Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (17 page)

I rose from my chair. "Your Honor, in view of Mrs.
Lightner's condition, perhaps she might be excused?"

Jones was on his feet. Before he could say anything,
Holloway held up her hand.

"Mrs. Lightner," said the judge, in a quiet,
compassionate tone, "do you think you would be able to serve? As I
said before jury selection began, the defendant has been charged
with murder. And I'm afraid that some of the evidence may be
graphic and quite unpleasant. When I was pregnant," she added,
"it's not something I would have wanted to do."

Emphatically shaking her head, the young pregnant
mother of two insisted she was perfectly able to serve and wanted
to do so.

"I don't want my children growing up in a world where
someone gets away with murder," she insisted seriously. "I believe
in an eye for an eye," she added.

"Did you have something you wanted to say, Mr.
Jones?" Holloway asked without expression.

He made the best of it he could. "No, your Honor. I
just wanted to make sure she had a chance to decide for herself
whether or not she could serve."

"The court appreciates your concern," she remarked
dryly. "Mr. Antonelli, you may continue your examination."

After Mrs. Lightner, we moved on to the other jurors,
repeating ourselves over and over again. When we finished with the
twelve jurors called into the box, we began to use our peremptory
challenges, replacing one juror with another and taking the new one
through the same questions we had asked before.

No one really picks a jury. You start with the twelve
they give you, chosen at random from two dozen that are brought
into the courtroom, and go from there. Every lawyer has a theory
about what kind of jury to get and what kind to avoid, but you
never really have the choice. It is like playing poker: when you
throw away two cards, you do not get to ask the dealer for the two
that would give you the hand you want. The defense got rid of
Dolores Lightner, and in her place we got an overweight
thirty-five-year-old motorcycle mechanic with a Harley Davidson
tattoo on his arm.

We had been doing this for days, and I was bored with
it. I waited until he had squeezed into the chair. "Would you like
to be on this jury, Mr. Armstrong?"

"Sure." He shrugged. "Why not?"

"Do you think you can be a fair and impartial
juror?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Sinking back into my chair, I waved my hand
listlessly. "Pass this juror for cause, your Honor."

Finally we had a jury. The judge instructed the clerk
to swear them in. As I watched the eight women and four men
listening as the clerk read the oath, I found myself wondering if I
had not underestimated Richard Lee Jones's ability to ingratiate
himself. He worked a kind of magic with his voice. He had talked to
them, every one of them, slowly, patiently, as if they were
children who could only understand things put into the simplest of
terms. I had thought it was patronizing, yet instead of resenting
it they seemed almost grateful. I was not worried anymore about
whether Marshall Goodwin was guilty. Now that the trial had
started, the only fear I had left was the fear I might lose. It did
not matter what side I was on; whenever I stepped into a courtroom
all I could think about was winning.

The next morning, as I made my way through the crowd
that had begun to assemble in the corridor outside the courtroom
door, I heard a familiar voice. Dressed in a wrinkled summer-weight
suit, Harper Bryce was at my elbow. "I've got a bet down that says
no matter how long you go on opening, Jones goes longer."

"As long as you don't bet that he'll have more to
say."

Television crews were setting up their equipment. A
young woman with lacquered hair and a microphone dangling in her
hand was pacing back and forth, rehearsing her twelve-second lead.
Drinking coffee from plastic cups, several reporters lounged next
to the wall, while they read in the morning papers the stories they
had written last night.

"Any chance we could have another conversation?"
inquired Bryce casually, as we reached the door.

"Whenever you like."

"How about after court today?"

"I'm not sure about today," I said vaguely, "but
sometime soon. Same rules as before, right?"

Nodding, he reached in front of me and opened the
door. "It's always a pleasure, Mr. Antonelli," he said.

I was twenty minutes early, but the courtroom was
almost full. Everyone wanted to hear what was going to be said in
the two opening statements, in which each side would lay out what
they thought they could prove or were certain they could refute.
Alone at the counsel table, I pulled out the yellow legal pad on
which I had written my notes. Jones and his client had come in and
were sitting at the opposite end of the table. The court reporter
was inserting new tape into the stenotype machine. I reached into
my briefcase, removed a document from a file folder, and passed it
across.

Goodwin glanced down at the paper, his face still
animated from the conversation he had been having with his lawyer.
As soon as he saw me, the lively expression faded. He turned back
to Richard Lee Jones, and I heard his voice, eager and dismissive,
start up again.

Short and chubby, with large, astonished eyes and a
small, bewildered mouth, the court clerk stumbled in like someone
not quite sure she has come to the right place and, almost as if it
were an apology, announced, "All rise."

With a quick nod, Irma Holloway acknowledged our
presence at the counsel table and took her seat on the bench.
"Bring in the jury," she ordered with a peremptory wave of her
hand, as she glanced down at the court file.

"I have a matter for the court, your Honor," said
Jones.

The clerk froze in her tracks, looked up at the
bench, and waited for instruction.

Knitting her fingers together, the judge rested her
hands on top of the file and gazed at Jones expectantly. "Yes?"

"Your Honor, the counsel for the State has just
handed us an amended witness list. The amendment consists of a
single name, the name of the defendant's wife." He went on,
speaking in slow, sweeping phrases. "The defense would like the
opportunity to file a formal motion in opposition to the use of
spousal testimony by the prosecution, and we would further request
oral argument on that motion."

I was on my feet, waiting for him to finish.

Holloway turned her attention to me. "Mr.
Antonelli?"

