Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  Monday, December 16, Morning

  It was eight thirty a.m., and the courtroom was crowded. Ruiz and his assistant, me and Terri, and fifty citizens filling the jury box and half the spectator seats, waiting to be whittled down to twelve jurors and one alternate. To win, I needed to convince all thirteen that Jackson was innocent. In a conservative county, with a cop on the stand, evidence of motive and opportunity, and a defendant from the wrong side of the tracks, that wasn’t much more likely than a lottery win.

  So my goal was to get at least a few jurors who seemed like they might distrust the cops. If they did, and if even one of them was stubborn enough to hold out against the tough-on-crime types, we’d get a deadlock and a mistrial. Jackson would go free, for a while at least. Ludlow could still decide to try him again, but the more jurors I could get to vote against conviction, the less likely that was. And if he didn’t, it would be over. Jackson would be free.

  To the assembled citizens, Judge Chambliss delivered high-minded remarks about justice and impartiality. Then he asked the usual questions: Had they heard about the case? Did they or a close friend or relative know the victim or the defendant, or Ruiz, or me? His court rules didn’t let us address the jurors directly at this stage. Each side submitted questions to him, and he asked them. While he talked to the jurors, excusing several for social or family connections to the case, Terri and I texted back and forth on our laptops about their responses and their body language.

  Excuse #16, she said. 2 cop sons, wld love Blount.

  Number 16, a good-looking woman around fifty years old, was sitting in the alternates box. I peeked at the questionnaire she’d filled out; she was a high-school teacher. That, plus her chunky necklace and purple cardigan, made me think she was less likely than average to take what cops said on faith.

  I typed back, You sure?

  Yes. Saw her arrive. Fraternal Order of Police bumper sticker.

  I wrote back, I stand corrected. It occurred to me that I could save a fair amount of time by just not questioning anything Terri thought we should do.

  We got ten peremptory challenges, to excuse jurors without having to explain why. After striking the ones we agreed on, out of respect for her abilities I used the last three to strike some who’d seemed fine to me but she didn’t like.

  By eleven a.m. the jury was seated. Mostly older, three Black, nine White. Chambliss explained their duties and the schedule: opening statements, lunch, and then the state’s first witness.

  Ruiz, as the prosecutor, went first.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “I want to thank you for your service and acknowledge that it is a sacrifice. The Commonwealth of South Carolina would not ask this of you if it weren’t important. And the case you will be asked to decide upon is about the most important thing there is: human life. A man was murdered. And I will show you, step by step through the evidence, that the defendant, his son Jackson Warton, committed that crime.”

  He paused while his assistant pressed some keys to bring up a photo of Karl on a large screen on the wall. Karl was on his boat, smiling, holding up a hooked fish.

  “This is Karl Warton,” Ruiz said. “On June 6 of this year, he was brutally murdered on board that very boat. Now, over the course of this trial, you’re going to find out that, just like any of us, Karl was not perfect. Matter of fact, he had many flaws. He drank. He sinned. And I will even tell you right up-front that he neglected and abused Jackson, his only child.”

  A few jurors shook their heads like that was a damn shame.

  “But we have not called you here,” Ruiz said, “to sit in judgment on Karl Warton. We are not here to talk about his good acts or his bad ones. We’re here to carry out our duty under the law: to affirm that murder is wrong—it is a sin and a crime—and to convict his killer of that crime.”

  Ruiz went on in that vein for twenty minutes. In his telling, Jackson was a child brutalized for years, powerless to protect himself or his mother. His story was compelling. I could see the jury rising and falling on his words, and I felt it myself: the anger, the childhood suffering. Ruiz told us that “when Jackson reached manhood, when at last he was strong enough to rise against his father,” he decided to take revenge.

  “And we know this,” Ruiz said, “because on the night of the murder, a police officer saw Jackson walking toward the marina where Karl moored his boat, on a road that led nowhere else, holding a crowbar. And the officer testified to that, under oath, five weeks before—ladies and gentlemen, before—the autopsy came back showing that the murder weapon most likely was exactly that: a crowbar.”

