Robert Tanenbaum: Outrage

“Objection,” said Langton, an attractive thirtysomething brunette. She didn’t need to address the issue further. While a defendant may have been arrested looking like he’d been living in a sewer, the prosecution was not allowed to comment when the defense team cut their client’s hair, shaved and showered him, put him through detox if necessary, and then dressed him up like a preppy Dartmouth premed student.

“Sustained; continue, Mr. Karp,” Dermondy said.

Karp nodded to the judge and then turned back to the defendant. “Here in this courtroom, the defendant hardly looks like the killer we all know him to be. He even wept for you on that witness stand with those big, brown eyes blinking away the tears. Listen to his tragic story, look at him frightened and demoralized in his seat now, and it’s easy to feel sympathy for him.”

Karp whirled and strode over to the prosecution table, where he picked up two eight-by-ten portrait photographs depicting the murder victims as they’d appeared in life. He held them up for the jurors to see. “But I would suggest that such sympathy is misplaced. It rightfully belongs to these two women. A young wife, Olivia Yancy, eager to move into a better, safer neighborhood, so that someday she could feel comfortable raising her children there. But she was instead ambushed by an evil and manipulative predator, the defendant, who stalked her because she was defenseless and vulnerable and lured her into his murderous trap under the guise of friendship.”

As he spoke, Karp handed the photographs to the jury foreman and again pointed at the defendant, who quailed but did not look up. “And her mother, Beth Jenkins, a sixty-year-old widow, who went to help her daughter pack her family possessions for the move but walked in on Olivia being brutalized by that man here in this courtroom sitting so meekly at the defense table.”

Stepping back from the jury rail, Karp allowed his voice to rise along with the genuine emotion he felt boiling to the surface. “So often evil men are made to seem like victims-they say they were only ‘following orders’ in Nazi Germany, or hitting back at the oppressors of Muslims everywhere… or they were abused as children. At the same time, it’s almost obscene how quickly we forget who the real victims are, that they weren’t just the numbers tattooed on their arms, or nameless, faceless office workers, or merely photographs to be passed around a jury box. Take a good look at the women in those photographs, ladies and gentlemen, and remember, they were real and they were the victims.”

Karp pointed at the defense table. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we can understand that outside forces may help lead a man to commit evil deeds, but it does not justify or excuse the sort of horrors and suffering he may inflict on other human beings… as this defendant inflicted on Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins.”

He paused, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. “You may ask, ‘Aren’t all murders horrible?’ And ‘Isn’t the taking of any life equally reprehensible?’ Good questions. So how do we differentiate between a murderer who deserves life in prison and one who deserves to be executed? And isn’t it enough to remove the offender from the population and lock him away with no hope of ever getting out?”

Karp rocked slightly on his heels and leaned on the jury rail, facing the jurors eye to eye. “Make no mistake, my colleague, Assistant DA Ray Guma, and I considered these very issues before deciding to seek the death penalty in this case.” He then stepped back and continued. “And we decided that because the defendant’s outrages were so cruel, unspeakable, and inhumane, if there is to be a death penalty, then beyond any and all doubt, this defendant’s evil qualifies. Let me suggest that perhaps the best way to demonstrate to you how we reached our conclusion, and the conclusion we are asking you to reach, is by going through the same process we did of reviewing the evidence and recalling what happened on that terrible day a little more than a year and a half ago.”

The courtroom hushed; all eyes were on Karp. Even the defendant felt compelled to look up. “It was early afternoon when the deceased, Olivia Yancy, finished packing for the move to her new apartment and walked three blocks to her neighborhood grocery store. That night was to be the Yancys’ last in the old apartment, and to celebrate, she was going to make a special dinner. She was happy. Her husband Dale had just been promoted to full professor at Columbia University. And the new apartment had two bedrooms, one for the child she intended to conceive… Life was good.”

It was one in the afternoon on a smoking-hot July day in Manhattan with the humidity and stench of the city hovering above the asphalt and concrete as a noisome translucent vapor. Ahmed Kadyrov wiped the sweat from his forehead as he watched the pretty young woman struggle with two stuffed paper bags, one in each arm, as she exited the mom-and-pop grocer on 110th Street on the Upper West Side. He waited until the auburn-haired beauty started off down the sidewalk and then hurried to catch up.

Despite being a methamphetamine junkie beginning to show the signs of his addiction-a deteriorating complexion with dark circles under his large brown eyes-Kadyrov was still a decent-looking young man of twenty-two who was often mistaken as Hispanic with his neatly coifed black hair and trim mustache. But he was Chechen, having immigrated to the United States at age twelve, and still spoke with an accent, which women found attractive.

However, the only thing Ahmed Kadyrov liked about women was terrorizing and raping them, and then robbing “the bitches” to feed his demanding drug habit. Lately, he’d been getting a kick knocking them around a little too, and the last time had been particularly gratifying when he used the switchblade he carried in his pants pocket to draw a few drops of blood from his victim’s neck.

As a boy he’d watched as a Russian army squad raped his mother and sisters. It was an event the psychiatrist at the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx, where he’d served a year for his first sexual assault, had told him was at the root of his “issues with females and predilection toward sexual violence.” But he didn’t give a shit what some “fag shrink” thought; if anything he identified with the Russian brutes. Women, especially pretty ones like his mother and sisters, were whores and got what they deserved.

Kadyrov found the areas around the colleges in the five boroughs to be good hunting grounds. There were lots of pretty young women, especially in this neighborhood near Columbia University, which increased his odds of finding one in need of a “Good Samaritan,” the ruse he used to win their confidence. They could be so incredibly gullible. For instance, he usually struck during the day, when such women thought they were safer accepting help from a neatly dressed stranger in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khaki pants with a nice smile and friendly attitude.

“Excuse me,” he said as he moved slightly in front of the young woman, forcing her to slow her pace and adjust her heavy bags, “may I help you, please, to carry?” He laid the accent and foreign word groupings on especially heavy when on the prowl; he perceived that for some reason, women also thought polite-seeming European types were less dangerous.

The young woman smiled but shook her head. “Thank you, that’s very kind,” she said. “But I’m only going three blocks, and I wouldn’t want you to go out of your way.”

Kadyrov was ready for the expected response and reached for what appeared to be the heaviest bag before she could protest further. “Is no problem, I am going this direction. Please, I help.” He turned up the smile a notch with a look in his eyes that indicated his feelings would be hurt if she refused his generosity.