A Death in Canaan (27 page)

As the recess dragged on, Chief Deputy Sheriff Pat Alfano stood in the doorway of the courtroom and mused on what Judge Speziale might do about the publicity. “He's tough,” said Sheriff Alfano, a tall, curly haired, affable Italian whom nearly everybody called Patsy. “Some judges, you can get away with anything, but Speziale will cream you for doing the slightest thing.”

Although a lot of people said a lot of things about other people in Litchfield Superior Court, not all of them well-founded, Patsy Alfano knew what he was talking about, because he and John Speziale had been schoolmates once, with a lot in common. The parents of both boys were Italian immigrants, hardworking and ambitious for their children, and the boys were high school classmates.

John Speziale was born in Winsted, Connecticut. His birthday was November 21, just one day after Barbara Gibbons' birthday. His father worked for the railroad, and his mother worked in a needle factory to help her children get through school. John always knew he wanted to be a lawyer, but there were five children in the family; never enough money, never enough new clothes. “Look at you,” a girl in his class used to jeer. “Just look at you. Patches on your knee and on your fanny. How can
you
ever be a lawyer?”

In high school, John was known as a brain. He carried a briefcase to school. But he had other interests, especially music and tennis, and he was so cheerful and resourceful that he was voted the “Most Optimistic” member of the Class of 1940. At Duke University, he waited on tables, played in the marching band, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1943. He went right into the navy, serving in the Pacific, and he was one of the first men to go ashore at Nagasaki after the bomb.

When he returned from the war he went back to law school at Duke. He passed the Connecticut bar on his first try and almost immediately became a Municipal Court judge. He ran for state treasurer in 1958 and won, with a little campaign jingle: “Don't dilly-dally; vote for Spez-ee-alley.”

In 1961 he became a judge in the Court of Common Pleas, and four years later was appointed to the Superior Court. In spite of his success, he and his wife, Mary, did not move to one of the big old houses in Litchfield. They stayed on in Torrington, where he was a member of the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, and the Sons of Italy, and he dressed in plain black or brown suits, with a soft tweedy country-style hat to add a little dash.

When Peter Reilly was brought into his courtroom, Judge Speziale was only fifty-one—just as old as Barbara was when she died—but because he'd been a judge at twenty-six, he always seemed older than he was. He was stern, strict, and, as Pat Alfano said, he was tough. He wasn't what they called a hanging judge; he was considered fair and honest, and he had an old-fashioned, courtly air about him. On the street he invariably tipped his hat to women, even women reporters.

He had a round face and a soft smile that he didn't use much in court; usually he wore a serious, semifrowning look, his forehead creased, rather like a worried monsignor continually fretting about the parish debt. Sometimes, in court, the afternoon sun glinted off the rims of his glasses, and as he bent over the notes he was writing, with the desk light beaming down onto the pages, he looked as he must have looked thirty years before, when he studied so intently to make Phi Beta Kappa and to live up to his parents' dreams. The law was not only his life, but also his lifeline; his work, which was so burdensome, which involved the handling of the lives of other people, was made easier by his absolute reliance on the law. The law was written down in books, and life was always easier when a man went by the book.

He wore that worried look when he swept back into court after the recess, his full black robe making a definitive swish as he turned the corner of the doorway from chambers back into court. He said he had read the articles and felt they might indeed have created “a clear and present danger” to the fairness of this trial. He then read the entire text of the order he'd written during the recess. It threatened to use the contempt power of the court against any person who (a) “disseminates by any means of public communication an extrajudicial statement relating to the defendant or to the issues in the case that goes beyond the public record of this court, if the statement is reasonably calculated to affect the outcome of the trial and seriously threatens to have such an effect; or (b) makes such a statement with the expectation that it will be so disseminated.” Regarding Peter Reilly, the order said, “The defendant is forbidden from participating in interviews for publicity and from making extrajudicial statements about this case from this date and until such time as a verdict in this case is returned in open court. Any violation of this order by the defendant may well lead to a revocation of his release on bail.”

