Defending Jacob(79)
“Yes, Your Honor, that’s the gist.”
“Mr. Logiudice? Do you want to be heard or will you rest on your brief? It seems to me the defense is entitled to a hearing on that sort of evidence before it comes in. Mind you, I am not excluding such evidence definitively. I am merely ruling that, if you choose to offer evidence of a genetic tendency to violence, we will hold a hearing at that time, outside the jury’s presence, to decide whether it will be admitted or not.”
“Yes, Your Honor, I would like to be heard on that.”
The judge blinked at him. His face read plain as day, Sit down and shut up.
Logiudice stood and buttoned his suit coat, a slim three-button number that, when buttoned up this way, did not fit him properly. Logiudice’s neck craned forward slightly while the jacket stayed erect, which caused the coat collar to float an inch or two away from his neck like a monk’s cowl.
“Your Honor, the Commonwealth’s position—and we are prepared to offer expert evidence on this point—is that the science of behavioral genetics has made great strides and continues to advance every day, and it is already mature enough by far and away to be admitted here. We would submit that this is even the extreme case where to exclude such evidence would be improper—”
“The motion is allowed.”
Logiudice stood there a moment, unsure if his pocket had just been picked.
“Mr. Logiudice,” the judge explained as he signed the motion, Allowed. French, J., “I have not excluded the evidence. My ruling is simply that, if you want to offer it, you will have to provide notice to the defense and we will have a hearing on its admissibility before you offer it to the jury. Understood?”
“Understood, Your Honor.”
“Let me be crystal clear: not a word of it until I rule it’s coming in.”
“Understood, Your Honor.”
“We’re not going to turn this into a circus.” The judge sighed. “All right, anything else before I bring in the jury venire?”
The lawyers shook their heads.
With a series of nods—the judge to the clerk, the clerk to the court officer—the potential jurors were fetched from one of the lower floors. They shuffled in, rubbernecking the courtroom like tourists wandering through Versailles. The chamber must have disappointed them. It was a grungy courtroom in the modern style: high boxy ceilings, minimalist furnishings of maple wood and black laminate, muted indirect lighting. Two flags drooped from listing flagpoles, an American flag to the judge’s right and the flag of Massachusetts to his left. The American flag at least had its original vivid colors; the state flag, once pure white, had faded to a dingy ivory. Otherwise there was nothing, no statue, no chiseled Latin inscription, no portrait of a forgotten judge, nothing to relieve the Scandinavian austerity of the design. I had been in this courtroom a thousand times, but the jurors’ disappointment made me look at it, finally, and realize how exhausted it all appeared.
The jury pool filled the entire gallery at the back of the courtroom, leaving only the two benches that had been reserved for the defendant’s family, reporters, and a few others whose courthouse connections entitled them to remain. The potential jurors were a mix of working people and housewives, kids and retirees. Jury pools usually skewed slightly blue-collar and underemployed, since these were the people more likely to respond to a summons. But this jury pool had a vaguely professional look to it, I thought. Lots of good haircuts, new shoes, BlackBerry holsters, pens sticking out of pockets. This too was good for us, I decided. We wanted smart, coolheaded jurors, people with the brains to understand a technical defense or the limitations of scientific evidence, and the balls to say Not guilty.
We began the process of voir dire, the question-and-answer process by which juries are chosen. Jonathan and I each had our jury seating charts, a table of two rows, six columns—twelve places in all, plus two extra boxes on the right side of the sheet—matching the chairs in the jury box. Twelve jurors, plus two alternates who would hear all the evidence but would not take part in the deliberations unless one of the jurors dropped out. Fourteen candidates were called forward, fourteen chairs were filled, we scribbled the names plus a few notes in the boxes on our scorecards, and the process began.
Jonathan and I conferred on each potential juror. We had six peremptory challenges, which we could use to eliminate a juror without stating a reason, and an unlimited number of challenges “for cause,” meaning challenges based on some explicit reason to think the juror would be biased. For all the strategizing, jury selection has always been something of a shot in the dark. There are pricey experts who claim to remove some of the guesswork using focus groups, psychological profiling, statistics, and so on—the scientific method—but predicting how a stranger will judge your case, especially based on the very limited information in a jury questionnaire, is frankly more art than science, the more so in Massachusetts where the rules severely limit how extensively jurors may be questioned. And yet, we tried to sort them. We looked for education; for suburbanites who might sympathize with Jacob and not hold his comfortable background against him; for dispassionate professions like accountant, engineer, programmer. Logiudice tried to load up on working folks, parents, anyone who might be outraged at the crime and who would have little problem believing a boy could kill even on scant provocation.
Jurors came forward, sat, were dismissed, and new candidates came forward and sat, and we scribbled details about them in our seating charts—