A Gambler's Jury

by Victor Methos

  “So you think an acquittal?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know. The deck is so stacked against us. But I guess you never know with a jury.”

  He put his hand on my back and gently rubbed, something he’d done a million times before during trials he helped on because he knew I didn’t have good posture and my back frequently ached. “Where’s he gonna live when he gets out of this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I can try and get him—”

  The doors to the courtroom opened. The bailiff pressed the doorstops down with his boot and said, “The judge is back.”

  “I can’t stay too long,” Will said. “But I’ll be here when you need me.”

  We filed inside. Will sat in the back of the courtroom. Sandy and Double D were already there. It always bothered me that prosecutors were allowed to use the same entrances and exits as the judges and clerks. It gave court a real “them vs. everyone else” feel. I sat down at the defense table while Roscombe wrote something in a file and handed it to the clerk. Teddy was brought out. I tried to smile, and he didn’t smile back.

  “That was mean, Danielle,” he said as he was seated next to me.

  “Buddy, I didn’t mean any of it. I had to do it in front of the jury. We have to play pretend that you’re not smart. That way they’ll feel sorry for you and might let you go. Don’t you want to come home?”

  He nodded. “I miss SpongeBob SquarePants.”

  “Yeah, I miss watching it, too.”

  “Both parties ready to proceed?” Roscombe said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded to the bailiff, who said, “All rise for the jury.”

  The jury filed back in. The judge said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you have under your seats a copy of the jury instructions. Please review them with me as I read aloud.”

  We went through each instruction. It was honestly the most painful part of a trial for me. The instructions in this case had been whittled down to fifty-two, and Roscombe read each one—enunciated each word, each letter, as though the jury were a bunch of children. By the end, some of the jurors looked like they had headaches. Although Roscombe took half as much time as any other judge.

  After twenty minutes, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now time for closing arguments. As I stated previously, closing arguments are not evidence, and are the opinions of the attorneys in relation to the evidence presented today in court. You may give whatever weight to the attorneys’ statements you feel appropriate.” He looked at Sandy. “Mrs. Tiles.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, getting up and approaching the jury. “And thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. We appreciate your service here today in this important matter.” She stepped to the whiteboard near the jury and uncapped a marker. She drew a puzzle piece in the center of the board. “This case may seem like disjointed facts, and it’s easier to think of those facts if you look at them like a puzzle. Each fact is a piece of that puzzle, and if we take them as a whole, the entire picture becomes clear.”

  She drew a puzzle piece in the corner and wrote inside it: Four Witnesses.

  She proceeded to summarize the testimony of Kevin and his friends and Detective Steed. “Now, you also heard from Mr. Zamora, who counsel claims was caught being dishonest with you. Unfortunately, that is simply the nature of the confidential informants we deal with. If they were honest, they wouldn’t be criminals.”

  This got a slight chuckle from the jury. How adorable.

  “But just because he was dishonest about one thing doesn’t mean he was being dishonest about the transaction, especially since so many other people saw it take place. You also heard the audio recording of the handoff itself. The fact is that the evidence is overwhelming.”

  She drew other puzzle pieces and wrote inside them: Gym bag, Money received, and Audio recording.

  “All these pieces, taken independently, may not amount to the standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that the judge explained in the jury instructions. But,” she said, holding up a finger as though she were lecturing, “taken together . . .” She drew a square and wrote Guilty in the center. “Taken together, they all add up to one thing: Mr. Thorne sold those drugs to Mr. Zamora. He did it, and we all know it. I would ask you to do the only thing that justice demands, and that is find him guilty.”

  She sat down. She didn’t even address his mental status. She didn’t have to. Prosecutors got rebuttal time after a defense closing, which meant they could save their big guns for when I couldn’t respond. I took a deep breath and stood up. I looked at Teddy, and then removed the photo I had printed at the copy shop from my pocket. I approached the jury and held it up so they could see it.

  “This is George Stinney Junior. Young black kid, not unlike Teddy. George is the youngest person we have ever executed in this country: fourteen years old. He was accused of killing two white girls. The evidence against him was that he talked to the girls on the day they were killed. The jury was all whites, since blacks weren’t given the right to be on juries at the time. Three detectives took the stand and testified that George had confessed to the crime. George’s public defender was a tax commissioner in the middle of a reelection campaign. He didn’t ask a single question, even though George insisted he had never confessed. The jury’s deliberation took minutes. The trial lasted one day, and he was executed two and a half months later.

  “When he walked into the execution chamber, he was carrying a Bible, and he had to use the Bible as a booster seat because he didn’t reach the electrodes. After the first shock, the face mask slipped off, revealing his tear-filled eyes and the saliva dripping from his mouth. They secured it to him again and again shocked him, and then the child died.

  “Some decades later, a white man from a rich family confessed to the crimes, to his family on his deathbed. George’s only crime was being a black kid who had talked to two white girls, and the government—your government, in your name—killed him for it.” I looked at Sandy. “Would we be here right now if Teddy Thorne was white? This case has nothing to do with facts; it has to do with the color of a man’s skin. Blacks in this country are convicted at four times the rate whites are for identical crimes. The death penalty is given to black defendants at five times the rate as white defendants for identical crimes. But the law says that punishments must be determined based on the circumstances of a case, not the color of the defendant’s skin.”

