by Jay Brandon
‘Hello, ma’am,’ Amy said politely, as if being introduced at a party.
‘I’m a lawyer and I’m going to be representing my sister, who as you heard is a medical doctor accused of murdering her husband, who was also a doctor. I’d like Amy to be able to respond to that in her own words.’
He sat and Amy said, ‘I loved my husband very much, Mrs Acosta. We were separated, but we’d started seeing each other again and I believed we were going to get back together. I didn’t kill him. I would never have done that. I tried to keep him alive after finding him shot.’
It had been Edward’s idea for Amy to talk as much as possible during jury selection. Unlike in most trials, he wanted the jurors to have personal conversations with her, feel they’d begun to know her. Sweet little Amy.
Amy sniffed and looked away, as if the pain of losing Paul had just hit her. Edward patted her shoulder without looking at her, wondering if his sister was a much better actress than he’d suspected or if that emotion was genuine.
‘Ma’am, the reason I bring this up is to ask you if you think there’s anything wrong with a lawyer representing a family member?’
‘Of course not,’ the lady said almost indignantly. ‘Family sticks together.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Edward continued the conversation, drawing from Mrs Acosta the facts that: she had four children herself, all alive and healthy, thank God; her Catholic faith didn’t approve of the taking of human life, even by the legal process and she believed in the presumption of innocence. Edward felt a growing sense of rapport with her. This is the one, he thought. There was nothing objectionable about her as a juror, but he felt she related to Amy as a person, and would at least hear the evidence objectively. Relief crept up his back and arms. The first potential juror, and she was golden.
When he passed the lady back to the prosecutor, Mrs Acosta smiled at Edward and at Amy too.
David Galindo didn’t ask her another question. Without looking up, writing on his legal pad, he said, ‘The state will exercise a peremptory, Your Honor.’
In a capital case, each side had fifteen peremptory challenges – ‘strikes,’ in legal parlance – it could use to remove someone from the jury panel, even if there was no other legal reason to do so. No! Edward wanted to shout. I want her. But there was nothing he could do about it. A lawyer had no power to veto the other side’s use of a strike.
‘I liked her,’ Amy whispered as Mrs Acosta departed.
‘Me too.’ He shot a glower at David, but the prosecutor wouldn’t look over at him. Instead David stood and addressed the judge.
‘Your Honor, having had to use that strike, I object to the defendant carrying on any more conversations with prospective jurors.’
Even as Edward was rising to his feet to respond, Judge Cynthia frowned at her prosecutor and said, ‘What’s your objection?’
‘She’s not entitled to hybrid representation, Your Honor. Ms Hall is represented by a lawyer, he should do the talking for her.’
So Edward continued to his feet. ‘She’s not representing herself just by exchanging a couple of sentences with a prospective juror, Judge.’
‘I agree,’ the judge said, continuing to look only at the prosecutor.
David seemed unfazed. ‘In effect she’s entering a plea prematurely, Your Honor. She’s saying she’s not guilty before the time in trial for that plea.’
Edward said, ‘I think the prosecution’s real objection—’
‘I can interpret the prosecutor’s words for myself, Mr Hall. The court does not recognize a valid objection, so it is overruled.’ She did finally look at Edward. ‘But keep it brief, Mr Hall.’
‘Yes, Your Honor.’
So Amy continued to talk to the potential jurors, making statements about her affection for her husband, trying to draw him or her out. If nothing else, they could tell the polite jurors from the rude ones. The ones who refused to respond to Amy, even to look at her, Edward tried to find ways to challenge and remove from the jury. Cynthia mostly ruled in his favor in those attempts, but not always. Edward had to use two of his precious strikes before the day was over.
Was the judge doing him any favors? He couldn’t tell. For the most part she wouldn’t look at him, but that might have been just to cover the fact that she was trying to help him out. Cynthia seemed to grow more remote as the day wore on. Even angry. But at whom he couldn’t tell.
