hold me in contempt! But the inexperienced jurist regained his composure and said, “My ruling stands. Period. No photos. Move on.”

  “Your Honor, I am at least entitled to mark them for identification subject to later connection.”

  Begrudgingly, he granted that rudimentary request.

  As we returned to our respective seats, Kent whispered in a sarcastic voice, “You got some real winners as judges out here!” But I wasn’t smiling. All I could think about was how ridiculous it was that a lawyer who didn’t understand basic evidentiary procedures in a criminal courtroom had gotten himself elected as a judge in Westchester County. Asshole.

  I put the graphic photos faceup on my desk, hoping jurors could see the top one from their seats. I returned to questioning Dr. Campbell.

  “Doctor Campbell, please describe what you saw on Carmen Gonzales’s back and buttocks when you examined her.”

  “This young woman had been struck multiple times with an object. In my opinion, she had been whipped repeatedly over a several-month period.”

  “I object,” Kent said. “Doctor Campbell is not an expert on whipping.”

  “Overruled,” Judge Williams said. “He’s a forensic dermatologist. I imagine he knows a lot about whipping.”

  I could hear a few spectators giggling, which caused Judge Williams to look even more peeved at me.

  “Besides scars caused by whipping,”
I said, “you testified there were penetration wounds, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct. She had some tiny puncture wounds. Based on my analysis, I determined she had been beaten with a leather belt. The distance between the cuts on her skin suggested a belt that was thirty-eight millimeters, which is slightly larger than one and half inches, a standard size for men’s belts. The scars caused by puncture wounds that I observed were consistent with a belt buckle, which left an imprint that you could see with the naked eye.”

  “To a reasonable degree of medical certainty, how would you rate the scars that you observed?”

  “Rate?” he replied. “I’m not certain what you mean.”

  “What I am asking is, how badly had Carmen Gonzales been beaten in comparison to other victims whom you’ve examined?”

  “I’ve examined more than two hundred victims of whippings as a forensic dermatologist and the scars on this young woman are the worst I’ve seen. I would say—to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, based on my experience—that a doctor would have to have lived during the early eighteen hundreds when slavery was prevalent to have seen an equal amount of scarring.”

  I held up a clear plastic bag that contained a man’s brown leather belt, marked the belt for identification, and announced that I wanted to enter it into evidence. Judge Williams approved and Kent didn’t object, so I handed it to Dr. Campbell, who opened the bag and carefully examined the leather belt.

  “Have you seen this belt before?” I asked him.

  Dr. Campbell said yes and testified that based on tests in his lab the belt was consistent in size with the scars that he found on Carmen’s back. I thanked him and sat down.

  Much to my surprise, defense attorney Kent didn’t spend much time cross-examining Dr. Campbell. He asked a few simple questions, including how many hundreds of thousands of one-and-a-half-inch belts were manufactured, who would have used the belt, and even assuming there was beating, was there any way to determine if it had been consensual.

  My next witness was from the chief medical examiner’s office and an expert in serology, or the type and characteristics of blood. He testified that he’d found blood traces on the belt, the one I’d introduced as evidence, that were consistent with Carmen Gonzales’s blood type. Once again, Kent asked him only a few routine questions.

  If you weren’t an attorney, you might not have noticed. But I was getting the strange sense that Kent was merely going through the motions of putting on a defense. He certainly was not the aggressive defense attorney that I’d read about in the flattering New York magazine cover story.

  Next up for the state was Detective O’Brien, who testified that he had searched Carlos Gonzales’s bedroom and had found the belt, which was now in evidence, in the closet.

  When it was Kent’s turn to cross-examine, he asked O’Brien: “Was the belt hidden or could anyone have used it?”

  “Anyone could have used it.”

  That was all Kent asked, and again, I wondered why he appeared to be pulling his punches.

  Having introduced evidence that established Carmen had been whipped, that her scars had been caused by a belt, and that her blood had been found on a belt hanging in her father’s closet, I turned to the rape charges.

  Dr. Joyce Cox took the witness stand reluctantly, and when I turned my head and looked into the spectators’ gallery, I recognized the two antiabortion protestors from outside her clinic. They had won seats in the courtroom and were taking notes.

  Through a series of questions, I had Dr. Cox describe how Gonzales had brought Carmen into the clinic for a “procedure” and how he’d refused to leave her side even when she was under anesthetic.

  “Did you see Carmen Gonzales’s back or buttocks while she was in the clinic?” I asked.

  “No, I did not. Mr. Gonzales said his daughter was very modest and she kept her upper body covered at all times during the procedure.”

  Kent took more time than he had earlier with my witnesses when he interrogated Dr. Cox. He began by asking her to state her credentials and her home address for the record. He knew what he was doing and so did she. In the gallery, the antiabortion couple were poised to jot down the address. I objected, stating that her business address should be sufficient. Judge “Amateur” actually agreed.

