Defending Jacob(75)

I had already decided Bloody Billy Barber was not going to come within ten miles of the witness stand. He was worse than a liar—he was a bad liar.

“All right,” I said, “you want to know what I came for? This is what I came for.” I held up a little packet: a sterile swab and a plastic envelope to hold it. “I need to wipe your gums with this. For DNA.”

“The guards won’t let you.”

“Let me worry about the guards. I need you to let me.”

“What do you need my DNA for?”

“We’re testing for a certain mutation. It’s called MAOA Knockout.”

“What in the f*ck is MAOA Knockout?”

“It’s a genetic mutation. They think it might code your body to be more aggressive in certain environments.”

“Who thinks that?”

“Scientists.”

His eyes narrowed. You could practically read his thoughts, the selfish opportunism of a career con: maybe here was an argument to flip his own conviction.

“The more you talk, the more I think maybe Jacob isn’t so innocent.”

“I didn’t come here to hear your opinion. I came to get your spit on this Q-tip. If you say no, I’ll go get a court order and come back and we’ll take it the hard way.”

“Why would I say no?”

“Why would you do anything? Guys like you I don’t understand.”

“What’s to understand? I’m the same as anyone else. Same as you.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever.”

“Don’t give me ‘okay, whatever.’ Did you ever stop to think that without me you wouldn’t exist?”

“Every day.”

“See? There.”

“It’s not a happy thought.”

“Well, I’m still your old man, kiddo, whether you like it or not. It don’t have to make you happy.”

“It don’t.”

After some negotiation and a call to the deputy warden, a deal was struck. I would not be allowed to swab my father’s mouth personally, which would have been the best method because it would create the cleanest chain of custody: I could testify that the sample was genuine because the Q-tip never left my possession. Not at Northern. “No contact” meant no contact. At length, I was allowed to give the kit to a guard, who passed it to my father.

I talked him through the procedure step by step on the phone in the visiting booth. “All you have to do is break open the package and wipe the Q-tip around your cheek a little. Just so it soaks up a little spit. Swallow first. Then wipe it on the inside of your cheek near the back of your mouth, back where your jaws meet. Then I want you to put the Q-tip in that plastic bottle there, without touching the tip to anything else, then screw the top on. Then I want you to put that label across the top, and sign and date the label. And I need to be able to watch you do all that, so don’t block me.”

With his hands still cuffed, he ripped open the paper package holding the swab. It was a long wooden stick, longer than an ordinary Q-tip. He put the swab straight into his mouth like a lollipop and he pretended to bite it. Then, looking at me through the window, he bared his teeth and wiped the cotton tip across his upper front gums. Then he swirled it around at the back of his mouth, in the pocket of his cheek. He held the stick up to the window.

“Now you.”





Part

THREE


“I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environmment.”





—JOHN F. WATKINS,

Principles of Behaviorism (1913)





24 | It’s Different for Mothers


For years I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat. But I was never intimidated, and I spat on prosecutors who were—the politicians and wheeler-dealers who were afraid to try a case that was not a sure thing, who would not risk a not-guilty. To a prosecutor, there is no dishonor in a not-guilty, not when the alternative is a sleazy deal. We are not measured by simple won-lost records. The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it. That was Logiudice’s way, not mine. Better to fight and lose than sell out your victim.

That is one reason I loved homicides. You cannot plead guilty to murder in Massachusetts. Every case must go to trial. The rule is a remnant of the days when murder was punishable by death in this state. In a capital case, no shortcuts were permitted, no deals. The stakes were simply too high. So to this day every homicide case, no matter how lopsided, must be tried. Prosecutors cannot cherry-pick the sure winners for trial and the long shots to dump. Well, I liked to think, so much the better. Then the difference will be me. I will win even with the weaker case. That was how I saw it. But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right—that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking, and in Jacob’s case I was.