Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  “So that was a lie,” Nassios challenged again.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “He sat there in that chair, took an oath to tell the truth and told a lie?”

  “Yes, he did. He told a boldfaced lie.”

  “You, on the other hand, are telling the truth?”

  Nassios shifted her questioning back to the scene of the interrogation room at the KPD. “Something you said on direct examination struck me. You said that Investigator Tipton made you feel ‘wrong.’”

  “Right off the bat. Yes.”

  “Are you saying she was not courteous to you?”

  “I didn’t say that. Maybe she was overly courteous… She just made me feel wrong. You can tell when somebody’s, Oh, I’m going to get you. That kind of wrong.”

  “She didn’t coerce you in any way?”

  “Nooo.”

  “So you voluntarily talked to her.”

  “I did and I said several things. I was also craving a cigarette, tired. Um… so, yeah, I said several things to her. I wanted to get this over with.”

  Nassios reminded Larry Lee that he had cooperated when Investigator Tipton requested to swab his hands and scrape his nails. He’d extended his hands and asked what, exactly, they were looking for. The investigator answered him: Ayesha’s vaginal secretions. How would they tell this, he’d asked. Because the victim’s DNA would be on his hands, Tipton had replied.

  “And you said, ‘Her DNA will be on my hands because I have touched her,’” Nassios pointed out.

  “Her DNA, but not vaginal DNA,” Larry Lee countered.

  “But you didn’t make that distinction to Investigator Tipton, did you?” Nassios fired back, her voice growing louder. “You had the opportunity to, right? You had the opportunity to tell her, ‘Look, I touched her, I comforted her, I gave her a hug, but I certainly didn’t have my hand in her vagina!’”

  “I never put my hand in her vagina.”

  “So, this was just a misunderstanding.”

  The flustered defendant fell into a long, loud and clumsy rant, arguing that no DNA testing was done so there was no proof, alleging that Ayesha “probably didn’t let them test it” because she knew he was innocent, and claiming that he’d cooperated because he had nothing to hide. “I wasn’t guilty,” he said. “I didn’t do it.”

  During Larry Lee’s rant, Nassios had turned her back on him to look through some notes on her table. When he finished, she continued reading over her notes and said, “Would you ask him to be quiet, Your Honor?”

  “Just wait for the next question,” Judge McGee admonished.

  Nassios then turned and pointed out to Larry Lee that when he had given permission for Tipton and Byers to search his apartment, he’d asked what they would be looking for. Investigator Tipton told him that they’d be looking for the ties Ayesha reported he’d used to restrain her during the assault.

  “That’s when I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa… no, no, no,’” Larry Lee recalled.

  “Well, actually, what you said was, ‘Okay.’ And your next response was, ‘Do you have my phone? Let me show you something.’ You scrolled until you found the photographs that you wanted her to look at. You wanted Investigator Tipton to see that these photographs were something you did, right? Maybe that was how Ayesha got the idea because everybody knew that you liked to do this, right? And you said, ‘You’ll probably just confiscate this as evidence.’”

  “I wasn’t thinking like that,” Larry Lee said.

  “You used the word confiscate, and you used the word evidence. It didn’t come out of her mouth,” the prosecutor shot back.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking about but—”

  “You were thinking clearly when you deleted the images.”

  “Ma’am?” Despite the entire courtroom, including Larry Lee, having watched blown-up footage of him moving his thumb back and forth between the buttons on the phone, before the images went missing, he still wasn’t admitting that he deleted them.

  Nassios moved on to the “strap” of neckties and Larry Lee’s explanation to Tipton of what he did with them. “‘Yeah, I don’t force nobody,’” she quoted him as saying. “‘I pay them.’ Do you agree you said that?”

  “That’s right. I said that because I paid Khristy.”

  The prosecutor returned to the matter of the images on Larry Lee’s phone, which Investigator Tipton had asked to see a second time. “She asks for permission,” Nassios reminded Larry Lee.

