Nearly the entire direct examination of Sellers is tense and unfriendly; he often refuses to speak up, prompting Judge Heard to frequently ask him to sit forward, speak into the microphone, and repeat what he said. Like Pusateri and Vinson, at times Sellers is directly hostile to Gutierrez. He doesn’t prove helpful to her case with ambiguous answers and a tone that sometimes reflects how ridiculous he thinks her questions are.
At some points, Gutierrez may deserve that disdain as she repeatedly takes him through an extraordinarily long line of questions on roads, locations, and routes from his house to work, often confusing him and onlookers.
Gutierrez calls into question the route Sellers chose to take on his way back to work when he pulled over to take a leak in Leakin Park, and the premise of his trip that day. After an hour or so of wrangling over why he would need a plane when he worked in maintenance at a large, well-appointed college, the judge decides to call it a day.
The next morning Gutierrez goes right back to the plane but then finally leads Sellers to describe how he found Hae’s body, with dozens of questions about every step he took to get there.
She manages to make some solid points, including that the police never fingerprinted Sellers or asked for hair or blood samples, that they never asked him to produce the plane he said he needed, and that indeed the first time he spoke to police he never mentioned the plane at all.
But she also drops a few balls. In one place she mentions briefly that Sellers had trouble returning with the police to where the body was later that day, that he couldn’t find the place. Sellers mumbles “uh-huh” and she moves on instead of exploring why he couldn’t remember where he found a body just a few hours prior. She also doesn’t ask him to point out on a map where he parked, the route he took to the body, or where the body was found.
She does try hard, however, to bring in Sellers’ prior convictions on public indecency. But the judge isn’t buying it because in order to bring in the conviction, Gutierrez would have to get Sellers to say something about going that far into the woods in order to avoid exposing himself. Instead, he says he wanted privacy for urination—an important difference as far as the court is concerned.
What ensues is a lengthy discussion between Gutierrez and Judge Heard about penises, exposure, and urination. At one point the judge asks Gutierrez to keep her voice down as she loudly says that “indecent exposure, which involves the exposure of his penis…”. After a robust debate, the judge disallows it. She also disallows admission of Sellers’ polygraph tests.
The State asks Sellers a few questions related to his work, all of which are met with objections that are sustained, and like that, Sellers is off the stand.
Gutierrez, now in the second day of the defense, calls Coach Sye.
Sye testifies that Adnan joined the indoor track team in 1999 after the coach saw him running sprints for football practice.
Gutierrez asks him about practice policy during Ramadan, and Sye responds that as long as Adnan came to practice, he didn’t actually have to run while he was fasting. He was expected to be there daily, and, according to Sye, he was. Sye also testifies that Adnan was a good athlete and good student, and got along with everyone.
But while Gutierrez may have gotten him to say that Adnan was at track even during Ramadan, she fails to catch two important things: (1) She fails to get Sye to testify to what he had said to investigators earlier, that he believed Adnan was at track because he notices if someone is not there, and (2) Sye told investigators the prior year that track began at 3:30 p.m. but now testified at trial that it started at four o’clock. If Gutierrez could have made Sye confirm his earlier statements, it would have challenged Jay’s timeline directly.
Rebecca (Becky) Walker is next on the stand and Gutierrez asks her, as a mutual friend of Adnan and Hae, to describe both the trajectory and nature of their relationship. Becky testifies to their being a generally affectionate couple but experiencing issues because of family and cultural differences. Gutierrez asks her about the homecoming dance incident, to which Becky responds that while Hae knew Adnan’s parents had shown up and was upset about it, Hae had not indicated that his parents actually spoke to her, confirming Aunty Shamim’s recollection, but different from some of the rumors at the school.
Gutierrez tries to introduce testimony that Hae’s family was also opposed to the relationship. This is reflected in her dairy and already admitted into evidence, though only a few passages have been read to the jury, but the prosecution objects. The judge sustains their objection.
