A Trial by Jury (4 page)

She
can
miss it, but . . .

Paige is the interior decorator; her temperament is cool, a touch disinterested, slightly impatient. Leah's software company designs multi-player games, but she talks about the job like it's a lark, something she is just trying out for fun. She has traveled a good deal (South America, East Asia) and had some adventures. There is a bounce in her step, and her lively green eyes narrow slyly when she smiles, which she does often, brightly, with a hint of mischief.

For my part, I dress way down, since the court building is so dusty and rank—parachute pants, hiking boots, a fleece. The rough index for my first book has come back from the press, so I fill the time in the hallway by poring over the loose galley pages, making index annotations. I am blandly friendly, but sit alone.

It is late Wednesday afternoon when we get under way, filing into the open court down the main aisle, preceded by the bailiff, who announces our entry by barking, “The jury is in the court!” as the metal door swings open; faces turn to observe. For the first time we see the victim's family, arranged in the penultimate row of the courtroom, on the prosecutor's side. When we are assembled, Richard Chorst, the neat gentleman with the garnet ring, gets placed in the first seat, with me on his left. He sits upright, his hands folded in his lap. He, the judge explains, will be our foreman.

“Are these jurors satisfactory to the people?” the judge asks the prosecutor, and he replies, without looking at us, “Satisfactory to the people.” “And to the defense?” The answer comes, a pinched voice, as the lawyer shuffles files: “Yes, your honor.”

And we begin.

3. The Defendant

F
rom the first moments of the prosecution's opening statement, the strange nature of the proceedings made a deep impression. How did it happen, I wondered, that a practice of truth-seeking had evolved to divide the job up in all these curious ways? The asking of questions was reserved to those who would play no role in judging the answers, while we, the jury, who were supposed to try to figure out what had gone on, had to remain absolutely silent. And though it was up to us to decide if the defendant was guilty, we would have no part in determining the consequences of that decision: the business of setting punishments was reserved to the judge; we wouldn't even know what they might be. (Although, later, during a suspension in our deliberations, when we were held temporarily in an empty courtroom under loose guard, one of us milling around the vacant bench found a judge's laminated sheet of “sentencing guidelines”; thus we learned what would happen to Milcray if we convicted—he could go to prison for life.)

Our enforced silence was the most difficult thing. How could one even begin to investigate a problem without being able to engage with it directly? We were allowed no paper or writing implements. I fidgeted like a monkey.

The prosecution's first witness was Antigua's sister—catatonic, blank, her thick West Indian accent clipping her monosyllabic answers.

“And did you go to the morgue with the police?”

“Yes.”

“And did they show you the body at that time?”

“Yes.”

“And did you recognize the body?”

“Yes.”

“And was it the body of Randolph Cuffee, ‘Antigua,' your brother?”

“It was me broth'r,” she said, beginning to sob in stoic stillness.

“And what did you say?”

The judge cut off this question: “It is not relevant what she said,” he announced irritably. “Next question . . .”

 

M
y way up Centre Street in the evening takes me past the adjacent jail, linked by a bridge of sighs to the court building itself. I step aside to let one of the repainted school buses of the Corrections Department back into the loading dock. It pings insistently and has windows of metal mesh. Milcray may ride in one of these. He may be held in the jail at night. We are not told.

Paused, I notice an interesting architectural detail on the building: the squared-off columns posed decoratively around its base are constructed of wire, as if they were the armature of a plaster sculpture. Harmless enough, modernist, and not unattractive. But, looking more closely, I see this means that these columns, set before the jailhouse, appear to be composed of stacks of little barred cells. I sense a tendentious architect slipping a caustic commentary past his clients: the traditional elegant white columns of the classical orders (those symbols of justice, and props to the pediment of the republic), stripped bare, reveal a carceral skeleton. Unnerving.

 

A
fter police discovered the body of Randolph Cuffee, they followed standard procedures in the investigation of a stabbing death: they canvassed New York–area hospitals for patients admitted with cuts to their arms and hands. It is hard to stab someone many times, in haste and agitation, and avoid a slip or two.

Monte Milcray slipped. He had been admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital around 2 a.m. on August 2 after being picked up by police near Sheridan Square. Central Dispatch had sent a squad car to follow up on the report of a young African-American man with an ugly hand wound who was making his way along the outdoor cafés of the neighborhood asking anyone with a cell phone to call 911. His right pinky was more or less severed, and there was a good deal of blood on his overalls, his shoes, and his personal effects.

