Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

Even without a gradual buildup or an announcement that there will be nothing more to follow, the moment when a defendant rises and walks to the witness stand is a dramatic one. And if the charge happens to be murder, and the victim the husband of the accused, the word dramatic falls short of adequately describing it. Awesome comes closer; pivotal is no overstatement. Because this is the moment everyone's been waiting for. The lawyers, the judge, the court personnel, the media, the spectators and the jurors. Especially the jurors. Something about human na ture leads ordinary people who are fully capable of making a wide variety and staggering number of errors on the simplest of assignments to believe with iron-clad certainty that all they'll have to do is look at and listen to a defen dant, and they'll know in a heartbeat if they're hearing the truth or not.

What these jurors saw, as Samara raised her right hand and dutifully swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, was a woman who looked small, nervous and alone. A stunningly pretty woman, to be sure, but Jaywalker's own mental jury was still very much out on the question of whether that prettiness, in the end, would contribute to her salvation or prove to be her undoing.

She took her seat, not quite on the edge of the chair, but not so far back as to look relaxed. Just as Jaywalker had had her practice. She put her hands in her lap, out of sight and away from her face.

THE CLERK: Would you give your first name and last, and spell them for the record.

MS. TANNENBAUM: My name is Samara M. Tannenbaum. S-A-M-A-R-A T-A-N-N-E-N-B-A-U-M.

THE CLERK: What is your county of resi dence?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Manhattan.

THE COURT: You may inquire, Mr. Jay Walker.

MR. JAYWALKER: Thank you. How old are you,Samara?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'm twenty-eight.

MR. JAYWALKER: Are you currently employed?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No.

MR. JAYWALKER: Have you been employed in the past?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, starting when I was four teen.

These were softballs, grounders. They were only partly aimed to elicit information. Their real purpose was to warm Samara up, to give her a chance to find her voice and develop something of a rhythm. Jaywalker himself had been on the witness stand a fair amount back in his DEA days, and even a couple of times since. He knew it wasn't a particularly comfortable chair to sit in, as chairs went.

He also wanted the jurors to get to know Samara. Not just the Samara they'd read about, the dark-haired tabloid beauty with the checkered past, the Las Vegas gold digger who'd hit the jackpot, the spoiled trophy wife. He wanted them to know her as he knew her, and-if she could somehow work her magic with them the same way she'd worked it with him-to come to like her as he liked her. If a jury likes a defendant, especially a female defendant, they may end up convicting her, but they're going to have an awfully hard time doing so. On the other hand, if they take a dislike to her, it'll be easy, particularly for the women on the jury. Find that hard to believe? Ask Martha Stewart, why don't you?

So he went back to the beginning, Jaywalker did, back to when Samara Moss had been a child growing up outside of Prairie Creek, Indiana. Back to a time before she'd had a penny to her name. Back to before she'd ever dreamed that there was a world beyond the Midwest, a world with out cornfields and trailer parks and rusted-out pickup trucks. Back to before she'd ever even heard of Las Vegas or Barry Tannenbaum or New York City.

MR. JAYWALKER: Who raised you, Samara?

MS. TANNENBAUM: My mother, sort of.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know your father?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, I never met him.

MR. JAYWALKER: What was your home like?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It was a half trailer that somebody had abandoned. It had no water or elec tric hookup. And it was missing the half with the bed room and bathroom.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you use for a bath room?

MS. TANNENBAUM: In nice weather, we used the field out back. When it was too cold, a stove pot. It was my job to empty it each morning.

MR. JAYWALKER: What did you and your mother do for food?

MS. TANNENBAUM: When there was money, we bought it, like everyone else. When there wasn't, my mother used to have me beg for groceries outside the Kroger's, the nearest supermarket. Sometimes she'd give me a boost so I could climb up into the Dump ster they kept out back, see what I could find. Some times neighbors left food by the door of our trailer. There was a black family that lived up the road and did that whenever they could, even though they were dirt-poor themselves. Then, after a while, they moved away, and my mother started taking in men, over night guests. And they would give her money, five or ten dollars at a time.

MR. JAYWALKER: Where did they sleep?

MS. TANNENBAUM: On the sofa, with my mother.

MR. JAYWALKER: In the same room as you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: There was only one room. If the weather was okay, my mother would send me out in the field. If it was cold or rainy or snowy, she'd put me to bed on the floor, in the corner. Cover me up with a blanket and make me face the other way, so I couldn't see.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you know what was going on?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I had ears. I could hear.

MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Ten, eleven.

MR. JAYWALKER: How did these men treat you?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Some of them were nice to me. Some of them weren't.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us about some of the ones who weren't.

MS. TANNENBAUM: They…they did things to me.

MR. JAYWALKER: What kinds of things?

MS. TANNENBAUM: You know.

MR. JAYWALKER: No, we don't know. Not un less you tell us.

MS. TANNENBAUM: They'd kiss me, touch me under my clothes, in places where they weren't supposed to. Make me touch them. Put their thing in my mouth, or on my front, or between my legs.

MR. JAYWALKER: Their thing?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Their penis.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever tell your mother?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes.

MR. JAYWALKER: And?

MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd slap me, say she didn't believe me. But I know she did. She knew.

MR. BURKE: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained. Strike the part about what her mother knew. The jury will disregard it.

MR. JAYWALKER: What else, if anything, did she do or say?

MS. TANNENBAUM: She'd tell me not to lie, not to complain, that we needed the money for food. If I cried, she'd hit me.

MR. JAYWALKER: So what did you do?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I'd close my eyes and pre tend I wasn't there, that I was someplace else alto gether. I put up with it as long as I could. And when I couldn't put up with it anymore, I ran away.

MR. JAYWALKER: How old were you when you ran away?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Fourteen years and one day.

MR. JAYWALKER: How is it that you remem ber that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: I remember that because I

MR. JAYWALKER: And what did you get?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Nothing.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you ever see your

MS. TANNENBAUM: No. waited to see what I'd get for my birthday. mother again?

It wasn't just the squalor and the sexual abuse and the separation Jaywalker wanted the jurors to hear, although their transfixed silence spoke loudly enough about the impact those things were having upon them. But beyond that, he was laying out a pattern for them, a template of a mother not only willing to barter sex for food, but equally willing to enlist her only child as an accomplice to the practice. How surprising would it be that within a year or two of her flight from home, Samara herself would be imi tating her mother's survival strategy and adopting it as her own? Would the jurors excuse her behavior? Perhaps not. But at least they'd be able to understand her actions, and hopefully empathize with her. And empathy, Jaywalker firmly believed, lay at the doorstep to forgiveness.