Becky does testify that after the breakup Adnan and Hae were “very good friends” and that they both “still cared very much about each other.” She describes her interviews with police about Adnan, after his arrest, and telling them that he had been deeply upset when Hae disappeared.
Becky had written several journal entries regarding Adnan, Hae, their relationship, his character, and behavior after Hae disappeared, which Gutierrez also tries to get into evidence. She is repeatedly challenged by the State and asks to approach the judge to make her case.
Gutierrez argues, “Our belief and part of our defense is to establish that, notwithstanding the existence of other evidence that might have challenged what they sought, they willfully ignore evidence of Adnan’s good character, evidence of information that went against their view of what their relationship was when it broke up, what reason it was for, and how they acted toward each other, all of which information would have disproved their theory.”
While accurate in her assessment of what the police actually did, Gutierrez has chosen a much more complex defense by trying to undermine the premise of the police investigation rather than presenting a coherent defense of Adnan—which would have entailed simply establishing where he was on the afternoon of January 13.
Gutierrez next presents Adnan’s father, who begins by testifying to his ethnic background and his story of immigration to the United States. Gutierrez asks him about his citizenship, and the citizenship of his children, she asks him to point out his sons in the courtroom, and then she asks him questions about his religion.
It is a fairly linear and coherent line of questioning meant to get the jury to an understanding of Ramadan—from daily prayer obligations, to fasting, to Islamic months, to the month of fasting that happened to be during January of 1999.
Gutierrez then asks him about the day Adnan led prayers, a very proud day for his father. Uncle indicates that it was Thursday, January 14, the day after Hae went missing, and that Adnan had spent a number of days beforehand practicing. He doesn’t know specifically where he practiced or how, but he knows it took him that much time to prepare. He remembers the 14th distinctly because it was one of “the happiest occasions of my life.”
Gutierrez then gets into dating and religion, and Uncle testifies that while Muslims are not allowed to date, they can have opposite-sex friends, as long as the interactions are innocent. He explains that Adnan had told him about Hae and that when something like this happened, elders would counsel the kids to do what’s right.
Gutierrez asks him when he learned of Adnan dating Hae, “Did you ask him to leave your home?”
Uncle says, “No. That would not resolve the problem.”
“Okay. And did you take away his car?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Did you beat him?”
“No.”
“Did you inflict any other physical punishment?”
“Nothing, no.”
“Or the loss of any other privilege?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I believe if he is treated otherwise it would influence him better than punishing him like that.”
Uncle makes two important points for the defense: first, that Adnan, who had gotten the cell phone through Bilal with his parents’ permission, had worked through the month of December to save up for the phone, challenging the idea that he had gotten it as part of a murder plan. But more importantl
y, Uncle testifies that every night of Ramadan, around 7:30 to 8:00 p.m., Adnan went to the mosque with him. Every single night.
If Gutierrez had honed in on this—that Adnan never missed the evening prayer during Ramadan—she might have been able to convey to the jury the improbability of Adnan coming straight to the mosque from the dark, muddy woods.
The next day, February 24, 2000, Gutierrez calls Detective Ritz to the stand and walks him through the interviews police conducted with Adnan during their investigation. But what she really wants is to introduce an internal police memo written by Detective Massey about the two anonymous phone calls that the cops received nearly a year ago. She had tried to serve Massey with a subpoena but he evaded it. Since the memo was written by him, and because the caller was anonymous, she couldn’t establish a basis to enter the memo into evidence. And that hurt her defense strategy.
Urick objects to the inclusion of the memo into evidence, and the judge sustains it but does agree to help Gutierrez find and serve Massey.
Gutierrez asks Ritz about the steps the police took after getting the memo, specifically having him testify that before the anonymous calls on February 12, 1999, Adnan had not been considered a suspect.
On cross, Urick makes an interesting move. Having first objected to the introduction of the memo, he now asks that it be published to the jury and has Ritz read it out loud on the stand. Urick probably hopes Massey is now off the hook and can’t be examined by Gutierrez.