  Kent walked Dr. Cox through each step of an abortion, at times clearly baiting her. Eventually, he got around to Carmen.

  “Doctor Cox, you testified earlier that you’ve never had a father bring his daughter in for an abortion, is that correct?”

  “What I said was that I had never had a father bring his daughter in for a procedure.”

  “Ah, yes, a procedure. Were you aware that Mr. Gonzales was a widower?”

  “Yes, he mentioned that Carmen’s stepmother had died recently and her own mother had died when giving birth to a son.”

  “Wouldn’t that explain why he brought her into the clinic?”

  I objected. “Calls for speculation.”

  Judge Williams agreed and sustained my objection.

  “Did you ask him or did you know anything about his relationship with his daughter?” Kent asked.

  “No, I did notice though that he never let her open her mouth.”

  “Are you saying he put a gag on her?”

  Some spectators chuckled.

  “No, I mean he did all the talking.”

  Kent said, “So as far as you know, Carmen Gonzales might have asked her father to go with her because she needed him there, isn’t that correct? She might have asked him to speak for her because she was too shy and reserved to speak for herself, isn’t that correct?”

  “I object,” I said. “Speculative.”

  “Sustained.”

  “I’ll rephrase,” Kent said. “Doctor Cox, did you ask Mr. Gonzales if his daughter had asked him to come with her?”

  “No. All I can testify to is that he brought her there and did the talking.”

  A smiling Kent sat down.

  My next two witnesses were two bartenders who worked in nightclubs where Carlos Gonzales had taken Carmen on “dates.” Both testified that Carlos had introduced her as his girlfriend. Kent didn’t bother cross-examining either man.

  It was now time for me to call Carmen Gonzales.

  33

  To get a conviction, jurors had to believe Carmen. I had Anne Marie take her shopping the day before the trial. She appeared in court wearing a baggy, high-necked dress with long sleeves that completely concealed her curves. She wore flats. Style was immaterial. I wanted Carmen to look even younger than her sixteen years. She wore no makeup and her hair was in a ponytail to diminish her natural sexuality.

  I couldn’t have asked for a better performance. Carmen’s eyes filled with tears as she described in graphic terms how her father had called her into his bedroom after her stepmother’s suicide and beaten her so viciously that she’d been forced to shower to wash away the blood. She’d then described the multiple rapes.

  In her childlike voice, she recounted how she’d closed her eyes while her father was raping her and had thought about her favorite children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams.

  “My stepmother used to read it to me.”

  “Why The Velveteen Rabbit?”

  “Because in the story the stuffed rabbit thinks he is real but he isn’t. When my father was on top of me, I pretended I was a doll and what was happening was not real. I know it sounds dumb, but I would imagine it really wasn’t happening. That he was doing these things to a doll.”

  “Were you afraid of your father?”

  “My stepbrother and stepsister were too young to know what was going on. But my brother, Hector, knew, only he was so terrified and only twelve years old so there was nothing he could do. He could hear me being beaten and screaming. Hector told me that he would cry and cover his head with his pillow. When my father was at work, we would talk about how wonderful it would be if he had died instead of our stepmother. Hector even
talked about getting a shotgun and shooting him.”

  I gingerly asked Carmen to describe her trip to the clinic. “My father was so angry when he discovered I was pregnant. He wanted to kill the baby. He punched me several times in my stomach, and when that didn’t work, he took me to that place for an abortion.”

  I kept her on the witness stand nearly two hours and felt confident that Carmen had come across as truthful.

  Kent began his cross-examination by asking: “Did your father ever hit you when your stepmother was still alive?”

  “Not with his belt. He spanked us, but he didn’t whip me until after she died.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone he was supposedly beating you?”

  “My father said he would hurt my brother.”

  “Is it your testimony that you never told anyone that he was doing these terrible things to you over and over again, night after night?”

  “I was afraid to.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Kent said. “Did you tell anyone—even at school?”

  “I told Detective O’Brien after my father was arrested and in jail, but that was it.”

  Kent said, “Judge, I’d like a sidebar.”

  Judge Williams waved us forward and Kent said in a low voice, “I would like you to declare a mistrial.”

  “Why?” the judge asked.

  “This witness has just poisoned the jurors’ minds by testifying that her father was arrested and in jail when she first contacted Detective O’Brien. They’ll naturally conclude that my client has been charged with additional crimes.”

  I felt a sense of panic. Judge Williams had already ignored the law when he wouldn’t let me introduce photos of Carmen’s scars. I certainly didn’t think there was a reversible error in what Carmen had just testified but I’d lost all confidence in his judgment. “Your Honor,” I said, “Mr. Kent opened the door by asking the witness why she finally told O’Brien she was being molested. At best, this is a harmless error. For all the jury knows, the defendant could have been in jail for a traffic citation.”