MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

  He walked back to the defense table and picked up a black leather Moleskine notebook. As Charlie watched him, his gaze snagged on Leacham’s, who had turned in his chair. Not a muscle moved on the other man’s face, but Charlie still felt his own shoulders tense as if he were getting ready to throw a punch.

  “In Ms. Quinn’s opening statement, which I wrote down”—Wheeler flourished the notebook dramatically—“she promised that you were going to hear from another prostitute who claimed she had evidence against Mr. Leacham. But that’s not what happened, is it? The lady didn’t even show up to testify.” He mimed looking around the courtroom. “So where is she, this mysterious woman? Is she not here because she was seeking something—sympathy, money, fame—but then she got cold feet when it came time to come before you and lie about what happened?”

  He nodded to himself. “Facts are stubborn things. An indictment is not a crime. Indictments mean nothing. Anyone can be indicted, and that should not affect your decision making in any way. Why do our courts have presumption of innocence? Why is our standard reasonable doubt? Because ‘looking bad’ and ‘probably’ are not standards of proof. That’s the most important thing to remember. Human beings are naturally judgmental and critical of each other. But with presumption of innocence, we are forced to wait and weigh the evidence.”

  Charlie didn’t think of himself as judgmental. He just called them as he saw them. And in his line of work, he saw a lot.

  “The police botched this investigation from the start. I’m sure we all remember the officer who was in charge of logging people in and out of the scene, Officer Childs. While he was on the stand, I asked him for his notes, and he opened up a teeny tiny notebook. He did not have the names of anyone who was at the scene. At first he did not even recall if he was wearing gloves when he initially walked through the massage parlor. Then he remembered he wasn’t.” Wheeler shook his head. “Was there evidence that was never cataloged, perhaps even destroyed? We’ll never know.”

  Wheeler went on, occasionally making a show of looking down at his notebook, casting doubt on every step of the investigation. Some of his points did not even make a lot of sense, but in aggregate they might leave the jurors confused enough that they would not be able to find Leacham guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  But being found not guilty wasn’t the same as being innocent. Even Wheeler would not go so far as to claim his client was innocent.

  Finally, Wheeler summed it up. “The prosecutor has not proved her charges. Instead, she has dragged the name of an honorable man through the mud. I ask that you serve justice today. I ask that you find David Leacham not guilty. Because that is the truth.”

  CHAPTER 5

  As she pushed back her chair and stood up from the prosecution table, Mia tried to take a deep breath. She had listened closely to Wheeler. Now was her chance to lay out her rebuttal. Her final chance to speak to the jury. Everything was riding on what she said next. She resisted the urge to wipe her sweaty palms on the skirt of her suit. As she walked to the jury box, Charlie gave her a subtle but encouraging nod.

  “Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the Seattle Police Department, the crime lab, and the DA’s office—we have done all that we can. There’s nothing else we can add. Nothing else we can show you. And do you know why? Because we didn’t make the facts. We didn’t make the evidence. He did.” She turned and pointed at David Leacham. He kept his face impassive, but she could see the hate hiding in his eyes.

  The defense had called a dozen people to speak on his behalf, but Leacham himself had never taken the stand. Mia wished she could bring that up, could say to the jury, “Hey, what’s Leacham so afraid of? Why can’t he answer our questions? If his story is true, why won’t he subject himself to cross-examination?” but she could not. The right to remain silent was guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment, and she could not comment at all.

  Even though Mia knew, and Wheeler must know too, that if David Leacham had taken the stand, he would have cracked like a potato chip.

  “When this trial is over, you will leave with questions that are never going to be answered. And for the rest of your life, when you think about your time as a juror, you’re going to ask yourself: Why did he do that? Why did David Leacham take everything that girl had to give and then take even more?

  “But having questions like that doesn’t mean there’s a meaningful doubt. What this trial boils down to is this: If you believe with all your heart and with all your gut that this defendant committed the murder, then you will find him guilty. And you, ladies and gentleman of the jury”—she swept her gaze from face to face—“better than anyone else in the world who wasn’t in the room that night, know what really happened there. And I know you’re not going to let David Leacham get away with it.”

  She lowered her voice, and the jurors leaned forward, as if she were letting them in on a secret. All the jurors, except Warren. He was staring down at the floor, as he had been ever since she began talking, his gaze vacant. Mia tried not to let the sight of his seeming indifference break her stride.

  “The defense has tried to overwhelm you with trivial details. Yes, Officer Childs was not wearing gloves when he first walked through the massage parlor. He answered honestly about that. He also answered honestly about not touching anything with his ungloved hands.” She was relieved to see her words met by nods.

  “As for our missing witness, we can only speculate as to what has happened to her. Unfortunately, we do not know.” Out of the corner of her eye, Mia could see Wheeler readying himself to object if she did speculate. She decided to pivot to a stronger point rather than let him interrupt her flow.