Edward noticed something else that first day of jury selection. David Galindo wasn’t asking any of the prospective jurors any questions about their feelings concerning the death penalty. Every juror had filled out a lengthy questionnaire weeks before this process began, so the lawyers had some information in that regard, but in a death penalty case, both sides always explored the jurors’ feelings on that subject in person. The death penalty. It was the ultimate topic about which to ask jurors. Do you believe the government has the right to kill a person? Could you vote for that outcome, for someone to lie gasping on a gurney, while the drugs the government had put into her system denied her that breath? Do you think there are some people among us so monstrous that we have to end their lives? Do you think this is one of them, sitting right here in front of you?
It wasn’t an annoying squeak in the floorboard; it was the whole room in which they sat. They were all in the guts of the death penalty. The lawyers had to probe gently into the biggest question of all in any possible criminal trial. Hi. How ya doin’? How about this weather? You think you could vote to kill this warm, breathing person sitting next to me?
So you had to ask a lot of futile questions. David Galindo wasn’t doing that. This seemed to support what he’d told Edward, that he wasn’t genuinely looking for a death sentence. Was David cutting him a break? Or laying some sort of trap? Edward couldn’t decide and the doubt made him edgy and nervous. While Edward scrambled all over the field, working his ass off, the prosecutor just asked minimal questions, and said, ‘The State accepts this juror, Your Honor.’
By the end of the day, there were two jurors neither the state nor the defense challenged, a white man and an African-American woman. Edward hesitated, taking a long pause before accepting the woman. He thought the prosecution would try to pack the jury with minority members, who might resent the rich white defendant and therefore be more likely to find her guilty. Edward’s hesitation wasn’t racist. He liked the woman personally, a thirty-eight-year-old married mother of two, who worked as a loan officer in a bank. But racism and reverse racism were facts of life, and nobody ever answered questions about them honestly. In the end, he sighed and took her. The woman grimaced when learning of her selection, which made Edward feel easier. It indicated she didn’t have an agenda of trying to get Amy.
So, by the end of the first day they had two jurors, which was lightning speed for a capital murder trial. Sometimes the jury selection took more than a month of eight-hour days. This one was being streamlined by David Galindo’s refusal to talk about the death penalty.
When Cynthia called a halt for the day and hastily left the bench, David turned to Edward for the first time all day.
‘You used to be better at this,’ he said.
‘I’m a little rusty. But I don’t think—’
David shook his head.
‘You used to have this offhand, kind of lazy charm that seemed to give you a rapport with the jurors, like you were a good host of an interesting party. Now you’re so serious I can almost hear you sweating.’
‘She’s my Goddamned sister, David.’
David shrugged and began packing his briefcase. Edward realized maybe his former colleague had been trying to help him out, give him good advice. But Edward didn’t apologize.
That night’s dinner with Linda and his family was strained, but not nearly strained enough, in Edward’s opinion. His family members were subdued – Linda was the one who mainly kept the conversation going – but the tension wasn’t nearly taut enough. It was like the night before one of them left on a trip, or h
ad a big presentation to make. They still didn’t get it, the danger Amy was in, the horror like a trap door on which they were all sitting. Edward wanted to scream at them.
‘I like the two jurors we have,’ Amy said.
‘Yeah, let’s invite them to lunch,’ Edward responded.
Linda laid her hand over his.
He gave her little finger a squeeze, to say, Yeah, I know. ‘I like them too,’ he said to Amy. ‘Especially the woman. But I don’t trust either of them, and I’m not going to trust anybody we have on this jury. Jurors lie, Amy. They never, ever tell the truth, except maybe the occasional crazy one and they’re easy to spot. Most of them hide their feelings, tell you what they think you want to hear and try to guess the right answers to your questions. It’s like a chess match with both sides able to hide their moves. Some people want on the jury and don’t want to let you know that. Most want to run screaming out of the room because they don’t want the responsibility – and those are probably the ones you want. I’ve been doing this a while and I don’t think I have any insight at all into jury selection. And I’ve never talked to a lawyer who did.’