A lengthy direct, cross, redirect, and re-cross of Ritz then ensues about inconsistencies in Jay’s statements, particularly about why he lied about the initial trunk-pop location. Jay had said that he was afraid there were cameras at Best Buy and “I’m associated with it.” Ritz attempts to explain Jay’s convoluted statement.
“One of the inconsistencies that we clarified was the location where they first saw the body of Hae Min Lee. He originally told me and Detective MacGillivary it was on Edmonson Avenue. In his follow-up statement, he said the first time that he saw the body and described it in great detail was on the parking lot of Best Buy out in Security Boulevard area. He stated the reason that he did not—wasn’t truthful with us at the beginning was that he thought they had surveillance cameras on the outside of the building and didn’t want to get caught or involved in it. He knew the defendant would get caught eventually and he didn’t want to get involved in it. He was trying to disassociate himself from the parking lot in that regards.”
Gutierrez bears down hard on this statement, though, trying to get Ritz to admit that Jay’s only admitted “involvement” at Best Buy was a brief look at the body in the trunk of the car.
Ritz doesn’t fold, though, and after one last round of redirect, Gutierrez lets him off the stand.
Gutierrez next puts on a series of character witnesses: my brother Saad, Adnan’s friend and classmate Saad Patel, Saad’s father and president of the mosque, Maqbool Patel, and school guidance counselor Bettye Stuckey.
Gutierrez asks Saad if he was present when Adnan led prayers on January 14. Saad was not, but had heard about it. He didn’t see Adnan during the week as much because of his own sports commitments.
She asks him about dating and sex, and its prohibitions in Islam, which he acknowledges, and then says that he did know about Hae and had met her once. Saad testifies about Adnan’s demeanor when he broke up with Hae.
“He was pretty laid back. He just told me that they broke up, and I wasn’t too surprised,” he testifies.
“Why was that?”
“Because Adnan was showing interest in other girls.”
Another important thing Saad testifies to is the function of Adnan’s cell phone, because he had one just like it. Gutierrez has him explain how numbers are stored in it, how it can scroll and automatically dial a number that’s been saved on speed dial or in the phone log—seemingly obvious things in 2016 but in 1999, to a jury of many older people, still a mystery. They spend a good amount of time explaining how easy it is to dial a number already in the phone, attempting to infer that the call to Nisha Tanna was made inadvertently by whoever had the phone, and not by Adnan.
When Urick gets his turn on cross, he takes Saad right back to the basics of the State’s theory—that this murder had a religious component, asking him “you testified that premarital sex is generally not accepted within Islam, isn’t that correct?”
The next witness, Saad Patel, testifies that he attends school with Adnan, believes him to be a good friend, a good athlete, and a good student. He knew Adnan was dating and he knew he was having sex. The exchange between Gutierrez and Patel suggests a level of confusion over how the Muslim community operates that is rather astonishing—a level of confusion that Gutierrez knows the State is banking on.
She asks him, “As a result of your finding out that information [that Adnan was dating Hae], did you report Adnan to anyone?”
“Did I—excuse me?”
“Did you report him to anyone?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“For dating against the Muslim religion?”
“No. I didn’t tell no one.”
“Or for having sex with a woman to whom he was not married?”
“No, didn’t report that to anyone.”
“Is there any procedure for you, as a Muslim, to report that kind of activity?”
“There is no procedure.”
Gutierrez knows this is what the prosecution is getting at: that dating is so anathema and alien to the Muslim community, that Muslims are so weird about it, that it would be considered a serious enough offense to have very serious consequences. And she knows the jury might be buying it.
Gutierrez asks Patel the same question she asked Adnan’s father—whether leading prayers in Ramadan would require Adnan to practice beforehand. She knows that Bilal Ahmed had testified at the grand jury that the day before leading prayers, Adnan had revised his notes with him.
The trouble she is having behind the scenes, however, is that she can’t find Bilal anywhere, though she needs him to testify.
