Defending Jacob(83)
She lay curled up like a cat, her back to me. “Who was that?” she murmured into her pillow.
“Paul.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said it’s probably just a parked car. Everything’s okay.”
She groaned.
“He said you wouldn’t believe him.”
“He was right.”
27 | Openings
What was Neal Logiudice thinking when he stood up to deliver his opening statement to the jury? He was keenly aware of the two unmanned cameras on him. That much was clear as he meticulously buttoned the top two buttons of his coat. It was apparently a second new suit, not the same one he had worn the day before, though today’s suit was the same hip three-button style. (The shopping spree was a mistake. He tended to preen in his new costumes.) He must have imagined himself as a hero. Ambitious, sure, but his goals matched the public’s—what was good for Neal was good for everyone, except Jacob of course—so no harm in that. There must have been a rightness too in seeing me at the defense table, literally displaced. I don’t mean to suggest there was any sense of Oedipal payback in Logiudice’s head that day. Anyway, he gave no outward sign of it. As he arranged his new coat and stood for a moment plumping for the jury—the two juries, I should say, one in court, one on the other side of the TV cameras—I saw only a young man’s vanity. I could not hate him or even begrudge him a little self-satisfaction. He had graduated, grown up, he was finally The Man. We all have felt such things at one time or another. Oedipal or not, it is a pleasure after long years to stand in our fathers’ place, and it is a perfectly innocent pleasure. Anyway, why blame Oedipus? He was a victim. Poor Oedipus never meant to hurt anybody.
Logiudice nodded toward the judge (Show the jury you are respectful …). He glared balefully at Jacob as he passed (… and that you are not afraid of the defendant, because if you do not have the courage to look him in the eye and say “guilty,” how can you expect the jury to do it?). He stood directly in front of the jury with his fingertips resting on the front rail of the jury box (Close up the space between you; make them feel you are one of them).
“A teenage boy,” he said, “found dead. In a forest called Cold Spring Park. Early on a spring morning. A fourteen-year-old boy stabbed three times in a line across the chest and tossed down an embankment slick with mud and wet leaves, and left to die facedown less than a quarter mile from the school he’d been walking to, a quarter mile from the home he’d left only minutes before.”
His eyes roamed across the jury box.
“And the whole thing—the decision to do this, the choice—to take a life, to take this boy’s life—it only takes a second.”
He let the phrase hang there.
“One split second and”—he snapped his fingers—“snap. It only takes a second to lose your temper. And that is all you need, a second, an instant, to form the intention to murder. In this courtroom it is called malice aforethought. The conscious decision to kill, however quickly the intention forms, however briefly it is in the murderer’s mind. First-degree murder can happen just … like … that.”
He began to pace the length of the jury box, lingering to make eye contact with each juror as he passed.
“Let’s think about the defendant a moment. This is a case about a boy who had everything: good family, good grades, beautiful home in a wealthy suburb. He had it all, more than most, anyway, much more. But the defendant had something else too: he had a lethal temper. And when he was pushed—not too hard, just teased, just messed around with, the sort of thing that must go on every day in every school in the country—but when he was pushed a little too far and he decided he’d had enough, that lethal temper finally just … snapped.”
You must tell the jury the “story of the case,” the tale that led to the final act. Facts are not enough; you must weave them into a story. The jury must be able to answer the question “What is this case about?” Answer that question for them and you win. Distill the case down to a single phrase for them, a theme, even a single word. Embed that phrase in their minds. Let them take it back into the jury room with them, so that when they open their mouths to discuss the case, your words come tumbling out.
“The defendant snapped.” He snapped his fingers again.
He came to the defense table, stood too close, purposely disrespecting us by invading our space. He leveled his finger at Jacob, who looked down at his lap to avoid it. Logiudice was entirely full of shit but his technique was magnificent.
“But this wasn’t just any boy from a good home in a good suburb. And he wasn’t just any boy with a quick temper. This defendant had something else that set him apart.”
Logiudice’s finger slid from Jacob to me.
“He had a father who was an assistant district attorney. And not just any assistant district attorney either. No, the defendant’s father, Andrew Barber, was the First Assistant, the top man, in the very office where I work, right here in this building.”
In that moment I could have reached out and grabbed that f*cking finger and torn it off Logiudice’s pale freckled hand. I looked him in the eye, showed nothing.
“This defendant—”
He withdrew his finger, raised it above his shoulder as if he were testing the wind, then he wagged it in the air as he moved back to the jury box.