Courtroom 302 (46 page)

Then Placek has Heinrich connect the PTSD to the shooting. A PTSD flashback can cause a person to “do something impulsive,” Heinrich tells the jury. And François triggered such a flashback with his actions in the cab, the psychologist says. When François “was going to force her to have sex,” it revived for McGee an image of the North Chicago episode, when she was tied to the couch “and the man was threatening her life.”

Heinrich relates this with certainty, a certainty reminiscent of Nolan’s opening statement. Heinrich and Nolan were relying on the same source for their accounts of the shooting—McGee. But whereas Nolan told the story as if he’d been in the backseat, Heinrich is providing an even more immediate perspective: the view from inside McGee’s head. When McGee shot François, the abduction in North Chicago was “the primary … thing on her mind,” Heinrich asserts.

Heinrich says that besides PTSD, McGee also has bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personality disorders are “fairly poorly adjusted individuals” who “have trouble reasoning issues through,” he says. He attributes her suicide attempts, her running away from home, and her dropping out of school to this disorder.

On cross, Heinrich concedes that when McGee described the abduction to him, she didn’t mention being raped.

He also acknowledges that he’s being paid by the defense for his work on this case—$125 an hour, or about $2,000 so far.

Heinrich has testified in more than fifty criminal trials, he tells me later, nine times out of ten for the defense. “Despite all of our efforts to be objective, we will have some bias that we take into the evaluating process,” he allows. “I try to wed my opinion to the evidence I’ve reviewed. But it’s an adversarial process, and it becomes a matter of convincing the jury, a matter of salesmanship sometimes.”

He also allows that the shooting could have been mainly a product of McGee’s borderline personality—but that PTSD was “certainly more dramatic as a defense argument.”

He never considered that McGee and François might have been involved before the night of the shooting. When I raise that possibility with him, he says that that would explain the blessing and kiss McGee said she gave François before killing him. Heinrich found that blessing and kiss “frankly bizarre.” He asked McGee about them, but she wasn’t able to explain them. If McGee and François were indeed involved, “that would have changed the whole dynamic of the offense—and maybe it would have changed my opinion, to be honest with you,” Heinrich says.

Now, in the courtroom, Nolan’s answer to Heinrich is psychiatrist Roni Seltzberg. Seltzberg, who’s employed by the county, has a diagnosis of
McGee that is less likely to engender sympathy: McGee’s main problem isn’t PTSD; it’s drug abuse. McGee acknowledged in her interview with Seltzberg that she’d been a heavy drinker, a habitual smoker of marijuana, and an occasional user of other drugs before her arrest. She told Seltzberg she’d started using drugs at age twelve because of “family problems” that she wouldn’t specify. Seltzberg says the sleep trouble and anxiety McGee described could have been products of the drug withdrawal she likely experienced after she was locked up. She doesn’t think McGee showed any particular fear of men before the shooting, pointing out that according to her confession “she apparently willingly went with at least three different men in one night.”

Placek counters Seltzberg with psychiatrist Alexander Obolsky.

This is Obolsky’s maiden trip to the stand for a Placek client—the beginning, Placek hopes, of a long and mutually beneficial relationship, like the one she has with Heinrich. Placek heard Obolsky speak at a recent psychiatry convention where she was “trolling for experts.” She’s planning to have him testify for another of her clients with even more at stake than McGee, a paranoid schizophrenic facing the death penalty for a quadruple murder. Today’s testimony is in part a dry run for that case, Placek has said, a chance for her to develop a “rhythm” with Obolsky.

Now Obolsky seconds Heinrich’s diagnosis of McGee. He tells Placek it’s reasonable to conclude that McGee was suffering from PTSD, given her symptoms and her “validated story of kidnapping,” and that the PTSD prompted the shooting of François. His conclusions regarding McGee are based on his review of the relevant records and reports; he never actually talked with her.

“
YOU
’
VE HEARD A LOT
of people tell you that Leslie McGee suffers from this or Leslie McGee suffers from that,” Nolan’s partner on the case, second chair Mark Ertler, tells the jury in his closing argument. “But did anybody tell you that she was not in control of her actions?”