Patel ends his testimony by noting that while he can’t remember every specific night from a year before, he was at the mosque on most nights in Ramadan, and on most of those nights Adnan was there as well.
The elder Patel, the president of the mosque, testifies once again about the rituals of Ramadan and what an honor it is to lead prayers. He recalls specifically being present when Adnan led prayers on January 14.
Gutierrez then presents her very last witness, Adnan’s guidance counselor.
Bettye Stuckey testifies having known Adnan since his junior year and that she came to know him well in his senior year when she coordinated the Advanced Placement programs and testing, which he took part in.
Adnan would swing by and chat with her when he had free time. Based on her interactions with him and his academic record, she had written him a letter of recommendation for college. The letter was dated January 13, 1999.
Gutierrez hands Stuckey the letter and asks her to identify it, then enters it into evidence and asks her to read it out loud.
Then, without having presented a single expert witness or establishing where Adnan was after school the day Hae disappeared, Gutierrez rests her case.
* * *
The next day, Friday, February 26, 2000, the State and defense both present closing arguments.
And, unlike during much of the trial, the courtroom is packed.
The day begins with attorneys from both sides arguing their points with the judge on jury instructions, including whether or not to call Jay’s plea a guilty plea. Gutierrez argues against it, but again loses the argument.
We wait as Adnan sits at the defense table, looking earnest in a tie and glasses. Finally the jury is brought in.
Judge Heard instructs them not to take into account that Adnan has not testified, that it can’t be held against him. We all thought, as most people do, that an innocent person should speak up in their defense, and Adnan also wanted to
testify. But Gutierrez wouldn’t allow it. Some lawyers make it a hard-and-fast rule never to allow a defendant to testify, while others feel like the right client should take the stand. I believe it could only have helped for Adnan to have testified.
Judge Heard then instructs them on Jay’s testimony, saying, “The defendant cannot be convicted solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice—however, only slight corroboration is required.”
In hindsight, this instruction opened wide the door to a conviction, given the cell phone evidence that was presented to back up Jay’s testimony.
After noting objections by Gutierrez on some of the jury instructions, the judge asks for the State to present its closing arguments.
Kathleen Murphy begins.
“‘How can she treat me like this?’ The words of this Defendant to Jay Wilds regarding Hae Lee, as if she deserved to die. ‘No one treats me like this.’ What does that mean? What exactly did Hae Lee do to him? She fell in love with him. When you read these diary entries, you’ll sense the joy and the excitement that she had about her relationship with this Defendant.… And then, as people do, Hey [sic] Lee met someone else, Don Kleindas [sic]. And at that point, it became readily apparent to everyone, including the Defendant, she wasn’t coming back. It happens all the time. So why then did he tell Jay Wilds ‘No one treats me like this’? What is it that this Defendant saw on January 13th when he looked at Hey Lee? He saw the hours they spent talking on the phone in hushed voices so their parents couldn’t hear. He saw all the things they did together. He saw a woman who made him do things he never thought about doing before. He saw the poems that he wrote. He saw him give her a flower in class, in front of the whole class. He saw that they openly discussed marriage and that this was known to their friends, and even their 5 teachers. He saw his parents standing at the window of the Homecoming Dance. He saw his mother raise her voice at Hey Lee in front of his classmates. ‘Look what you’re doing to our family.’ He saw the pain in his mother’s face because she knew they were together. He saw Hey Lee falling in love with someone else and he saw himself, in the end, standing there with nothing to show for it but a guilty conscience and a pack of lies in which he cloaked himself. That is what he saw on January 13th. That is what he saw when he put his hands around her neck and squeezed, literally, the life from her. He felt strong, almost superhuman. He felt the little bone in her throat pop and still he continued to hold her there 10 seconds, long seconds, and it was done. So ended the life of Hae Min Lee, a beautiful young woman, a scholar, an athlete, a friend, a daughter, a sister.”
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