When investigators pulled the file on this incident, they saw a suspicious story. Milcray had told the responding officers (who called in the paramedics) that he had been in an extended altercation with “five white males,” a posse that initially confronted him outside his gym in the Flatiron District, and then pursued him on a wild chase, punctuated by beatings, all the way down to an area he vaguely indicated lay to the west on Christopher Street. Shaking them finally (though having managed to conserve his hip pack, its water bottles, a CD Walkman, and his jacket), Milcray discovered his hand injury and sought help. Where was his shirt? Lost in the fight. Had he tried to alert passers-by or duck into an attended building during the twenty-five-block bias crime? Apparently not. Could he describe the attackers? Loosely at best.

It is hard to come up with a good lie. Monte Milcray immediately became the leading suspect in the death of Randolph Cuffee. This was not, of course, how police then approached him. Rather, the detectives who visited him in his hospital room expressed a desire to learn more about his own assailants, and asked permission to take his bag and shoes to the lab in order to run some tests that might aid in this investigation. Meanwhile, the precinct sent two intrepid gumshoes to a medical-waste incinerator on Long Island, where they spent several hours picking over the contents of a large dump truck in an effort to recover Milcray's overalls, which the hospital had discarded. Amazingly, they succeeded. Later, most of these items would prove to be splattered with a mixture of human bloods: Milcray's and Cuffee's.

When Milcray came out of surgery the next day, his finger largely reconnected, he was asked if he would be willing to take a ride down to the station house in order to look over some photos, in hopes of making an identification. He agreed, and was shuttled to a neighboring precinct, because cameras and press reporters were on stakeout at the Sixth, clamoring for a break in the Cuffee case. The specter of a gay-bashing incident had attracted much attention.

The two lead detectives in the case put Milcray in a small, windowless interrogation room with a spy-through mirror and gave him a can of lemonade and a random book of mug shots. There was a bit of desultory flipping, but it was now late evening, and Milcray had just undergone major surgery in which a pair of steel pins were drilled into the bones in his hand—this at the end of a very eventful thirty-six hours. He was tired and in pain.

At some point in the questioning that followed, one of the detectives either did, or did not, tell Milcray that the body of Randolph Cuffee had been discovered at 103 Corlears Street. The detectives would remember this detail differently. Either way, Milcray announced the desire to make a statement, but said he wished to do so only to the male detective. Obligingly, the lead detective (a woman) left the room. Milcray then received his
Miranda
warnings, first orally, then in writing, on a sheet he signed. As Milcray perused this document, the male detective exited the room and conferred with his superior, who had been looking on through the mirror.

“He's going to give it up,” he said to her, and went back into the room.

She stepped out to call the district attorney's office.

Milcray told the following story.

Leaving work for his meal break on the evening of the 1st, Milcray claimed to have taken a walk west, toward the Staples store on Union Square. On the street there he met a long-haired black woman who addressed him flirtatiously, saying as she passed, “You're sexy!” and asking him if he modeled.

He replied: “Where's your man at?”

She introduced herself as Veronique, and gave him her number and her address, inviting him to come by her West Village apartment around midnight, when he got off work.

At 11:55 p.m. Milcray punched out of work and made his way across town, into a neighborhood that, according to his statement, he had never before visited. He got lost, made a call to her apartment from a pay phone, received further instructions, and found his way.

Veronique, wearing a short robe, greeted him at the door of apartment one, 103 Corlears, and invited him in. The only light in the room came from the television, which she tuned to an erotic channel. For some period they sat beside each other on the futon, chatting, and then she invited him to take off his clothing, spreading a blanket in the narrow space between the futon and the low coffee table against the wall on the other side of the room, behind the entrance door. He reclined there and undressed, while Veronique stood at the edge of the blanket, at his feet, between Milcray and the door. Looking up, naked except for his socks, Milcray allegedly watched her open her robe, remove her shirt, and lower her panties. At which point he saw that she had a penis.

He cried out, “What the fuck is this?” and “I'm outta here!,” to which Veronique replied, “Once it gets in, it's not gonna hurt.” Milcray scrambled for his clothes while Veronique turned and put on a condom. She thrust Milcray to the floor on his back and lowered herself between his thighs. He, by this time, had managed to get his overalls partially on (up, he recalled, but he was uncertain if he had managed to fasten the bib). Bearing down on him, face to face, Veronique repeated her promise (“Once it gets in . . .”) and began working to raise his legs and strip him.