  “What you need to focus on is Mr. Leacham himself, and what kind of man he is. And to do that we need to look below the surface. We want to think that we know evil when we see it. We want to believe that evil is ugly. That it is friendless. That evil isn’t a member of the Rotary Club, that it doesn’t have a wife and kids and a successful business. We want to believe we can tell just by looking who is evil, because it makes us feel safer.” Mia sighed, her mouth twisting. And was rewarded when the jurors seemed to sigh with her, a quiet echo.

  “The defense has paraded people before you, people who are acquainted with Mr. Leacham from his church and from his business and from his volunteer work. They all thought they knew him. They all wanted to believe that there wasn’t a secret, hidden, sick side to him. Can you imagine how you would feel if you thought you knew somebody and then you turned out to be so wrong? And meanwhile, you had perhaps let that person be around your family? Around your wife? Around your daughters? You would never want to believe you could be that wrong about anybody. But the simple truth is these people were that wrong, and they’re still that wrong.” Mia’s voice strengthened with every word.

  “Now it’s time for the twelve of you to start deliberating, to sit down together and talk about what you have seen and heard. For you to reason together and come back with a verdict. It’s time for this case to finally be resolved by you, the jury. Not by the media. Not by Mr. Leacham’s acquaintances. But by you. It’s time for justice to be served for Dandan Yee.”

  Her voice rang throughout the courtroom. “Because David Leacham is guilty of taking this vulnerable young woman’s life. He is guilty. And I ask you to find him so.”

  CHAPTER 6

  As he drove to the University of Washington law school, Eli Hall hummed an old Billy Joel song under his breath. Tuesday was the bright spot of his week. Wednesdays could sometimes be wonderful too.

  Of course, judged objectively, neither day should be. Both started with ten or so hours at his job as a public defender. Both ended with a couple more at home, hunched over his laptop until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  But in between … ah, in between, that was a different story. Because Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the nights Eli was an adjunct professor.

  It wasn’t that the intelligence and enthusiasm of his law school students made Eli’s long
days worthwhile. These days the students mostly just made him feel old. He would be turning forty in a few months, older now than even the latest of bloomers in his class.

  And while he could always use the money—he was a single parent, and the worst-paid attorneys were public defenders—that wasn’t what made those two days of the week stand out.

  He had met Mia Quinn, another adjunct professor, at the beginning of the term and had fallen. Fallen hard. On Wednesdays they taught in adjoining classrooms. But on Tuesdays they were a team. First they demonstrated the given topic, then, along with the students, they listened to the lecture given by Titus Brown.

  So in a few minutes Eli and Mia would be sitting just a few feet apart. With luck, they might even meet up in the parking lot beforehand and walk in together. And they would surely walk out together. They had fallen into a routine without having to discuss it. Walking and talking was just a given now.

  They had a lot in common. As was true for Eli, one reason that Mia taught was because she needed the money. Like him, she had a teenager, although his Rachel was a couple of years older than her Gabe. But what drew Eli to her couldn’t be summed up on paper, he thought as he pulled into the parking lot and felt a flash of disappointment at not seeing her.

  It was her low laugh. How she tilted her head when she was listening intently. How she reached out to others. When she had learned that the mother of one of her son’s friends was being treated for cancer and had lost her apartment, she had invited both mother and son into her own home.

  Only once had Mia and Eli been on opposite sides, and he had seen then that she would never, ever give up. Not on her cases, not on her family.

  Not like Lydia, who had taken off to “find herself” after endlessly complaining that she had gone from a child to being a mother. She learned she was pregnant her senior year of high school, and they married three months after her graduation.

  After nearly seventeen years of marriage Lydia had left Eli and Rachel a year ago without a backward glance, a Skype visit, or even a letter.

  Mia would never do that. He had seen how loyal she was to the victims she represented, to her co-workers, and to her friends.

  Which was what Eli was. He wanted to be more. He had tried to drop hints, but he didn’t have much practice.

  Now his heart started beating a little faster as he pulled open the door to the classroom, which was modeled like a miniature courtroom. The students who had earlier been assigned to play jurors were already in the jury box. Mia was sitting at the prosecutor’s table, deep in conversation with Titus. Tomorrow Eli and Mia would critique their own students as they put into practice what they learned tonight.

  As Titus took the judge’s chair, Eli shot Mia a smile. She nodded and smiled in return, but she seemed distracted.

  After clearing his throat, Titus said, “Tonight Ms. Quinn and Mr. Hall will be modeling voir dire for you. The case for which they will be questioning prospective jurors concerns a forty-three-year-old black defendant who is charged with assaulting and raping a twenty-one-year-old white woman after they left a bar together.”

  Slipping into his role as judge, Titus asked the prospective jurors as a group if any of them knew the defendant, the victim, or the attorneys. By prearrangement they all said no, the same answer they gave when he asked if any of them doubted their ability to be fair and impartial during the trial.

  Then he turned the jurors over to Mia and Eli. Just as in a real voir dire, they had been given the bare “facts” about each juror, such as name, age, and marital status. But Titus had gone one step further and slipped each of the pretend jurors an interesting fact to see if Eli or Mia would tease it out.