  Ruiz spoke of bloodshed, betrayal, Cain and Abel. He knew his audience; the flags-and-Bibles approach worked well around here.

  I knew Ruiz had to do his job. But I couldn’t help but think that in a case where, I knew, he himself had some doubts, he was under no obligation to do it that well.

  When he sat down, it was my turn. I wasn’t used to going second, and I could feel the disadvantage. The story had already been told, and now I had to change it.

  I thanked the jury and apologized for interrupting their Christmas plans with this trial. “But as the government told you,” I said, pointing to Ruiz, “you have been called here on a matter of the highest importance.” I planned to frequently refer to Ruiz and the police that way, since along with flags and Bibles, distrust of the government was a cherished value in these parts.

  “A man was killed,” I said, “at night, out on the water on his boat, and then he either fell or was pushed overboard. We’re not sure what happened, or exactly where, because there were no witnesses to the crime, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon ever found. There’s no security-camera footage, no cell phone records, no confession, no DNA left by the killer, no bullet casings to analyze. Nothing.” I let that sink in for a second. “And, as I’m sure you folks can understand, a crime like that is very hard to solve. I don’t envy the police force tasked with solving that.”

  Three of the jurors nodded.

  “It’s a hard task,” I said, “when it’s done right. It leaves no stone unturned. You’ve got to interview everyone who knew the victim. You’ve got to figure out if he had shady business dealings or, God forbid, criminal activities. You’ve got to see if he was using drugs, or gambling, or sleeping with another man’s wife. And you don’t do that to sully his good name, of course not. You do that because it’s the only way to figure out who the people in his life were, and which of them might have been angry at him or wanted something that was his.”

  I looked at each juror before continuing. I had their attention.

  “But the government didn’t do that here,” I said. “They did not investigate. It seems to me, and I think by the time you hear all the evidence it’ll also seem to you, that they just decided that since Karl was a man who beat his son, it had to be his son who killed him. His son, Jackson.”

  I gestured to him at the table. He was wearing my old suit and looking a little overwhelmed.

  “Now, Mr. Ruiz has said a witness saw Jackson walking near the marina on the night. When you hear that witness on the stand, I think you’ll agree that he was mistaken.” I couldn’t say anything specific about Blount’s testimony, since he hadn’t given it yet.

  “Jackson is a high-school graduate, and at the time all this occurred, he had a steady job at Barrett’s Hardware here in Basking Rock. But according to the government, this hundred-and-fifty-pound kid somehow managed to overpower his hundred-and-eighty-pound father, on the deck of Karl’s motorboat, and beat him to death. That’s what they’re going to ask you to believe, on faith, without any physical evidence—no footprints from Jackson on the boat, no DNA, no nothing.”

  One juror, a gray-haired Black man, had the look on his face that I wanted to see: a skeptical squint that I read as, “That can’t be right.”

  “The government wants you to think,” I said, “that this boy, who has no history of aggression, suddenly turned into a murderer.
Now, child abuse is a terrible thing, but I think we all know that the vast majority of abused children don’t turn around and kill their parents. That almost never happens, and it didn’t happen here. Matter of fact, one more thing the government is not going to tell you, but you will hear it from our witnesses, is that six months before Karl was killed, Jackson actually stepped forward and saved his life.” I paused, looked from juror to juror, and said, “The government will be telling you that Jackson wanted his father dead. But last Christmas, at a family dinner, when Karl swallowed something wrong and started choking, Jackson sprang into action, gave him the Heimlich maneuver, and saved… his… life.”

  They were listening closely. This mattered to them.

  “A man lost his life here,” I said, “and that is a terrible thing. And now his son, this nineteen-year-old boy, might lose his freedom. He’s facing thirty or more years in prison for supposedly killing the man whose life he saved just a few months earlier. Does that make sense to you?”