  “Yes.”

  “And you said, ‘You’re going to use them against me, right?’ And she says, ‘Well, it’s your call. You don’t have to show them to us.’”

  “And you know,” Larry Lee responded in a now-raised voice, “I shouldn’t have! If I hadn’t brought up the pictures, they would never have looked on my phone. And I feel bad because Khristy was fighting for custody of her boys. And yeah, I admit that I feel really rotten about having shown those pictures.”

  “Oh, okay,” Nassios said. “So that’s why you deleted them: because you were worried about Khristy’s custody suit.”

  “I didn’t say I deleted them! I have not said I deleted them!”

  This exchange continued on for a few minutes. Larry Lee admitted that the images had originally been there. Perhaps he could have deleted them accidentally, sort of, maybe. “I don’t know what happened.” He was growing weary. Any semblance of the good-natured swagger he’d brought to the stand was long gone.

  “You admit that you deleted potential evidence against you?”

  “I don’t understand the question. Would you repeat it?”

  “If you deleted the images on the phone, you ruined potential evidence against you.”

  “So now you’re asking me to admit that I understand… You’re asking me to admit to a crime?”

  “I’m asking you to respond to my question.”

  Larry Lee leaned forward in the witness chair, beyond the corner of the judge’s bench, and looked in the direction of the defense table. “Where’s my attorney at?”

  Mitch Harper had watched this entire performance without comment or overt reaction. He did not respond now. If Sasha could guess what he was thinking, it would be something akin to this: You dug this hole on your own, buddy. I advised you not to take the stand.

  “Just answer the question,” the judge instructed.

  “I’m still not understanding it.”

  “Oh, it’s not a trick question.”

  But Nassios moved on. It was time to bring up the “first felony” comment Larry Lee had made on the stand. She repeated it back to him and said, “The fact is, you are a convicted felon.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You have two felony convictions, right? One from Georgia, one from Florida.”

  “Yes.”

  The jurors, in unison, bent their heads forward and began scribbling on their writing pads.

  “So, there’s no question about dealing drugs and getting your first felony conviction.”

  “My first felony conviction in Knoxville would put me away for life.”

  “I’m sorry. It was just the location. Let’s move on then to your conversation with your sister, Nancy, on December 1, 2011, when you’re trying to get her to make your bond and you tell her: ‘You know my doctor has already said he’s going to boost me, as soon as I come off my probation’—and she’s not really interested in that.” This was in reference to an additional recorded conversation between Larry Lee and Nancy that had not been played in the courtroom.

  “She says, ‘Yeah, well…’ And you say, ‘So, all I have to do is go back to him as soon as I get out of here.’ Did that conversation take place?”

  “Well…”

  “So you admit that you were willing to peddle your prescription drugs in order to make money?”

  “No, I deny that. You have to understand what I was trying to say to her.”

  “Explain it to us. Tell us how you can distinguish that from what you said Ayesha
Mack was telling you to do.”

  “Because me and my sister have known each other for a long time and—”

  “She’d never rat you out to the police, right? So you could get away with it.”

  “Are you going to let me answer the question?”

  Nassios cast her eyes upward and turned away from Larry Lee. “How can I stop you?” she muttered, not quite under her breath as she strolled toward the state’s table.

  Larry Lee stumbled and rambled some more, claiming that Khristy had tried to get him to sell his prescription pills previously, but he needed them for the pain in his legs and back. He mowed lawns and scrapped metal for his cash.

  “What’s the price of an OxyContin pill?” Nassios asked.

  “Uhh…”

  Nassios didn’t wait for an answer and returned to the subject of the defendant’s honesty and credibility. She probed other conversations Larry Lee had with his sister during his numerous jail-house phone calls. “Always truthful with your sister?” Nassios asked.

