Defending Jacob(86)
“Defense?” the judge said.
Jonathan stood up. It struck me at the time—and still does now, when I see him—that he was one of those men whom it is easy to imagine as a boy, even in his gray-haired sixties. His hair was perpetually mussed, his coat unbuttoned, his tie and collar always a little askew, as if the whole getup were a boys’ school uniform that he wore only because the rules required it. He stood before the jury box and scratched the back of his head and his face became perplexed as he thought it all over. For all anyone knew, he had not prepared a thing to say and needed a moment to compose his thoughts. After Logiudice’s long opening, which somehow managed to seem both rehearsed and rambling, Jonathan’s rumpled spontaneity was a breath of fresh air. Now, I admire Jonathan and I like him too, so I may be placing a thumb on the scale for him, but it seemed to me, even before he opened his mouth to speak, that he was the more likeable of the two lawyers, which is no small thing. Compared with Logiudice, who seemed unable to draw a breath without calculating how it would be seen by others, Jonathan was all naturalness, all ease. Slouching in the courtroom in his lousy suit, distracted by his own thoughts, he looked as at home as a man in his pajamas in his own kitchen eating over the sink.
“You know,” he began, “I think about one thing he said, the lawyer for the government.” He waved his arm behind him in the general direction of Logiudice. “The death of a young man like Ben Rifkin is awful. Even among all the crimes, all the murders, all the terrible things we see here, it’s just tragic. He was just a boy. And all the years this boy had in front of him, all the things he might have become, the great doctor, great artist, the wise leader, it’s all lost. All lost.
“When you see a tragedy as enormous as that, you want to make it right, you want to fix it somehow. You want to see justice done. Maybe you feel angry; you want to see someone pay. We all feel these things, we’re all only human.
“But Jacob Barber is innocent. I want to say that again so there’s no misunderstanding: Jacob Barber is completely innocent. He did nothing at all, he had nothing to do with this murder. This is the wrong man.
“The evidence you just heard about, it all turns out to be nothing. The moment you scratch the surface, the moment you look at it, you understand what really happened, and the state’s case blows away like smoke. That fingerprint, for example, which the government lawyer made so much of. You will hear how that fingerprint got there, just as Jacob told the policeman who arrested him, the moment he was asked. He found his classmate lying on the ground wounded, and he did what any good person would do: he tried to help. He rolled Ben over to check on him, to see if he was okay, to help him. And when he saw Ben was dead, he did the exact same thing many of us would do: he got scared. He did not want to get involved. He worried that if he told anyone he’d seen the body, let alone touched it, he would become a suspect, he might be accused of something he did not do. Was that the right reaction? Of course not. Does he wish he had been braver and told the truth right from the start? Of course he does. But he is a boy, he is human, and he made a mistake. There’s no more to it than that.
“Don’t—”
He stopped, looked down, considered his next sentence.
“Don’t let it happen twice. One boy is dead. Don’t destroy another innocent boy to make up for it. Don’t let this case become a second tragedy. We’ve had enough tragedy already.”
The first witness was Paula Giannetto, the jogger who discovered the body. I did not know this woman but I recognized her from around town, from the market or Starbucks or the dry cleaner. Newton is not a small town, but it is divided into several “villages” and within these neighborhoods the same faces keep popping up. Oddly, I did not remember seeing her jogging in Cold Spring Park, though apparently we both ran there often around the time of the murder.
Logiudice led her through her testimony, which dragged on too long. He was over-thorough, anxious to get from her every last ounce of detail and pathos there was to be got. Ordinarily, for the prosecutor a funny transformation takes place with the first witness: after standing center-stage for his opening statement, the prosecutor now steps out of the spotlight. The focus shifts to the witness, and the rules require the prosecutor to be almost passive in his questions. He steers the witness or prods her along with neutral questions like “What happened next?” or “What did you see then?” But Logiudice was quite picky about the details he wanted from Paula Giannetto. He kept stopping her to probe about this or that. Jonathan never objected to any of this, since none of the testimony tied Jacob to the murder even remotely. But again I sensed Logiudice fumbling his case, not by some grand strategic blunder but inch by inch, in a thousand little ways. (Was this wishful thinking? Maybe. I do not pretend to be objective.) Giannetto was on the stand for the better part of an hour relating her story, which was essentially unchanged since she first told it the day of the murder.
It had been a cool, damp spring morning. She was running along a hilly section of trail through Cold Spring Park when she saw what seemed to be a boy lying facedown on a leaf-strewn embankment, which sloped down to a tiny algae-skinned pond. The boy wore jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. His backpack had tumbled down the hill near him. Giannetto was jogging by herself and she did not see anyone else near the body. She had passed a couple of other joggers and kids walking to school (the park was a common route to the McCormick School, which abutted it), but she saw no one near the body. She had not heard anything either, no cries or sounds of a struggle, since she had been listening to music on her iPod, which she wore in a holder strapped to her upper arm. She was even able to name the song that was playing when she saw the body: “This Is the Day” by a group called The The.