  I pointed to Teddy. “You’ve got a mentally disabled black kid with three white accusers against him, three white accusers who have been friends forever and would cover Kevin’s butt, since he’s probably the one who actually got the drugs and set up the deal. And let’s not forget the sleazy confidential informant who got up there and lied to your faces. We can’t believe a single word that scumbag said, and yet the prosecution joked about CIs being untrustworthy as though it has no implications. The implication is that Teddy could go away for the rest of his life based on the color of his skin and the word of a known liar. And you know what the government is banking on? Your inherent prejudice. That Teddy’s got the right skin color for you to convict without looking too hard at the case.”

  I stepped close to the jury and looked as many of them as I could in the eyes.

  “So I’m asking only one thing from you: Pretend my client is white. Because the only way you could find this boy guilty of this crime—when his main accuser is a known liar and three boys banded together to point the finger at him, three boys with their full mental faculties blaming a boy who’s mentally disabled—is if you think he has the wrong skin color. So I’m asking you, I’m begging you, please, when you go back there and discuss this case, please pretend that Teddy is white.”

  I sat back down. Some of the jurors couldn’t look at me. I could see the guilt in their eyes when they would glance up. They knew I was right and it shamed them—some of them, anyway. Some of them stared coldly at me and Teddy like we were soldiers
from an enemy army.

  A few of the jurors were staring at Teddy, who was running his fingers over the carving in the table. The judge asked Sandy for a rebuttal. She got up, spoke for exactly five minutes, and said the same things she’d said before. It was known as “hammering home” the facts she wanted the jury to keep in mind during deliberation, a technique taught in trial advocacy classes in law school. I had discovered juries just found it annoying and repetitive.

  When she was done, the jury was excused for deliberation. We all stood as they filed out, and my stomach dropped. I usually had a sense for how juries would find. I couldn’t really read this one, but I couldn’t believe they would find him guilty. Not when the CI was a known liar and Teddy was disabled. They had to see he’d been set up.

  “We are excused for deliberation,” Roscombe said, hitting his gavel against the sounding block.

  Teddy was taken by the bailiffs. “Can we go home, Danielle?”

  “Almost, buddy. Little longer.”

  “Can I get Jell-O?”

  I turned to the bailiff. “Can you get him some?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Once Teddy disappeared into the bowels of the court, I collapsed into my chair. I got a text from Will that he had to run for a minute but would meet up with me later.

  Trials, even just a one day, took it out of me, physically and emotionally. I rubbed my head and then rose to leave. I saw Stefan sitting in the audience seats. I smiled and sat next to him.

  “That was good,” he said. “Hit them in the white guilt.”

  “White guilt only works if they feel guilty.”

  He looked out over the courtroom. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

  “Wanna drink? I’m buyin’.”

  “I would love to.”

  52

  There was a bar not far from the courthouse. We sat and ordered two beers and didn’t talk for a minute.

  “You haven’t seen me in trial in ten years,” I said.

  “I know. You’ve improved. I remember your first trial. You were so scared your hands were trembling. You won that one, do you remember?”

  “Yeah. I think the jury just felt sorry for me. I threw up before the trial, did I tell you that?”

  “No. When?”

  “Right before. I asked for a two-minute break to return an emergency call and then puked my guts out in the bathroom.” I shook my head. “My client didn’t even thank me after. That should’ve been a sign that I was going into the wrong profession.”

  “I don’t think it’s the wrong profession. You’re good at what you do.”

  “Pablo Escobar was good at what he did, too. I wouldn’t have recommended he continue.”

  He smiled before taking a long drink of beer. “Not the same.” He paused, staring into the amber fluid. “You really gonna move to LA?”

  “Yeah. Soon as possible. I miss California. I miss the ocean. Maybe I’ll open a little burrito shack on a beach somewhere. No stress, no mess, just sunshine and drinks and the sound of the waves all day.”

  “Sounds like paradise.”

  I nodded and gazed at my beer. “I am so in love with you.”

  He stared at me a second. “Dani, I—”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to say it one more time.” I looked at him. “You really gonna marry her?”

  He hesitated and then nodded.

  I took another sip of beer and stood up, laid a ten on the bar, and kissed his cheek before heading back to the courthouse.

  I lay on one of the benches outside Roscombe’s courtroom and covered my face with my forearms, protecting it from the brutal lighting. I dozed off for a while before I felt someone near me. I peeked through my fingers and saw that it was Mia Roscombe, standing in front of me with his hands in his pockets, wearing a sweater-vest and tie with Dockers.

  “Little rest, Counselor?”

  “You have to sneak them in where you can.”

  He nodded. “You certainly do. I recall, when I had my own firm some forty years ago, that I would sleep on the couch because it would save time that I could bill rather than driving all the way home.”

  “I didn’t know you had your own firm. Defense?”