  After a pause, I said, “This is America. And in this country, we have a presumption of innocence. You must, under the law, presume that Jackson did not commit the terrible crime he’s accused of. That is how we protect our liberty. We cannot let the government put this boy in prison unless they show us evidence proving, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he committed the crime. Proving that Karl abused Jackson isn’t enough—that would truly be visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children. And proving that Jackson was sometimes angry at Karl for that abuse is not enough. Of course he was. Anyone would be. But anger isn’t murder.”

  I let that phrase hang in the air. I hoped one of them would repeat it in the jury room.

  “What the government has to prove,” I said, “beyond any reasonable doubt in your minds, beyond any troubled conscience with the Lord, is that on the night of June 6, a boy with no history of aggression whatsoever got on his father’s boat, rode out with him somewhere on the water, physically overpowered him even though Karl was larger, and beat him until he was dead.

  “But there just isn’t any evidence of that. And you have been called, as jurors, as Americans, to decide whether the government can prove to you that this boy is a murderer and that his freedom should be taken away. I think, once you’ve heard the state’s evidence, your answer will be no.”

  I looked at them all again, gave them a nod, and said, “Thank you, and God bless.”

  I felt good walking back to the table, and I could see on Terri’s and Jackson’s faces that they liked what I’d done.

  There was nowhere to go but down.

  32

  Monday, December 16, Afternoon

  Ruiz was not a flashy lawyer. Once we were past setting the stage with our opening statements, he got down to work. A documentary about accounting methods would have been more interesting to watch, but I soon realized what he was up to.

  I’d expected him to call the medical examiner first, to discuss Karl’s autopsy. That was the usual order of a murder case: start with the hideous crime, the innocent victim and the violence done to them, the gruesome pictures that would shock the jury into understanding how real this was. The blood and emotion would make them realize, on a level they hadn’t before, that a person was dead. That would make them care, so they’d pay attention to the mind-numbing technical evidence coming later.

  But Ruiz had heard my point about the investigation not being thorough. His first witness seemed designed to show the jury that wasn’t the case at all. He called the crime scene investigator who’d examined Karl’s boat and written the report listing every species of tree leaf and each kind of dirt found on board. The man was about as charismatic as I would expect a dirt analyst to be. Ruiz had him walk the jury through the entire process of examining the boat, with photographs: the rubber-gloved hands using plastic tongs to pick up bits of debris and slide them into numbered plastic bags, the chemicals used to find hidden bloodstains, and the exact measurements of each stain. Ruiz made sure to ask how long each step took and how long it had taken to do each lab test and write the report. A very long time, was the message: this was a solid investigation.

  At one point Ruiz stood at his table leafing through the report—looking for something, he said. Since he was not the type to improvise at trial, and I could see from all the Post-Its that he knew how to mark a page, I figured he was just letting the jury see how long the report was. It was the dullest start to a murder trial I had ever seen, but it was a one-two punch: my argument that the investigation wasn’t thorough seemed pretty flimsy now, and I looked foolish for having painted with such a broad brush. Now I would have to make the distinction between the forensic investigation, which was solid, and the police’s search for suspects, which had stopped at Jackson and gone no further.

  When Ruiz finished his direct, I did one of the shortest cross-examinations of my career. In about sixty seconds, we established that Karl must’ve lost at least a liter of blood, based on the size of the stains. To translate the investigator’s metric system into something our jury could understand, I said, “So that’s a whole wine bottle’s worth of blood and then some, correct?”

  “I believe a standard wine bottle is 750 milliliters.”

  “So a wine bottle plus a can of Coke?”

  He looked at me like I was a member of some different, and less intelligent, species. “If you prefer to think of it in terms of beverages,” he said, “it would be a wine bottle plus three-quarters of a can of Coke. And that’s just what was on the boat, not what went into the water.”

  “Thank you.”

