Steve Martini - Double Tap

“You don’t understand. It means what it says. You would stay behind bars for life. There would be no parole. No release date. You would be there until you die.”

This seems to settle on him like a boulder. Ruiz has always seen his fate in terms of black and white, darkness and light. He would either be convicted and executed, or acquitted and set free. He has been left to contemplate death for months now, a slow, choreographed execution, strapped to a gurney, a machine pumping lethal fluids into a vein in his arm while witnesses look on from behind a glass partition. This thought has not seemed to move him. But the concept of life without the possibility of parole is an entirely new matter.

“Why would they do this if they thought I killed her?” he says.

“Because it’s a certain result. The state avoids the cost and time it takes for a trial and all of the appeals that would follow if they get a capital conviction. And politically, for them, the stakes are high. If they shoot and miss-if you walk with all of the publicity surrounding the trial-it’s the kind of case that’s likely to be remembered come election time.”

There are no doubt other reasons for the offer but I don’t go into all of them. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. They are all long shots. There is the chance that, given Ruiz’s background, we will be able to show the defendant in a positive light: his years of military service, injuries and wounds that he suffered-some of them perhaps psychological-what the man has endured while defending his country. These are things that could make the defendant more sympathetic in the eyes of the jury. Beyond this is the fact that the victim was a wealthy woman with all the toys that money could buy. The DA knows we will have no choice but to put the dead on trial, and in Chapman’s case there is a universe of unknowns behind that door. Anything and everything that Chapman did over the last ten years, if we can drag it into the ring of relevance, is going to come out. If there is any doubt in the minds of jurors as to whether Emiliano did the crime, juror attitudes toward the victim could steer the state’s case into a ditch- could being the operative word.

“What do you think I should do?” He looks at me through a blue haze curling toward the ceiling.

You can hurdle the bar exam and sally forth to spend decades in front of the bench. You can deflect thunderbolts tossed by gods in black robes and do battle daily with other lawyers. But in the end it is this question posed by someone in the position of Emiliano Ruiz that is the riddle most feared by every attorney I have ever met.

“We’re not talking dollar damages,” I tell him, “or whether you should do a few years of hard time as opposed to going to trial. We’re talking about your life.”

“You haven’t answered my question.” There is no fear visible in his eyes as he says it. It’s not that Ruiz is cavalier about death. If I had to guess, he has confronted the issue before and more than once, though maybe not on the certain level of capital punishment, which in this state is slow and tortuous at best, taking years to grind out appeals. But there is no question in my mind that Ruiz is a man who has studied closely the dimensions of his own mortality and done so enough times that, while what lies beyond the veil is a mystery, it is not one that terrifies him.

I’m shaking my head. “It’s the toughest thing for a lawyer. I can’t tell you what to do.”

“But you must have an opinion?” he says. “Forget the death penalty. What I want to know is, what are my chances of beating the case if we go to trial? Of walking free?”

He has already made up his mind. A man like Ruiz would claw the walls inside his cell until his fingers bled the moment he knew he had no chance of ever getting out. A death sentence-and my guess is he might not even appeal it-would be preferable to life without possibility of parole.

I have told Ruiz about my meeting with Harold Klepp and reports of an argument between Chapman and General Satz. According to Emiliano, this squares with Chapman’s concerns conveyed to him in the days immediately before her murder that Chapman was scared to death. This, according to Ruiz, was the reason she hired him off the books to provide security at a distance.

“You’re entitled to the truth. I won’t dress it up,” I tell him.

“It’s that bad, is it?”

“Unless we can crack the wall around Isotenics to get at the evidence of what was happening inside the company when Chapman was killed, if we go to trial we’ll be throwing dice for your life. And that’s a dangerous game. One usually reserved for fools and those who are desperate.”

“You’re telling me to take the deal?”

“I’m telling you that, given the evidence as it is right now, your chances of an acquittal are not good.”

He gets up from the table, cigarette to his lips. The guard outside the door turns to look through the glass to see if perhaps we are finished.

“Can they. .” Ruiz stops to reorganize his thoughts. “What happens if they convict me? They go to a penalty phase, right? The jury, I mean.”

“That’s right.” I have talked with him about the procedure before.

“What happens if they decide not to give me the death penalty?”

“If it’s a conviction for first-degree murder, you’ll be sentenced to life without possibility of parole.”

“Promise me one thing. Promise me that you won’t let that happen.”

“I can’t promise you that.”

“You have to.”

I shake my head, take a deep breath, and look up at him. “I’m your lawyer, not your executioner. I can’t do that.”

“I’d rather be dead than locked up for the rest of my life.”

“I know.” I sit in silence for a moment as he paces a couple of steps, all that the room will allow.

“I’ll convey the message to them. Tell them that you’ve rejected their offer.”

All I can see is his slowly nodding head from behind.

I would like to console him, tell him not to dwell in the dark corners. But anything I say at this moment would sound cheap, condescending. Ruiz is a man who is broken in many ways, has seen too much, and-unless I am wrong-has lived grasping the thin edge of life far too long.

To the average person his attitude at times can be off-putting, seemingly careless, almost casual in the face of death. I worry about the jury and what they might think if this becomes their perception of him at trial.

Recently in these sessions when we meet, looking at him through the haze of smoke, it is as if I see another aspect, larger, more brooding: memories of the dark visage of my uncle. I get flashes of Evo from my childhood, in the haunted decades of life after his return from Korea. I remember veiled and faded images of what had once been a hearty and happy soul, a spirit that was buried inside by the violence he had seen and what he had endured. Emiliano may be made of harder stuff, but when I listen to his voice and look into his eyes in times like these, moments of stress, I can see the outline of tiny fissures where the hard emotional veneer is beginning to pull away. I sense that he is starting to crack at the edges.

It is in these moments that the pain for me is real. Looking back, I cannot be sure when it happened, but at some point in the months that have intervened since we met, the trial of Emiliano Ruiz has taken on a frightening dimension that even I do not fully comprehend.

Lately this has been accompanied by dark visitations. They seem always to come at night when I am alone, after my daughter Sarah is asleep in her room. I am left to huddle with the documents that would condemn Emiliano-police reports and the state’s forensic details of the crime-and one set of items in particular: a few photos of Ruiz in uniform, battle fatigues, his face haggard and dirty. He is with a small group, other men similarly worn and tired, all huddled in a semicircle, giving it their all to smile.