Steve Martini - The Jury

They were worn to a nub, fighting with insurance companies and creditors. Trying to pay mounting medical bills had become a battle of attrition, and they were losing. Their only real hope was to enroll Penny in new clinical trials that held the prospect, no matter how remote, of a cure. Trials were planned at the university medical center. Battles were ongoing for funding, federal and private money. But even if they got the money, these programs were not available to Penny Boyd. She didn’t fit the protocol. She was too young. The studies were only taking patients between the ages of thirty-six and fifty-six.

We spend our lives pursuing aspirations, career, family, money, always postponing those silent promises to ourselves that someday we will make a difference, we will reach out and get involved, lend a hand simply because it is the right thing to do. That evening, something spurred me to action, something I do not normally do. I am not by nature altruistic, but the Boyds were drowning.

The next day I stepped into a world I didn’t understand, one that was populated by physicians and laboratory technicians, most of whom turned a deaf ear if not a hardened heart as soon as they read the title on my business card: Attorney at Law. This conjured up things they did not want to think about: the perennial enemy of all in the healing arts, the bloodsucking lawyer.

They were not anxious to help, or even to talk. I got enough doors slammed in my face to become an expert on hinges and knobs. I was the pariah. I started leaving my briefcase at home, wearing polo shirts and slacks instead of a suit, just to get through the door. Several times I was mistaken for a patient, and owned up to the truth only after they produced a sharp needle and were getting ready to draw blood. I would have gone all the way, but I knew that as soon as the little glass vial turned blue, the jig would be up-lawyer’s type O. I could be transfused only with the blood of a shark.

As I was being led out, I always offered the same spiel, that I wasn’t suing anybody, just trying to get help for a sick child, while I left claw marks on the frame of their door. This went on for weeks. It included letter writing and phone calls to state lawmakers, one of whom was an old friend, a member of the Senate Health Committee. He finally put me in touch with some hospital administrators, and after eating my way up the food chain I found myself in the office of Doctor David Crone.

I am imbued with all the law-school notions about doctors. That they subscribe to a different view of social stratification than the rest of us. In their eyes they are at the top of any pecking order. Don their white smocks, and the waters must part for them. Underlying all this is the notion that since medicine is grounded on good intentions, bad results should be ignored. This starts with the scrub nurse and ends with the hospital administrator, for whom the fudging of a few medical records is considered a virtue.

In my first meeting with Crone, I sensed that he was different. He was canny in the way that most successful people are. He did not want to offend the politicians who had put me in touch with him, but wanted to ease me to the door without wasting too much of his valuable time. I sensed that he had seen enough death in his time that the passing of one more child wasn’t going to keep him up at night. It wasn’t that he was hard-hearted, only that he was a creature of statistics, and Penny Boyd’s chances on the scale of probabilities were dismal. On that point he had me.

He was a man of research science, which meant that if the issue didn’t fit into a statistical standard deviation, his mind began to wander. Yes, the child was condemned to death. It happened all the time, all over the world. The fact remained that there were not enough children afflicted with Huntington’s chorea to justify statistical inclusion of children in the current therapeutic studies.

As the director of clinical studies for genetic research, he’d make the call on whether Penny would be admitted. Crone explained that the protocols had already been written. These were tied to grants, private and federal money that was rigorously monitored by auditors. Then there was the question of liability. If he were to look the other way and allow Penny to slip through the gate and something went wrong, the university, and Crone himself, could be on the hook.

He was a man with a history of controversy. In the late seventies he came under fire for research that led him into the political minefield of racial genetics. He had published two scholarly papers on the subject and found himself the target of student demonstrations and stern rebukes from administrators who didn’t need that kind of attention.

So when I approached him regarding Penny, Crone had a veritable bookful of arguments, none of them the kind of answers I could take back to the Boyds. Increasingly their concern was for the other two children. Though I got the sense that Frank never really accepted this, I could tell that in Doris’s mind Penny was already gone. She loved the child, but she was losing her and there was nothing she could do. She saw Penny dying by the inch. Frank and Doris hoped that Penny could be admitted to the study. No matter how slim, it was her only chance. If she didn’t make it, at least she was of the same genetic strain as the other two Boyd children. Anything the researchers learned might be used to help them-that is, if they tested positive for the disease.

Crone had a zillion arguments why he shouldn’t do it at all, a boatload of downsides, not the least of which was the fact that it might un-track the studies that were soon to start and were already funded. It would require a major infusion of new research money. I stopped arguing. There was nothing I could say. In my own mind, I was headed for the door. I started making small talk, changing the subject, when he looked at me, smiled and said: “You give up too easily.”

I was dumbfounded.

“Have you ever written a grant proposal?” he asked.

I said no.

“Actually, it would take an amendment. Would you like to learn?”

I smiled, almost laughed out loud, and for six weeks through the fall and early winter we spent evenings and weekends hunched over a computer in my office, typing. I was useless. Crone did it all. Dictated the language, showed me the pitfalls, and finally sent the bundle to the gods of funding in the university administration. In the end it was all for naught, but not for want of trying.

Harry and I have had our problems with Crone, but for me it always comes back to the same issue: How do you question a man who has done this? Put his body on the blocks for a child he didn’t even know. It may be stupid, but it is the reason I cannot believe he killed Kalista Jordan.

Our efforts went up in smoke. Competing applications for grant money on other research dried up the funds that might have been available for the children’s portion of the Huntington’s study. A few weeks later, Crone was arrested for Jordan’s murder and the rest is history.

“Never thought I’d be pulling for a man accused of murder,” says Doris. Then she thinks of what she’s just said to the man who is defending him.

“No offense. It’s just that I’ve never been involved with anyone arrested before. How long could this last?”

“It could go on for weeks, perhaps months. And if he’s convicted. .”

“You don’t think that’ll happen?”

“I don’t think he did it, but I can’t predict what a jury will do.”

“Maybe he could talk to somebody at the university? Get them to take another look at the funding request?” she says.

“Unfortunately, he lost whatever pull he had within the university when they arrested him.”

“Oh.” Her expression sags in a way that tells me she has been harboring this hope for a few days.