  “Some. I had to take whatever came through the door. Lawyers back then didn’t really specialize. You had to know how to set up a trust and conduct a breach-of-contract trial in the same day.”

  “Sounds stressful.”

  He shrugged. “No malpractice lawyers around back then either,” he said with a grin.

  I sat up. “Can I ask you something? Between me and you?”

  “I don’t know if that’s appropriate.”

  “Judge, this entire trial is inappropriate and you know it.” He didn’t say anything. “She wants to lower the number of black voters in this county. If a juvenile is tried as an adult for a felony, that felony follows them into adulthood and they can’t vote. That’s what this whole thing is about. There’s been a surge of black and Mexican voters, and she wants to make sure she and her friends don’t get overwhelmed at the polls. Did you know that?”

  He looked down at his shoes, staring at a scuff mark on the toe. “Those in power have only one goal: to stay in power. That shouldn’t surprise you.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. What surprised me is how many judges they have going along with this. You and at least one on the court of appeals. Probably one on the supreme court. You and I disagree on your sentences and your manner on the bench, but I never thought you would do something so blatantly wrong.”

  He inhaled deeply. “The DA should have the power to decide if a juvenile is tried as an adult. I cannot tell you the number of cases I had as a prosecutor where I just knew the juvenile was going to go on to become a monster, but there was nothing I could do. The Serious Youth Offender Act is a mistake. Our prosecutors should have that power. So to that end, I agree with her.”

  I didn’t attack him. There was no point. He was a true believer in his own crusade. Instead, I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. He shuffled into the courtroom. We’d had a chance to see each other as human beings rather than enemies, and seeing him for who he really was was worse. I preferred not knowing.

  I heard the elevator doors open. Will stood there smiling at me and I smiled back. Before I could say anything, the clerk came out of the doors. “They have a verdict.”

  53

  It’d taken this jury an hour and forty-seven minutes to decide Teddy’s fate. Everyone trickled back into the courtroom. Teddy came out with Jell-O smeared on his shirt. He sat down. “They gave me Jell-O, Danielle. They gave me grape and strawberry see, but I like grape. I like grape Jell-O, see.”

  I couldn’t breathe. My chest tightened and my vision was constricting into a gray tunnel. I had to close my eyes and suck in some deep breaths before I could open them again and take in what I was seeing.

  Once the bailiff seated the attorneys and everyone in the audience, Roscombe said, “Bring out the jury, please.”

  We stood up and sat down again and I barely noticed. My brain was a goopy mess, unable to hold a single thought for more than a second or two. I watched the jury file in and tried to predict what they had done. I couldn’t tell anything from the way they moved.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Roscombe said, “it’s my understanding you have reached a verdict. Will the foreman please rise and address the court?”

  A pale man with a thin mustache stood up at the end of the first row. “I’m the foreman, Your Honor. And yes, we’ve reached a verdict.”

  “Please pass it to my bailiff.”

  They gave the verdict form to the bailiff, who walked over and handed it to the judge. The judge read it and handed it back.

  “Will the defendant please rise?”

  I helped Teddy to his feet. My hand slipped down to his, and our fingers interlaced. He rocked back and forth silently.

  “What say you in this mat
ter?” Roscombe said.

  The foreman began reading the verdict form. “In the matter of the state of Utah versus Theodore Montgomery Thorne, on the sole count of distribution of a controlled substance alleged to have occurred on April second within the Hoover County limits, we find the defendant guilty.”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the chest and I had to suck in breath as though I were drowning. I gripped Teddy’s hand even tighter as the judge thanked the jury for their time. Tears filled my eyes. I could barely stand; my knees felt like they might dislocate from my legs. My chest constricted like a fist.

  “You fucking idiots,” I shouted. “You damn fucking idiots.”

  “Counsel!” Roscombe bellowed. “You will apologize to this jury immediately.”

  I couldn’t even muster the strength to yell at him. I just collapsed into my chair as Roscombe said, “Please take the defendant into custody and remove him from the courtroom. Counsel, I’m setting a sentencing date to give Adult Probation and Parole time to prepare a presentence report. I’m also scheduling a contempt hearing for Ms. Rollins immediately following the jury’s removal from this courtroom . . .”

  He kept talking, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I just watched, numb, as a bailiff lifted Teddy by the arm and Teddy kept looking back at me. His fingers slipped out of mine and he said, “Danielle, are we going home?”

  Another bailiff grabbed him and they pulled him along. He kept trying to look at me even as they shouted at him to look forward. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Danielle? Danielle are we going home?”

  Just before he disappeared through a door, I heard him yell, “Danielle!” one more time, and then there was silence.

  Once the jury left, Roscombe held a contempt hearing. He asked whether I admitted or denied the allegations. I said I admitted that he was a prick.

  Back in the cell, I sat on the cot and watched the light glimmer off the linoleum in waves; it would puddle in one spot, only to move away as the motion sensors turned lights off and on. At one point, I sat completely in the dark and felt warm tears slide down my cheeks. The stuff I had said in closing about the color of Teddy’s skin being the most aggravating circumstance was to make the jury feel guilty. Now I realized it was the truth.