After dinner, while everyone else cleared the table and started coffee, Dr Hall cut Edward out of the herd none too subtly and led him to his study. His father acted very uncharacteristically, like a weak actor playing the role of his father, never having met him. He kept looking down or glancing over at his bookshelves or somewhere else. He cleared his throat more than once.
‘There’s something that – there was an incident some months ago, two months before Paul’s death, maybe, and several people know about it, even though it wasn’t – it didn’t get public attention. But there may have been a police report, so I think I need to tell you this.’ Finally Dr Hall looked up at his son.
‘You’re scaring me, Dad. And I’m already terrified, so if you thought this was going to help, you probably—’
‘I know, but you have to know, so they can’t spring it on you unawares. As I say, some short time before Paul died, there was a break-in at his lab—’
‘Oh my God,’ Edward said, understanding instantly. ‘Amy? What was she looking for?’
The throat-clearing happened again and now Dr Hall was looking away, too.
‘You know that the research, for which Paul was given the award, was started with me. When he was my student he took a couple of ideas of mine and asked if he could develop them. That’s how I remember it, though of course Paul would probably—’ He remembered that, at this point, Paul couldn’t contradict anyone. ‘At any rate, we worked on it together at first. Later Paul claimed that when he’d gone out on his own he’d taken a different direction, but I doubted it. I suspected his work was based very directly on my earlier work.’
‘So you asked Amy—?’ Edward began, thinking, my God, how many people knew about his sister’s hobby?
‘No,’ Dr Hall said. In that one syllable he sounded like his old self, emphatic and in command. ‘I never asked your sister to do anything. But I did discuss the idea with her. Especially after she and Paul separated. Then we were sort of allies, Amy and I, with a common cause of mistrusting this man we’d allowed into the family.’
‘And into your lab,’ Edward said, thinking, And into your daughter’s pants. He wondered if his father had ever thought that, that maybe Paul had started dating Amy to get to him. It would be a very egotistical thought, but not necessarily wrong.
‘So did Amy come to you with some evidence that Paul was ripping off your work?’
‘No,’ emphatic Dr Hall said quickly. But then the other Dr Hall, the hesitant, reappeared. His eyes stopped meeting Edward’s. ‘At least, not directly, but some papers appeared here. Right here on this desk. With file-marks on them indicating they came from Paul’s lab: some lab notes and one preliminary report Paul wrote for someone. A potential commercial sponsor, I suppose.’
‘And did they show he stole from you?’ Edward repeated. That ‘commercial sponsor’ remark demonstrated one aspect of his father’s interest. It might be that Paul had been about to become very rich. The doctor or scientist who invented a cure for cancer, even a very narrow, restricted cure only good for one type of cancer, would become a multimillionaire. Edward looked around his father’s study and realized what it represented. A nice room in a beautiful house in River Oaks, for God’s sake, the richest neighborhood in the biggest city in Texas; did his father want more than this?
But then there was the fame, of course.
Dr Hall shook his head quickly. ‘Inconclusive at best,’ he said. ‘It did indicate a track I had taken, but other people had pursued the same course. No, she didn’t take the right—’
He stopped himself, looking horrified.
‘I didn’t ask her to do this,’ he repeated, this time mumbling. Dr Hall looked down at his own hands or his desk, as if expecting to find something else there. His eyes appeared glazed. To Edward it seemed he had just witnessed his father’s descent into old age.
‘So you think …?’ Edward asked gently.
Finally his father looked into his eyes. The older man’s were anguished.
‘Maybe she did find better evidence that Paul had stolen from me. But she kept it, and as she studied it she thought, if Paul was out of the way, I could resume the research. Maybe even with Amy as my assistant.’