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  Nassios brought up a story Larry Lee had apparently spun to his sister regarding an interaction between him and a judge in which Larry Lee claimed to have eloquently argued for his “constitutional right” to be adequately defended by his previous attorney.

  “That was just bullshit,” Larry Lee admitted. “I’m sure I’ve told my sister plenty of tall tales.”

  “In not one of the nearly fifty jail-house phone calls with your sister did you tell her the story that you told this jury today… that Ayesha was upset with you because you refused to go into a pill-selling scam with her. Right?”

  “I wouldn’t talk about something like that to my sister. I mean, you know—”

  “You never told her that Ayesha was mad at you because on that day you kind of trashed her boyfriend.”

  “No, I didn’t tell her that.”

  Nassios returned to the issue of Ayesha’s credibility—her believability—versus that of Larry Lee and challenged him on his various, evolving stories: “I’m going to go over the six different versions you’ve told witnesses and others about the motivation of Ayesha Mack, the first one being Scott Brown’s testimony that on October 24th, while you were waiting outside for the police, you told him, ‘She wanted me to. She wanted it.’”

  “I would never say anything like that about any female,” Larry Lee protested.

  “In version two, when you’re with Investigator Patty Tipton, you say, ‘What she said happened, happened.’” Larry Lee admitted he’d said this, but claimed he certainly wasn’t referring to rape.

  “Right. I mean, ‘What she said happened, happened,’ could mean it was consensual, right? Kind of like, ‘She wanted it.’”

  “No, no no… I thought she meant something else. Jade’s not that kind of girl.” He lowered his voice. “She’s a decent girl.”

  “She’s somebody who would perjure herself and try to put somebody in prison with a false accusation about kidnap and rape. Other than that, she’s… all right!”

  “No, see—”

  “Let’s go on to version three, the Barry Evans thing—a setup, a conspiracy.” Nassios was referring to Larry Lee’s theory that the man who had allegedly stolen his OxyContin had conspired with Ayesha against him, even though they didn’t even know one another.

  “Version four: you told Patty Tipton that Ayesha probably got angry with you when you said you could take better care of her than a crack dealer. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Well, don’t you find it odd that you would say that when your story now is that you all were actually arguing because you wouldn’t give her money?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Version five: you told your sister on January 14, 2012, that Ayesha was lying about rape in order to figure out how to have a place to stay. Somebody downstairs talked her into it.”

  “I believed that was a possibility.”

  “Okay. Version six is the story we’ve heard today. Yes, you touched her, but only in an effort to console her because she was upset about her boyfriend, right?”

  “I agree, yeah.”

  “And somehow, she got mad during the course of your contact with her?” When Larry Lee didn’t immediately respond, Nassios prompted him. ”I’m asking a question.”

  “Yes.”

  Nassios then ran through the three theories Larry Lee had presented for Ayesha’s alleged anger, why she would go to all this trouble to set him up: he’d said mean things about Tam, he’d refused to go into a prescription drug scam with her, and she blamed him for Tam’s arrest. Quite simply, Ayesha was looking for revenge.

  The prosecutor took in a deep breath, then sighed. “You’ll have to agree with me, Mr. Smith, that you have given inconsistent accounts of why she has done this to you. Despite these inconsistencies, we are supposed to believe you—and not her.”

  “I think that’s where the jury comes in.”

  With that, Leslie Nassios turned away from the defendant. She was done.

  “Any redirect?” Judge McGee asked Mitch Harper.

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “What?!” Larry Lee exclaimed, staring in shock at his attorney. “That’s not right!”

  Sifting through papers at her table, Nassios said, “I ask the court to admonish him to be quiet.”

  Shaking his head and pursing his lips, Larry Lee stepped down from the witness stand and shuffled back to his seat at the defense table. He was trying not to show it, but everyone in the courtroom could see that he’d lost that overconfident feeling.

  Sasha leaned over to Bert and whispered, “He should have listened to the judge.”