  Mia was first up. “I want to begin this morning by telling you that you are all qualified jurors. When you came in, you had no idea whether it was to hear a case about a personal injury in a car crash, or about two partners who had a falling out over their company, or maybe it was a medical malpractice case or a criminal case. You had no idea, did you?”

  Already caught up in Mia’s spell, the pretend jurors bobbed their heads in agreement.

  “And you ended up here, on a criminal case. Now, each of us has personal experiences that make the different cases the right case or the wrong case for us.” She emphasized the last two words. “You may have personal feelings that make this an inappropriate trial for you, whereas you could listen to that partnership dissolution very easily. So the purpose of our questions is not to disqualify you. In fact, if you think about it, it’s more like figuring out whether the case should be disqualified from you. Nothing is personal. And I think it’s easier to answer the questions if you keep that in mind.”

  Eli resolved to borrow Mia’s phrasing the next time he did voir dire. If you couldn’t learn from the best, you didn’t deserve to practice law.

  “Have any of you been the victim of a crime?” Mia asked.

  One of the pretend jurors raised his hand.

  After checking her printout, Mia called out, “Juror Seventeen?”

  Juror Seventeen, played by a young man, was supposedly a plumber in his forties. “Three years ago, I was the victim of an armed robbery and was pistol-whipped.”

  “Pistol-whipped?” Mia echoed. “So you were injured?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you satisfied with what the police did?”

  Getting into his part, the young man jutted out his jaw. “They did nothing.”

  “So I would say that’s a no.”

  About half the jurors smiled. Mia was already building rapport.

  “No.”

  “And were you satisfied with anything the prosecutor did?” Mia raised one eyebrow.

  “No. They never caught him.”

  “The police never did anything, so the prosecutor didn’t do anything?”

  “Exactly,” the supposed victim said. “And now I have posttraumatic stress disorder.”

  “And in hearing the evidence about the alleged assault, do you think you would have a problem believing the police officer’s testimony?”

  He hesitated and then said, “Yes, I do.”

  Good job, Mia, Eli thought. Some people would feel a crime victim would naturally side with the prosecution, but in this case, the juror actually bore some animus toward law enforcement. And because of her careful questioning, she would be able to strike him for cause.

  Mia looked back out over all the jurors again. “Now I’m going to ask you some questions that you may ask to respond to out of hearing of the other jurors, if you feel the questions are too personal. Have you, or has any family member or close friend, ever been the victim of any type of sexual assault?”

  A juror raised her hand.

  “Yes, Number Three?”

  “My daughter was raped.”

  “And was her assailant caught?”

  “She did not press charges.”

  “May I ask why not?” Mia said gently.

  “She was afraid of how she might be treated.”

  “And what did you think?”

  Suddenly vehement, the girl managed to channel a fifty-two-year-old mother. “If I had known about it at the time I would have told her that she had done nothing wrong, and that she needed to report him to the police so that creep couldn’t hurt anyone else.”

  “Anyone else?” Mia asked, and then when no one answered, she went on to ask a handful of carefully chosen questions.

  After Mia was finished, it was Eli’s turn. After a few questions about what TV shows they liked to watch or magazines they liked to read—questions he always felt helped jurors let down their guards and still provide him with useful information—he asked them how they defined sexual assault. Some stammered and blushed while others answered forthrightly.

  Eli then asked, “Does anyone know someone who falsely claimed to have been a victim of a sexual assault?”

  A man slowly raised his hand.

  “Number Sixteen? What were your feelings about that?”

 
“Well, since I was the one who was falsely accused, I had pretty strong feelings about it, as you can imagine.”

  “Do you think those feelings would make it hard for you to believe another woman claiming she had been assaulted?”

  He paused, then said, “I don’t think so.”

  “I sense some hesitation in your answer,” Eli said. “It is absolutely okay to have some hesitations or reservations. I just need to know. When you say you don’t think so, does that mean that it might?”

  “I guess it might.”

  After Eli was finished, he and Mia both chose which jurors to strike for cause and with preemptory challenges. Then Titus began his lecture.

  “Voir dire is a French term meaning ‘to speak the truth.’ It’s when prosecutors and defense attorneys interview prospective jury members about their beliefs and life experiences. We say we want a fair and impartial jury, and maybe that’s true for society, but it’s not true for us as attorneys.” Titus pointed his finger at his own chest. “I want a juror whose experiences make them biased in my favor.”

  His blunt words were greeted with nods and laughter.

  “Voir dire is like going on a first date, something you ladies and gentlemen might have some experience with.” He waggled an eyebrow. “When you go on a first date, you want to find out as much as you can about your date in a short amount of time so that you can figure out whether you want to see them again. You want to get your date to like you and have a sense of what you’re about, but you also don’t want to turn them off with a bunch of nosy questions.”

  Eli and Mia exchanged glances. He would have given anything to know what she was thinking. They’d gone out exactly that one time, for brunch. And even though it probably didn’t count as a second date, he had once saved her life.

  Titus continued, “Just as everything someone does on a first date is noticed, everything lawyers do and say during voir dire conveys a message. And just as lawyers are picking jurors, at the same time jurors are picking the lawyer they like and trust the most.