Joseph Teller - Depraved Indifference

The playing of the video for the jurors turned out to be every bit the horror show Jaywalker had expected it to be. They got to see it only once, but from the rapt attention they appeared to give it, once was enough. As he watched it from the defense table, the only thing Jaywalker could take comfort from was the dimming of the courtroom lights, allowing him and his client to hide in the semidarkness. But then the lights came back up, and there was no place to hide, literally or figuratively.

On cross-examination, he focused on the sources of information that Landon Miller and his team had relied on in putting the video together.

JAYWALKER: Did you interview the driver of the Audi?

MILLER: No.

JAYWALKER: Did you try to?

MILLER: No. There wasn't time.

JAYWALKER: Did you try to contact me?

MILLER: No.

JAYWALKER: Interview any of the other drivers or eyewitnesses?

MILLER: No.

JAYWALKER: So whom did you interview?

MILLER: May I check my notes?

JAYWALKER: Sure. I imagine Mr. Firestone will give me a copy of them sometime next year.

THE COURT: The jurors will disregard that remark.

MILLER: We interviewed Mr. Firestone, Mr. Kaminsky and Investigator Sheetz.

JAYWALKER: That's it?

MILLER: That's it.

JAYWALKER: Two prosecutors and one prosecution witness?

MILLER: I guess so.

JAYWALKER: Kind of like Fox News? Fair and bal anced?

FIRESTONE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

JAYWALKER: Let me try to understand this, Mr. Miller. You made a movie version of what Mr. Firestone, Mr. Kaminsky and Investigator Sheetz told you. You spoke to not a single eyewitness. You didn't even attempt to speak with anyone from the defense. Am I correct?

MILLER: Yes.

JAYWALKER: Care to tell us how much you charged the taxpayers of Rockland County for this production?

FIRESTONE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained as to form.

JAYWALKER: How much did you bill for your services?

FIRESTONE: Objection.

THE COURT: Overruled.

MILLER: That's a proprietary matter.

THE COURT: Not anymore it isn't. Please answer the question.

MILLER: (Inaudible)

JAYWALKER: I couldn't hear that.

MILLER: One million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Which, judging from the collective gasp emanating from the jury box, was as good a time for Jaywalker to collect his notes and sit down as he was going to get.

The setting up of the video equipment, the previews, the arguing, the instructions to the jurors, the actual showing, the testimony and the removal of the equipment left no room for additional witnesses in the morning session. Which was just as well, as far as Jaywalker was concerned. He needed to talk to Carter Drake, in order to straighten out the business of Amanda's having been seated next to him in the Audi rather than driving the Lexus with Eric.

He did it locked in a holding cell with his client over the lunch hour. He even broke his no-lunch rule and accepted a cheese sandwich from a guard, as well as a cup of warm yellowish water he guessed was tea, though only after subjecting it to a repeated smell test.

For lack of imagination, he tried the same ploy with Carter that he had two days earlier with Eric. "I've got an interesting bit of news for you," he said.

"What's that?"

"Firestone has photos he subpoenaed from EZPass."

"Oh?"

"It seems you weren't alone in the Audi," said Jaywalker. "There's a woman sitting in the passenger seat, and from the back she looks very much like your wife. And the shot of the Lexus shows only a driver in the front, and he looks an awful lot like your son."

Drake finished swallowing a mouthful of stale bread and cheese. Velveeta must have somehow come in with the low bid for the concession, Jaywalker had already decided. A million and a quarter to piss away on a oneminute cartoon was okay, though.

"Why can't you keep my family out of this?" asked Drake.

"Why can't you tell me the truth?" countered Jaywalker. "Then maybe I can." He left it at that. This was neither the time nor the place for a lecture on trust, honesty and professional ethics.

"So what if she was with me?"

"Don't you see? It changes everything. For starters, the wasp story won't sell."

"Why not?"

"Because," Jaywalker explained, "if there had really been a wasp, your wife could have dealt with it. You already had enough on your plate, driving-"

"Drunk?"

"You said it. I didn't."

"Okay," said Carter. "You want the truth, here's the truth. My wife was in the car with me. That much is true. But there was a wasp, and when it started flying around, I asked her to kill it. But she was angry at me, and she wouldn't do it. So I tried. I probably even made a bigger deal of it than I should have. You know, reaching way over to accentuate the fact that she wouldn't help me. You know the rest."

Did he? All Jaywalker really knew was that his bluff about the EZPass photos had worked, and that Amanda had indeed ridden home in the Audi. As for the wasp story, it was still up for grabs. Amanda had said it was a lie, but Carter was sticking with it. And Jaywalker couldn't very well confront him with Amanda's version, not without breaking his promise and giving her up.

Besides which, Carter's insistence that it was true provided Jaywalker with some ethical cover. Because he was in no position to say for sure who was telling the truth and who was lying, he could go ahead and put his client on the stand and have him tell his story. He could even tell Amanda that her husband was sticking with it. If she were to get the hint and remember it his way, she could bolster his defense. On the other hand, if she were to continue to insist that there'd been no wasp… Well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

The afternoon session brought a woman named Lone Thanning to the stand. Thanning was the Rockland County medical examiner, and a witness Jaywalker had been dreading for some time. One of the elements the prosecution is required to prove in a murder case is that the victim died, and that some act of the defendant caused that death. In some cases, that cause-and-effect relationship is thrown into serious debate. Jaywalker had tried cases where cause of death was the issue before the jury. The guy with the. 45 blood alcohol reading, for example, whose stepson had conked him on the head with a bottle. Had the blow really been the cause of death? Or had it been merely incidental to the victim's suddenly collapsing from acute and chronic alcohol poisoning? Or the nineteen-year-old who'd lost his balance after being punched in an alley fight, and had happened to land on a jagged piece of glass that severed his femoral artery? Had the defendant truly caused his death, or had it been a tragic accident?

But when it came to the nine occupants of the van, cause of death was hardly in issue. They'd died, Jaywalker was more than prepared to concede, because the van had rolled over, exploded and burned. Precisely when in the course of those events their deaths occurred, or exactly how, made no difference at all. So Jaywalker had repeatedly offered to stipulate that the medical examiner, if called as a witness, would testify that all nine deaths had resulted from the van's being forced off the road.

But Abe Firestone would have none of that.

Just as Jaywalker wanted to keep the gruesome details from the jurors, Firestone wanted to get as much mileage from those details as he possibly could. And because neither side can be forced to accept a stipulation in lieu of actual evidence, Justice Hinkley wasn't about to intervene. The most she would do was to warn Firestone- and David Kaminsky, who would conduct the direct examination of Dr. Thanning-to keep things as brief as possible and refrain from going into overly graphic details.