At this point, Milcray explained, he went for his knife, opened it, and stabbed Veronique once in the chest. She, he asserted, did not relent, but bore down still more furiously and squeezed him to her body. He responded by reaching around with his right arm, over her back, in order to “hit him a few times,” eventually slipping out of the weakening grasp, putting on his shoes, grabbing up his bag and jacket, and escaping.

In the street, he saw the extent of his hand injury, and the amount of blood on his white tee shirt. He ditched the latter, and dropped the knife, open, into a storm sewer at the corner of Christopher Street, before proceeding along that sidewalk and soliciting help from several shopkeepers and bystanders.

Sheepishly, he admitted that the tale of the five white males had been an invention, asserting that he had lied out of fear.

Milcray communicated this story to the detective orally, who then arranged for him to write the basic outline on a sheet of lined paper. While he did so (slowly, since his right hand was largely immobilized), the lead detective arranged for an assistant DA to come and videotape the statement, though it was now nearly midnight. She and the other detective reviewed the written statement and asked Milcray to add the location of the jettisoned weapon, so he drew a line from the mention of the knife in the body of the text, along the side of the page, to the bottom, where he put in a footnote: “in a rain-gate.”

The video team arrived and set up, as did the assistant DA, who then conducted a forty-five-minute recorded interview with the suspect. This was later entered into evidence. In response to the ADA's probing, Milcray expanded on certain crucial moments in his account: Where was the sheet of paper with the address and the phone number? Lost. How close did he and Veronique sit on the futon? Close enough to touch, but not touching. Did Veronique threaten to kill him? No. Did Veronique have a weapon? No. Did Veronique ever punch or kick him? No. Was Veronique dead when he left? Milcray said no, that his assailant was still moving. Did Veronique look seriously injured? Yes.

He was made to rehearse the most minute details of the physical confrontation several times, and this made for certain ambiguities. How exactly did Milcray manage to dress while under attack? Did he try to rise? How many times? Repeatedly revisited, some of this became muddled. More muddled than any complicated story would become under close examination? Difficult to say.

At trial, the prosecutor—rumpled, gesticulating, deferential with the judge to the point of sycophancy—made much of the defendant's changing stories: first five white men and a melee (each time the prosecutor said the phrase “five white males,” his voice oozed sarcasm, as if to whisper, “See how he played the race card, the skunk!”); then, once he was cornered by the authorities, a tall tale of a drag rapist. And even that story had changed.

Milcray's lawyer, in his opening statement, declared that his client still stood by much of the story he told the detectives, but that he now admitted to fibbing a bit there as well. In particular, Milcray now asserted he had not met Veronique on the street on August 1 but, rather, via a telephone chat service the same day. The defense attorney explained: Milcray had made up the story about the street encounter because he was embarrassed about having used a “date-line” phone service, and having gone to the home of someone he met that way. Milcray had a fiancée, after all.

The prosecution scorned this “correction” as bald strate-gizing, necessitated by the improbability of the first story: Who, after seeing photos of Randolph Cuffee (or, rather, of his somewhat distended corpse), would believe that anyone could, in broad daylight, mistake this large-featured, robust man for a woman, wig or no?

The defense attorney wanted to know if anyone had a photograph of Cuffee alive. No one, apparently, did.

Or no one willing to help the defense, anyway.

 

W
e watched the grainy color video of Milcray's confessional statement on a television wheeled up beside the witness stand. After some back and forth between the judge and a court officer, the lights were dimmed; it proved impossible to lower the shades, despite several attempts. The gallery had filled in for the showing—various clerks, assistants, a visiting class from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

A large cockroach emerged from under the prosecution's table, creating a minor disruption. It escaped the stomp of a squeamish female guard, and wedged itself into an invisible crevice at the foot of the bench.

The taped statement was compelling. It made the evening of the killing feel close. The ADA was young, handsome, Asian, wearing a tie. He had a three-ring binder open in front of him, and he and Milcray sat across from each other, a narrow table between them, like tournament chess players. Shortly after the recording began, the invisible camera-operator tightened the frame on Milcray, and the ADA became a disembodied voice, inquisitive, measured. A digital readout of the time (both elapsed and local) rolled along at the bottom of the screen. One sensed that each question, seemingly straightforward, concealed complex structures: legal implications, potential charges, due-process considerations. The ADA took his time, making it clear he had to think before he spoke. Milcray responded quickly, telling the story, his intonation rising restlessly at the end of each phrase, as if he were looking for some confirmation from his inquisitor, as if he himself were asking question after question, in an eager tumble. The difference in pace, in caution, stood out.