  I took another minute to establish that one of his techs had found heroin on Karl’s boat and that they’d handled the sample correctly and had a clear chain of custody for it. Then we got to the evidence I wanted: the fact that, unlike typical street-level heroin, which had a median purity of just 13 percent—“The other 87 percent,” he said, “can be anything from baking soda to rat poison”—this sample was 91 percent pure.

  “And where do you more typically see that level of purity? What level of the drug trade?” The answer wasn’t in his report, but I knew it from prosecuting drug cases up in Charleston.

  “Well… I’m hesitating,” he said, “only because in my lab we have no direct knowledge of drug distribution hierarchies. We’re informed by police investigators and others with direct knowledge.”

  “And what do they inform you?”

  “That those numbers would more typically be seen at a higher level of the hierarchy.”

  “Higher-level dealers, in other words,” I said. “Correct? Before the little guys cut it to increase their profits, and the littler guys cut it again, and so on down the line?”

  “That would be my understanding, yes.”

  “Thank you. I have no further questions.”

  I walked back to the defense table. Their own witness had just provided a link between the murder scene and the drug-dealing evidence I wanted to introduce later. Without that, Ruiz would’ve objected to my evidence, and the judge might’ve tossed it.

  On my laptop, I sent a quick text to Garrett. He’d left a voicemail, but I wanted to cut out the phone tag and talk to him before I put the drug evidence on.

  Ruiz called the medical examiner to the stand, and the gruesome part began. I’d stipulated to everything I could—the number and size of the wounds on Karl’s body, the fact there was postmortem predation by fish—so he would have no cause to show the most hideous photos to the jury. The fewer the better, since images like that tended to make juries want to punish the defendant.

  The medical examiner, unfortunately, had a colorful way with language. He described Karl’s injuries so vividly that every gory photo I’d kept out with stipulations might as well have been emailed directly to the jurors. Then Ruiz added to the horror by putting a photo I hadn’t been able to keep out, a close-up of Karl’s swollen face and slashed neck, up on the screen. Several jurors looked nauseated, and the rest looked angry.

  “That ne
ck wound,” the witness said, “nearly severed Mr. Warton’s jugular vein, resulting in massive blood loss that in my medical opinion was the immediate cause of death.”

  “So, to clarify,” Ruiz said, “when you mentioned earlier that the assailant inflicted head injuries using the boat’s railing, what was the order of events?”

  “Well, I would say that first the assailant pounded Mr. Warton’s head against the railing—brutally and repeatedly, given the amount of tissue and blood that my colleague found there in his examination of the boat. And then, since the largest bloodstain was located just under five feet away, either Mr. Warton tried to escape or the assailant dragged him that distance. That’s where the assailant swung the crowbar, causing a hacking type of wound, as you can see there in the photo.”

  “So at what point did Mr. Warton die?”

  “Shortly after that hacking injury.”

  “And, in your medical opinion, did Mr. Warton suffer pain?”

  “Oh, most certainly. Extreme pain.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was nearly five, so my cross-examination would have to wait until morning. Trial day one would end on this note, with the jurors ruminating on blood, gore, and suffering.

  Ruiz had done well.

  My phone rang as we were heading down the courthouse steps.

  “Garrett!” I said. “It’s been a while!” I gestured to Mazie and Terri to go on without me. He and I spent a minute catching up, and then he said, “Hey, reason I called back so quick is I’m heading out of town tomorrow and won’t be back until just before New Year’s. But I’ve got nothing on the agenda for dinner—the wife and kids already left town—so if you can make it up here, we could talk tonight.”

  I pulled into Garrett’s driveway outside Charleston at a little past seven. Our topic wasn’t something to discuss in public, so he’d ordered Chinese food and I’d swung by to pick it up.

  Inside, we got our meal set up on the coffee table. He flicked the TV on to the shopping network and ignored it. I said, “Making it harder to eavesdrop? I do that too.”