The shooting was McGee’s “way of saying, ‘Somebody is going to pay for all the things that I feel have been done wrong to me,’ ” Ertler says. To render a verdict of only second-degree murder would be to give McGee a “license to kill because of the problems that she says she has.”

Ertler advises the jury to put more stock in McGee’s confession—given before she talked with defense lawyers or psychologists—than in her courtroom testimony. When a person tells conflicting stories, the first account is likely to be more accurate, he says. And McGee’s confession makes clear that McGee was bent on killing someone even before she encountered François, the prosecutor observes. She left her home that
morning intending to kill her boyfriend “and to the great misfortune of Jean François, he happened to get in the way.”

Once again Lisa Hampton, sister-in-law of François’s wife, is the only one in the gallery with a personal interest in the case. François’s common-law wife, Elizabeth August, had flown back to California, her current home, the day she testified. The only spectators in the gallery besides Hampton and myself are three assistant state’s attorneys. Hampton, who’s rocking her infant daughter in her arms, says she hopes McGee spends twenty-five years in prison. “That’ll give her time to think about what she did.”

It’s five in the evening when Placek begins her closing argument. She reminds the jury of Ertler’s contention that a person’s original account of an event is the most trustworthy. Then she further reminds the jury that before McGee gave her confession, she told a sergeant she shot the cabbie after he molested her and struck her. Thus it’s clear McGee was simply trying to protect herself from being raped, Placek says.

Placek barely mentions the North Chicago abduction. She’d just as soon the jury not dwell on that, given McGee’s performance on the stand.

The PD allows that she doesn’t know exactly what happened in François’s cab. But the prosecutors don’t either, she says. She gestures at her blank-faced client at the defense table: “I don’t know if
she
knows what happened.” But the likeliest explanation, Placek says, is that McGee shot François either to fend off a rape or because of her PTSD: “Otherwise, what is the motive? She did what she had to do based on her background.”

In his rebuttal argument, Nolan allows that “something probably did happen” to McGee in North Chicago, but something far less traumatic than what McGee described. After McGee met with her lawyers, he says, she probably realized the North Chicago episode was her only possible ticket out of the first-degree murder charge, but that she needed to embellish on the episode for it to help her.

Nolan thinks his best courtroom skill in a jury trial is his ability to focus jurors on the bottom line. “Keep it simple” is the advice he gives younger colleagues.

Now he tells the jury that François did something in the cab that offended McGee, “and she shot him and killed him—it’s that simple, folks.” He urges the jurors to ignore “all the other nonsense. There is no post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a murder, plain and simple.”

DEPUTY RHODES IS STUDYING
a pair of mail-order catalogs at the sheriff’s station, while Deputy Guerrero twirls the cylinder of the .357 McGee used to shoot François. It’s seven-thirty
P.M
., and the jury has been out a half hour. Guerrero doesn’t much care what the jury decides since “I
get paid either way.” The deputies’ lockup monitor shows McGee stretched out atop a steel bench, sound asleep. “Maybe we’ll go to a hotel, get some overtime,” Guerrero muses hopefully. But Rhodes shakes her head. Though she’s rooting for second degree, she’s expecting first, “in an hour, tops,” as she tells her partner. Then she reconsiders. “Well, their dinner is back there, so maybe an hour and a half.”

At nine-fifteen, the deputies hear laughter from the jury room. “They’ve reached a verdict. They’re all relaxed now,” Guerrero says.

The beep sounds a few minutes later.

Soon Placek is at the bars to the women’s lockup, calling to her client. McGee blinks awake and slowly pushes herself up on the bench. “Whatever the verdict, show nothing,” Placek instructs her. She always tells her clients this. She thinks it’s insensitive for defendants to celebrate in the courtroom when they’re acquitted, especially in murder cases. And she’d rather not give the prosecutors the satisfaction of seeing her clients break down when they’re convicted.

The parties are back at their tables a few minutes later, and the somber-faced jurors return to the jury box. Lisa Hampton has the gallery almost to herself—there’s just her baby, dozing in the infant seat next to her on the bench, and myself.

Locallo directs the foreperson to hand the verdict to Guerrero, and Guerrero delivers it to Locallo. Since the clerk is gone for the day, Locallo announces the verdict himself: “ ‘We, the jury, find the defendant, Leslie McGee, guilty of first-degree murder.’ ”

“Yes!” Hampton says.

