Defending Jacob(85)
“So what was that trigger? What was it that converted a fantasy of murder into the real thing?”
He paused. It was the central question to be answered, the riddle Logiudice simply had to solve: how does a normal boy with no history of violence suddenly do something so brutal? Motive is an element of every case, not legally but in the head of each and every juror. That is why motiveless (or undermotivated) crimes are so hard to prove. Jurors want to understand what happened; they want to know why. They demand a logical answer. Apparently Logiudice had none. He could only offer theories, guesses, probabilities, “murder genes.”
“We may never know,” he admitted, doing his best to shrug off the gaping hole in his case, the very strangeness of the crime, its apparent inexplicability. “Did Ben call him a name? Did he call him faggot or *, as he had in the past? Or geek or loser? Did he push him, threaten him, bully him somehow? Probably.”
I shook my head. Probably?
“Whatever it was that set the defendant off, when he met Ben Rifkin in Cold Spring Park that fateful morning, April 12, 2007, around eight-twenty A.M.—where he knew Ben would be, because the two of them had been walking to school through those woods for years—he chose to put his plan into action. He stabbed Ben three times. He punched the knife into his chest”—he demonstrated with three sword-fighter thrusts of his right arm—“one, two, three. Three neat, evenly spaced wounds in a line across the chest. Even the pattern of the wounds suggests premeditation, coolness, self-control.”
Logiudice paused, a little uncertainly this time.
The jurors appeared unsure also. They watched him with expressions of concern. His opening statement, which had started so strong, had foundered on this all-important question of why. He seemed to want it both ways: at one moment Logiudice was suggesting Jacob had snapped, lost his temper, and murdered his classmate in a sudden rage. A moment later, he was suggesting Jacob had planned the murder for weeks, deliberated coolly over the details, used the lawyerly expertise of a prosecutor’s son, then waited for his opportunity. The trouble, obviously, was that Logiudice himself had never quite been able to answer the question of motive, no matter how many theories he threw at it. The murder of Ben Rifkin just did not make sense. Even now, after months of investigation, we were asking, Why? I was sure the jury would sense Logiudice’s problem.
“When it was done, the defendant disposed of the knife. And he went off to school. He pretended to know nothing, even when the school was put in a lockdown and the police were frantically trying to solve the case. He kept his cool.
“Ah, but the defendant ought to have known, this son of a prosecutor, from his own long apprenticeship, that murder always leaves a trace. There is no such thing as an immaculate murder. Murder is messy, bloody, filthy work. Blood sprays and spatters. In the excitement of killing, mistakes are made.
“The defendant had left a fingerprint on the victim’s sweatshirt, pressed into the victim’s own wet blood—a print that could only have been made in the immediate aftermath of the murder.
“And then the lies begin to pile up. When the fingerprint is finally identified, weeks after the murder, the defendant switches his story. After denying for weeks that he knew anything about the murder, now he claims he was there but only after the murder.”
A skeptical look.
“A motive: an outcast schoolboy with a grudge against a classmate who had been teasing him.
“A weapon: the knife.
“A plan: detailed in a description of the murder written by the defendant himself.
“The physical evidence: the fingerprint on the victim’s body, in the victim’s own blood.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is overwhelming. This is a mountain of evidence. It leaves no room for doubt. When this trial is over and I have proved all the things I have just described to you, I am going to stand right here before you again, this time to ask you to do your part, to say what it obviously true, to draw the only conclusion you can: guilty. That word, guilty, will be hard to say, I promise you. It is hard for anyone to judge another. All our lives we are taught not to. ‘Judge not,’ the Bible tells us. It is especially hard when the defendant is a child. We believe fervently in the innocence of our children. We want to believe in it; we want our children to be innocent. But this child is not innocent. No. When you look at all the evidence against him, you will know in your heart of hearts there is only one just verdict in this case: guilty. Verdict, from the Latin for ‘say the truth.’ That is all I am going to ask you to do, say the truth: guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”
He gave them a look that was determined, righteous, imploring.
“Guilty,” he said again.
He bowed his head mournfully, then returned to his chair, where he slumped down, apparently drained or lost in thought or grieving the dead boy, Ben Rifkin.
Behind me, a woman in the audience whimpered. There were sounds of footsteps and the swinging door as she rushed out of the courtroom. I did not dare turn around to look.
My sense was that Logiudice’s opening had been quite good. It was by far the best I had ever seen him deliver. But it was not the home run he needed. There was still room for doubt. Why did he do it? The jurors must have sensed the weakness in his case, the doughnut hole at its center. That was a real problem for the prosecution, since there is no time in a trial when the state’s case looks stronger than in the opening statement, where the story is pristine and uncontradicted, before the evidence has been dinged up by the realities of a trial, bumbling friendly witnesses, expert hostile witnesses, cross-examination, and all the rest. My impression was that he had left us an opportunity.