  30. THINK ABOUT IT

  It was well into the afternoon when the prosecution and the defense presented their closing arguments to the jury. The state went first and Leslie Nassios rose to face the panel of six men, six women and one alternate. Larry Lee sat watching from the defense table, a crooked smile seemingly fixed upon his face.

  Nassios led off by restating the nature of the charges against Larry Lee. She reminded the jurors that Larry Lee’s penetration of the victim with his fingers still constituted rape, and that according to the law, the severity of Ayesha’s injuries, the length of her confinement, and the fact that the defendant had eventually allowed her to leave, did not matter in determining guilt. All that mattered was that Ayesha’s freedom, through the use of undue force, had been hindered.

  “I want you to think about how that would happen,” Nassios said. “Larry Lee Smith on top of that young girl, the bulk of his body on her. She’s terrified for her life. She can’t breathe. Remember what she said—‘the look in his eyes,’ crazed with lust and anger. Sweat dripping from his red face onto hers. Think about how she must have struggled to get him off her.”

  She acknowledged that Ayesha had made a number of questionable choices in her troubled adolescent life—running away with her drug-dealing boyfriend, living in some fleabag place with some shady people. “She’s young,” Nassios reminded the jurors. And despite a lifestyle lived among those on the edge, the victim remained credible in this case.

  Ayesha had provided clear and precise details about the circumstances of her assault, all of which had been corroborated through witnesses and the evidence collected by KPD Investigator Tipton and Forensic Technician Byers. She had been accurate about details at the scene of the crime: the can of peas, the cut-up onion, the movie in the DVD player, Larry Lee’s attire with the broken suspender, the balcony from which she had planned to jump, the knife laying upon the table where he had placed it, the tea cups and the tea bags in the trash. “And I have wondered,” the prosecutor observed, “why he was so anxious that she drink all her tea.”

  Nassios then emphasized the courage it took for Ayesha to share such an embarrassing personal story with a room full of strangers. “She didn’t exaggerate her symptoms. She told you exactly what happened to her. And I believe that’s why her a
ccount is credible. If she was making up the story, she could have told you anything, because as Mr. Harper will tell you in a few minutes, her injuries were not documented by a doctor.

  “Your only account is her experience, and what she felt as a result of it. She still sees it: an experience so repulsive and so disgusting to her that it’s imprinted upon her mind. Who makes that up? It would have to be a miraculous actress, a marvelous manipulator, a fantastic liar to make up a story like that.”

  Larry Lee’s crooked smile remained firmly in place throughout the summation. As Leslie Nassios returned to her seat, defense attorney Mitch Harper rose from his and crossed the room to address the jurors. He began his closing remarks by revisiting something Nassios had said. The jury had been instructed by the state to examine the credibility of the victim versus that of the accused. But credibility, Harper argued, is indicated by the actions of each party immediately following the alleged incident.

  “Mr. Smith didn’t run away,” Harper said. “He didn’t leave, but went down to the front desk and waited for the police.” Then he’d been “more than happy to allow them to search his apartment.” He’d signed a voluntary waiver for them to do so. “He’s more than willing to provide them with physical evidence and he even helps them to collect it as its being done.”

  And what does the KPD do with that evidence? Nothing. “Investigator Tipton tells you that they didn’t submit that evidence to any sort of laboratory for testing.

  “And what does Ms. Mack do after the police interview at the KPD? She tells the folks here in Knoxville that she’ll see her doctor when she gets back to Georgia. That sounds reasonable, but she doesn’t follow through. As far as we know sitting here today, she’s never been to a doctor complaining about anything that occurred on October 24, 2011.

  “You don’t know things that you should about this case. That creates a reasonable doubt. Keep in mind that it is the state’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If they have not done that, you have to find Mr. Smith not guilty.”

  Harper returned to his seat beside his client at the defense table. Larry Lee was smiling now—a genuine smile—and nodding in agreement.