From which position, Edward thought, she could feed her father back the other stuff she had stolen. She could help him become even more famed and honored, rather than let her cheating ex-husband get that credit.
He and his father were going to stop talking now. They were probably thinking the same thing, but neither was going to speak that thought aloud. The ideas could be denied life if they remained unspoken, if they never hung in the air of this cloistered, sacred room.
Edward rose, saying, ‘Thanks for letting me know this, Dad. Like you say, I would have hated to have it sprung on me by the opposition.’
Dr Hall just nodded, his head down again. Edward left the room quickly. He had another thought, one not to be shared with his father, and he wanted to get out of the study before his father could read it on his face. It would probably come to Dad, though, maybe already had, because it was pretty obvious.
This information didn’t create a motive for murder only for Amy.
THIRTEEN
By the next morning’s jury selection, Edward had added a new layer to that thought. His father must have known Edward would think that. Maybe Dr Hall had been offering himself up as an alternative perpetrator. That’s why he had told Edward the story. Maybe Dr Hall had been offering to sacrifice himself for his little girl.
‘Are you paying attention to this man?’ Amy whispered.
Edward nodded. The man in the witness stand was tall and fair, with a solid, slightly rectangular head and a clear, straightforward gaze. Amy had her laptop open in front of her, with the man’s Facebook page pulled up on the screen. In the information open to the public, he had a picture of himself with his wife and four children, all dressed as if for church, and a link to the church itself – a megachurch for prosperous Houstonians, the minister of which assured them they were going to Heaven for the same reason they were well off, because God loved them.
Amy pointed to another section of links, to Republican office-holders of the extremely conservative variety, all of whom the potential juror ‘liked.’
When it was Edward’s turn to question the potential juror, he said very politely, ‘Thank you for being here, Mr Simmons. Let me ask you first, will you be financially inconvenienced by having to serve on this jury?’
Mr Simmons grimaced slightly. ‘It won’t help, but I’ve hired good people in my department. They can handle things for a while and I’ll be available to them at breaks and in the evenings.’
‘Good. Excellent. I see from your questionnaire the company of which you’re vice president, but you list your wife’s profession as “homemaker.” Has she ever worked outside the home?’
‘Oh
yes. I wasn’t sure what to put there, actually. It’s only been since the birth of our younger two that Irene gave up her job as a pharmaceutical rep. And she’ll probably go back to that once Susie and Pete are in school. She’d better, if we hope to put all four through college.’
He chuckled, joined by everyone else in the courtroom. No one wanted to offend someone who might end up on the jury. But Edward needed to probe a little deeper.
‘But she’s all right for now with her stay-at-home mom role?’
‘Oh yes. It was something we discussed from the beginning, before we even had children. Irene was raised in a traditional family household and she very much enjoys fulfilling that role now.’
Edward wondered if that was true and wondered if Mr Simmons believed it himself. Edward looked at him closely, as if he could see through to his thoughts. This was the most crucial decision of trial – whom to let on your jury – and it was always done blindly. It was too bad you couldn’t look into someone’s eyes and see his soul.
‘Thank you, Mr Simmons,’ Edward said, and stood to address the judge. ‘The defense will accept this juror.’
Amy was tugging at his sleeve as he sat. She was pointing to the information on her screen. This was exactly the kind of sanctimonious man who might resent a woman like Amy, who not only worked but was a highly educated professional. Edward leaned over to whisper to her very quietly.
‘There are such things as sincere Christians, Amy, even ones who vote Republican. Or if he’s as smug and obnoxious as you think, that will come out during deliberations and there’s a good chance he’ll piss off our Juror Number Two.’ The African-American professional woman. As their jury was growing, so were Edward’s concerns about its composition. Now he not only wanted his kind of jurors in the jury box, he wanted a mix of people who wouldn’t be able to agree unanimously on a guilty verdict. Jury selection now was like a game of Risk, each juror an army Edward was moving around the board, sometimes allied with other armies, sometimes at war with each other.