The language was legal and formal, but the message couldn't be missed. Peter Reilly wasn't nearly as free as he'd thought nor, for that matter, was anyone else.

None of the jurors, as it turned out, had seen any of the articles, but Mr. Bianchi moved for a mistrial, anyway. “Litchfield County has been inundated with publicity,” he declared, and he asked for a two-month continuance, “so that the publicity will have been tempered by time.”

Miss Roraback opposed it. “I'm as concerned as Mr. Bianchi that we have a fair trial,” she said. “But we have seven good jurors already, none of whom has seen or heard this …” She motioned to the newspapers on the prosecution table, and smiled a little. “In my experience, I was always shocked to discover how few people read the newspapers,” she said. Mr. Bianchi, who didn't have an office near Yale, and who had never taken part in a nationally known trial, flushed a little. “I am likewise impressed with the jury, your honor,” he said hastily. Miss Roraback laughed a little, Mr. Bianchi laughed too, and Judge Speziale said they'd go on with the voir dire.

John Bianchi, impeccable in a pearl gray suit with a powder blue shirt, looked at the latest panel of prospective jurors.

“We are here to determine who caused the death of Barbara Gibbons on September 28, 1973, in the town of Canaan, Connecticut,” he told them solemnly. “This town is much more commonly referred to as Falls Village, Connecticut. Barbara Gibbons was murdered on the twenty-eighth day of September 1973, sometime between nine and ten o'clock that night.” Then he read off the names of some of the witnesses the state intended to call.

Catherine Roraback stood up, dressed in pale blue, with a string of pearls, and about a quarter of an inch of her slip showing.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the panel, I am representing Peter,” she said, and she half-turned and smiled at him. “Will you stand up, Peter?”

The jurors stared. They saw a pale young man, skinny and tense-looking with long, slender hands and large hazel eyes, his skin a little broken out, and his teeth a little crooked, his hair long and falling over his right eye. Miss Roraback paused, taking advantage of the stillness of the moment, then she said quietly that she wanted to correct something Mr. Bianchi had said.

“We're not here to determine who caused the death of Barbara Gibbons,” she said, “but whether Peter Reilly caused it.”

One by one, the jurors came out to be questioned, to take the oath of the voir dire—“to speak the truth.” Some of them were clutching
A Handbook for Jurors,
the sixteen-page blue booklet each of them had been given in the jury waiting room. The style of the booklet was both pedantic and vivid, as though it were written for Boy Scouts who liked to read James Bond under the covers at night. Some of the text was lecturing (“The juror must be diligent and conscientious, patient and trustworthy … a juror must be courageous”) and some of it was blunt and graphic (“What is evidence?… the evidence is what the judge lets the jury hear and consider.… Evidence may take the form of photographs, bullets, or a scarred face …”). But the booklet also promised, “You will witness a real life drama in every case that you sit on.” I was fascinated by the drama of the voir dire itself, as these people came out of the jury room, trailing their ordinary sense of the serious, the tragic, the absurd. When Mr. Bianchi asked a woman from Winchester, who had two teen-age sons of her own, whether she would therefore feel sympathy for the accused, she shook her head. “I'm not really a sympathetic person,” she said.

A juror could be challenged for cause, such as an occupation that made him unsuitable, or an attitude, a bias, that made him unsuitable. When capital punishment was a factor in jury selection, a common challenge for cause was to a juror who didn't believe in it. In this voir dire, a clear challenge for cause was to a man who said he was a social worker in the welfare department, employed by the state of Connecticut. “Would that make it difficult for you to be objective in this case?” Mr. Bianchi asked. “I think so,” the juror replied mildly. “The Gibbons' case was part of my caseload.”

Beyond challenge for cause was the peremptory challenge, less formally known as the hunch. Miss Roraback and Peter, on one side, and Mr. Bianchi, on the other, might excuse as many as eighteen people each because they didn't like the way the juror looked, or talked, or something the juror said, or didn't say, or just because they felt like it. Often the reason for a peremptory challenge was hard to pin down, but one thing was usually very plain: A juror excused by one side was usually a juror whom the other side liked a lot.