Locallo polls the jurors. Some of them are wet-eyed, but they each acknowledge the verdict was theirs. The judge thanks them and dismisses them to the jury room. He sets a December sentencing date. McGee yawns as Rhodes ushers her out of the courtroom.

“First-degree murder, and she’s
yawning
,” Hampton says dejectedly as she lifts her baby from her infant seat. “I wanted to see the pain on her face.”

MCGEE IS IN BLUE
jail togs when she returns to 302 for sentencing on a mid-December morning. Placek is in a green suit jacket, and her hair is now red. “Looks nice. Matches the season,” Locallo tells her.

Both sides know Locallo has made up his mind on the sentence, and so they rush through the hearing. Nolan presents no witnesses in aggravation, Placek none in mitigation. Locallo asks McGee if she wants to say anything. McGee says she doesn’t. But then she adds softly, “I feel remorseful for what I did. I would like to apologize to my father for what I did.”

Locallo says that because McGee is only eighteen and has no previous
record, he thinks she can be rehabilitated. The murder was the result of an “unfortunate set of circumstances.” He gives McGee the minimum twenty years—and a contact visit with her father, who’s in the gallery today. The hearing is over in five minutes.

The contact visit consists of McGee and her broad-shouldered father clutching each other for almost ten minutes in the hallway outside the courtroom lockup, with Rhodes and Guerrero looking on uncomfortably. Finally Rhodes tells them it’s time for Leslie to be returned to the jail. Her father leaves the courtroom through the gallery. In the hallway, he tells me he’s worried about how prison will affect his daughter. He fears she’ll only slide farther downhill. His eyes are glistening, and he’s twisting a baseball cap in his hands. He wonders whether he disciplined her too harshly. He was tough on both his kids, he says, but especially on Leslie because she ran away so often.

With day-for-day credit, McGee will have to serve ten years. (The truth-in-sentencing law enacted in June 1998 requires first-degree murder convicts to serve 100 percent of their terms; but since the François murder predated that law, McGee is still eligible for the day-for-day credit.) In the jail before she’s shipped downstate, McGee says she intends to make the most of her time in prison. “I want to show my family that I’m more than they think I am. I have to forget what’s happened and go on with my life. I want to make myself be somebody people can look up to instead of down to.”

She’s shipped to the Dwight Correctional Center the day before Christmas Eve. The guards inspecting her upon admission discover a new tattoo on her thigh, a jailhouse artist’s work. The words “Live By The” and “Die By The” are printed alongside a sword.

LATER
, when I outline for Locallo the numerous facts suggesting a prior relationship between McGee and François, he’s at first taken aback. He says that it would disturb him if the jury was indeed presented an erroneous scenario of the crime. It would bother him, too, he says, if he sentenced McGee under a false presumption of how the crime occurred. “If what you say is true, that he was in fact her boyfriend, then the post-traumatic stress disorder is bullshit,” he says. “I don’t know what the truth is here.” But then he shrugs and turns to the bottom line. “If he was her boyfriend, then the question might be—so what? She still killed him.” He chuckles and adds, “She gave him a kiss and blew him away. So was justice done anyway? Sounds to me like it was.”

The jurors did not believe McGee’s account of the North Chicago episode, according to foreperson Selig Pearlstein. They speculated that the place McGee was staying was a drug house since it had no phone and since
McGee couldn’t recall anyone’s last name. They figured that McGee was high when she walked outside to use the pay phone. They didn’t believe she was raped. And they didn’t believe that the abduction traumatized her about men, particularly Haitian or Jamaican men, given that, according to her confession, she got into François’s car when François offered her a ride.

But the jurors felt sorry for her nonetheless, Pearlstein says. “We felt she was a street kid who’d probably been selling her body for drugs since she was twelve or thirteen. We didn’t know if Jean François was a good person or a bad person, but what we knew about him we weren’t impressed with. We went into the jury room planning to give her second-degree. But then we read the instructions, and we realized that according to the law, she was guilty of first-degree. No matter how the defense tried to cloud it, there was no denying she could have gotten out of the cab without doing serious harm to him and without being seriously hurt herself.”