"The decision was made only yesterday to call the
defendant's wife, Kristin Maxfield, as a witness for the
prosecution. I doubt if she has yet been put under subpoena. If Mr.
Jones means, by his reference to spousal testimony, those
statements protected by the spousal privilege, I can assure the
court that is not the kind of testimony we hope to elicit. I would
add, your Honor, that Mr. Jones cannot possibly claim that the
decision to call the defendant's wife is a surprise. He is
certainly aware that Mrs. Goodwin was not only interviewed by the
police but testified before the grand jury that returned the
indictment in this case."

"

Well, I am surprised!" Jones exclaimed.

Angrily, Holloway turned on him. "Mr. Jones, in this
courtroom you will speak when I ask you to and not one moment
before. Now, what is it you want to say?"

He went on as if he had not heard a word she had
said. "I'm surprised that Mr. Antonelli is so desperate to win that
he's thrown away all respect for a married woman's privacy. Leaving
aside the question of whether Mrs. Goodwin's testimony does or
doesn't fall within the legal prohibition on spousal
communications, there is, after all, something called common
decency. I can't imagine any lawyer asking a woman to help him
convict her husband. I just can't imagine that, your Honor, and
we're requesting a formal hearing to make sure it doesn't happen
here."

Holloway fixed him with a withering stare. "Save it
for closing argument, counselor. Your motion is denied. At the time
the witness testifies, you can of course raise any objections you
might have." She paused, lifting her thin eyebrows. "Any objection,
that is, that has some basis in the law." Turning away, she found
the clerk still waiting to be told what to do.

"You may bring them in now," she said.

A few minutes later, the clerk returned, followed by
a shuffling parade of a dozen men and women chosen for the
anonymous notoriety of deciding if Marshall Goodwin had murdered
his wife. As they settled themselves into the jury box, the elderly
Mildred Willis exchanged a brief smile with the juror next to her,
the motorcycle mechanic. They seemed to like each other.

Chapter Twelve

Irma Holloway was a study in formality. "Ladies and
gentlemen," she began, in a steady voice, "we begin with opening
statements from the two attorneys. The prosecutor will go first and
the defense will follow. Opening statements are for the purpose of
providing you with a preview of the evidence each side expects to
produce during the course of the trial."

With a look of the utmost seriousness, she went on to
explain. "There are only two kinds of evidence. There is the
evidence given by the testimony of witnesses, witnesses sworn under
oath to tell the truth. And there is the evidence provided by
things themselves, things that frequently serve as what we call
exhibits. Simple examples would be a weapon that was used in the
commission of a crime, blood samples, or fingerprints."

Pausing, she looked from one end of the jury box to
the other. "The opening statements of the lawyers are not evidence.
I want you all to be clear about this. You are not here to be
persuaded by the speeches the lawyers give, you are here to decide
whether or not the evidence in this case—and only the
evidence—proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant has
done what is alleged in the indictment." With one decisive nod,
like the last hammer stroke that drives in the nail, she folded her
hands together, gazed straight ahead, and invited me to begin.

"Mr. Antonelli."

I walked close to the jury box and let my eye go from
face to face until I had looked at them all. "This is a terrible
case. You will wish you were somewhere else when you hear some of
the things that will be said in this courtroom and see some of the
photographs of what happened two years ago, when Nancy Goodwin was
raped and murdered in a motel room a hundred miles away. I'm not
going to ask you to imagine what it must have been like for
her—what she must have felt, what she must have thought—when, with
her mouth taped shut, she saw the blade of the knife and felt a
hand grab her by the hair and pull back her head—when, just before
he slashed her throat, she heard the killer say that her husband,
Marshall Goodwin, had paid him to do it. No one can really imagine
what that must have been like. No one needs to. The act itself is
brutal enough."

I went back to the beginning and started over.
Dispassionately and concisely, I described the sequence of events
that led from the discovery of Nancy Goodwin's body to the
voluntary confession of the man who had killed her. "The law
insists, quite properly, that no one can be convicted of a crime on
the testimony of a co-conspirator alone. The law requires
additional evidence: first, that a crime was actually committed
and, second, that the defendant was involved.

"The law does not require that this additional
evidence be the testimony of an eyewitness, or evidence which by
itself would be sufficient to convict. We will provide all the
evidence necessary to corroborate the testimony of the killer,
Travis Quentin. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the
defendant, Marshall Goodwin, had a private conversation with
Quentin, dropped the serious criminal charges that were pending
against him, gave him precise instructions on the time and place
his wife would be alone, and, in addition, gave him ten thousand
dollars in cash as payment for murder."

I spoke for less than thirty minutes; Richard Lee
Jones spoke for more than an hour. The glittering blue and grey
snakeskin boots he had worn at the arraignment were now replaced by
plain brown ones. With sorrow and contempt, he recited a tale of
police incompetence and official misconduct with such earnest
conviction that by the time he got to the end he had probably
talked himself into believing it.

The premise was straightforward, and once you
accepted it everything else seemed to make sense. Moving slowly
back and forth in front of the jury box, stopping just long enough
to fix them with looks of studied sincerity, Jones insisted that
the police had bungled the initial investigation by failing to
secure the crime scene in a way that would have preserved evidence
left behind by the killer.

"Imagine what it must have been like to find out that
the wife of the chief deputy district attorney of the largest
county in the state has been murdered and you've managed to destroy
any chance there might have been to find her killer. Now imagine
what it must have felt like when someone saved you all that
embarrassment not only by confessing to the crime but also claiming
that lurking behind this whole thing, masterminding it, was none
other than this evil genius, the chief deputy district attorney
himself!