“As you look at my client,” Catherine Roraback asked a woman in a purple pants suit, “is he innocent or guilty?”

“Why, I don't know,” the woman said. “I'd have to hear his case first.” She looked annoyed, as though a lawyer ought to know that already. Miss Roraback sighed a little.

“But he's innocent until proved guilty, isn't he?”

The woman looked startled. “Oh, yes,” she said.

It wasn't a trick question. It was the presumption of innocence, a concept every citizen in the voir dire had probably recited in school, one that nearly every citizen now forgot. “I don't know,” they said to Miss Roraback, or, “I can't say. I don't know the facts yet.”

Once she phrased it differently. “What does presumption of innocence mean to you?” she asked a factory worker from Bristol.

“It would be like he and I would be in the same boat right now, you know what I mean? Can you figure that one out?” the man replied, and Miss Roraback smiled.

“You mean, you're innocent too?” she asked.

Another of the defense questions was whether a juror thought that just because Peter was in court, he had done something wrong. “Well, I assume he's here for
some
reason,” a woman replied uncertainly. That sort of question, whether Peter's very indictment would weigh against him, led naturally into the question of whether a juror would tend to believe a police officer more readily than a civilian witness. “I honestly don't believe I would,” said a breezy looking woman in gold and black bell-bottoms and a chartreuse blouse. She was married to a policeman in Hartford. But another woman said she certainly would consider a policeman more credible. “I've been brought up in a society where the police are always right,” she said.

Just as presumption of innocence was a stumbling block for the defense, so for the prosecution was the concept of reasonable doubt. Judge Speziale had told the pool that “the state must prove its case in a criminal prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt,” and said that when the time came for the jury to be charged, he would explain further.

Meantime, however, Mr. Bianchi had to find out a juror's ideas much earlier.

“Do you feel you would have to remove
all
doubt from your mind?” Mr. Bianchi asked a middle-aged woman on the stand.

“Yes,” she said, as so many jurors before her had said, and Judge Speziale intervened.

“Maybe you don't really understand that question, because it's not that easy to understand,” he said. “It would be your solemn duty to accept the law as I give it to you.”

“I'd have to be sure in my own mind,” she insisted. “I've got to be satisfied.” The judge looked his sternest. “You mean, satisfied beyond the law as I explain it to you?”

She looked back at him seriously. “I don't know where that fine line is,” she said.

The jury selection took several days. It was a delicate, difficult process, requiring experience, psychology, instinct, and lots of luck. In some courtrooms, scientific jury selection was popular, a process by which prospective jurors were compared with profiles of the population from which the jury pool was drawn.

The new science was expensive and comprehensive. Besides the usual questions about income, occupation, and hobbies, people might be asked about their TV-viewing habits and their feelings on a variety of topics from women's lib to the grain deal with Russia. Out of all this came certain answers. “If the juror is a fifty-four-year-old registered Republican who is the proprietor of a sporting goods store, computer printouts will tell you what he is likely to believe, even if he won't,” said an article in
Psychology Today
. But a sizable study made in California, also reported in the magazine, found that the significant variance between jurors who voted guilty and those who voted not guilty was how much they liked the prosecutor. Those who liked the prosecutor voted guilty; those who didn't voted to acquit. Maybe jury selection wasn't a science, after all. Just chemistry.

At 3:10
P.M
. on Thursday, February 28, 1974, the last juror was chosen in Docket #5285,
State of Connecticut
v.
Peter A. Reilly
. The jurors were:

Paul Travaglin,
sixty-six years old, a bachelor from New Milford who still lived there with his mother. He said he had never been involved in politics.

Edward Ives
of Litchfield, fifty, a Boy Scout leader and pillar of the community. His three sons were nineteen, twenty-three, and twenty-five.