acted in self-defense and was therefore not guilty.
“All beings,” I concluded, “are entitled to defend themselves when it reasonably seems as if they are in imminent danger of being killed or of receiving great bodily harm. That is certainly the law in Colorado. At the end of this trial, Emily and I will be relying on you to uphold the law, to safeguard her right to defend herself, and to find her not guilty. Thank you for listening and thank you in advance for your patience and attention throughout the trial. It means a great deal to us.”
Although it’s hard to sit down when you have a jury’s complete attention, the last thing you want to do is bore them. They can’t walk out on you like an ordinary audience, but they can convict your client. I’d said enough and projected as much sincerity as I could. Any more, and they’d think I was running for office. Reluctantly, I turned and walked back to the defense table.
***
For the rest of the week, Jeff slowly and methodically built his case against Emily. While she sat very still, her hands clasped on the table in front of her, an endless succession of policemen, detectives, emergency medical technicians, doctors and crime scene investigators all testified about the first seventy-two hours of the investigation.
Although I’d memorized everyone’s reports and knew what to expect, still there was something about hearing it out loud from real live witnesses. The problem with reading police reports over and over is that inevitably the reader becomes inured to the horrible reality of blood and death being graphically described. By the third or fourth reading, it doesn’t sound so bad; it just sounds familiar. The jurors, of course, are hearing this information for the first time and the look on their faces (shock, horror, disgust) is often a wake-up call for the lawyer who’s been living with these facts for months—oh right, getting stabbed to death with a pair of scissors is actually pretty gruesome.
Even the fifty-minute crime scene video, which was about forty-seven minutes too long—here we are approaching the Watkins’s house, and now we’re walking up the steps to the porch, we’re crossing the porch, we’re studying the front door, we’re finally opening the door, now we’re entering the house, we’re panning the foyer, we’re entering the living room, we’re panning the walls, we’re approaching the body, we’re focusing on the feet, the legs, the torso, the arms, the neck, the head, we’re examining the wound from a trillion different angles, and now we’re panning the blood on the floor, the blood on the walls, the blood on the television, and because there’s still some tape left, we’re going to enter every other room in the house searching high and low (including under the bed) for any more signs of blood—seemed for the first time grimly fascinating. Every juror watched it with the kind of rapt attention usually reserved for an academy award-winning thriller.
During the following days, I’d occasionally look over to see how my client was doing. Almost invariably she’d vanished, disappeared deep inside herself to that place where nothing could touch her. After a couple of days, I allowed Donald to sit in the front row behind the defense table. By then, I assumed most of the jurors had figured out he was part of the defense team. Who knew, maybe they’d feel sorry for us. But the truth was, since Emily was so checked-out, I was feeling lonely and beleaguered and needed the company.
This was the painful part of criminal defense, the grunt work of sitting through the prosecution’s case, springing up after each witness finished testifying, taking a few potshots, and then sinking down again. When the coroner told the jury that the cause of death was internal bleeding as a result of a stab wound to the abdomen, I stood up and asked him, “How do you know that the cause of death wasn’t really Mr. Watkins’s stubborn
“All beings,” I concluded, “are entitled to defend themselves when it reasonably seems as if they are in imminent danger of being killed or of receiving great bodily harm. That is certainly the law in Colorado. At the end of this trial, Emily and I will be relying on you to uphold the law, to safeguard her right to defend herself, and to find her not guilty. Thank you for listening and thank you in advance for your patience and attention throughout the trial. It means a great deal to us.”
Although it’s hard to sit down when you have a jury’s complete attention, the last thing you want to do is bore them. They can’t walk out on you like an ordinary audience, but they can convict your client. I’d said enough and projected as much sincerity as I could. Any more, and they’d think I was running for office. Reluctantly, I turned and walked back to the defense table.
***
For the rest of the week, Jeff slowly and methodically built his case against Emily. While she sat very still, her hands clasped on the table in front of her, an endless succession of policemen, detectives, emergency medical technicians, doctors and crime scene investigators all testified about the first seventy-two hours of the investigation.
Although I’d memorized everyone’s reports and knew what to expect, still there was something about hearing it out loud from real live witnesses. The problem with reading police reports over and over is that inevitably the reader becomes inured to the horrible reality of blood and death being graphically described. By the third or fourth reading, it doesn’t sound so bad; it just sounds familiar. The jurors, of course, are hearing this information for the first time and the look on their faces (shock, horror, disgust) is often a wake-up call for the lawyer who’s been living with these facts for months—oh right, getting stabbed to death with a pair of scissors is actually pretty gruesome.
Even the fifty-minute crime scene video, which was about forty-seven minutes too long—here we are approaching the Watkins’s house, and now we’re walking up the steps to the porch, we’re crossing the porch, we’re studying the front door, we’re finally opening the door, now we’re entering the house, we’re panning the foyer, we’re entering the living room, we’re panning the walls, we’re approaching the body, we’re focusing on the feet, the legs, the torso, the arms, the neck, the head, we’re examining the wound from a trillion different angles, and now we’re panning the blood on the floor, the blood on the walls, the blood on the television, and because there’s still some tape left, we’re going to enter every other room in the house searching high and low (including under the bed) for any more signs of blood—seemed for the first time grimly fascinating. Every juror watched it with the kind of rapt attention usually reserved for an academy award-winning thriller.
During the following days, I’d occasionally look over to see how my client was doing. Almost invariably she’d vanished, disappeared deep inside herself to that place where nothing could touch her. After a couple of days, I allowed Donald to sit in the front row behind the defense table. By then, I assumed most of the jurors had figured out he was part of the defense team. Who knew, maybe they’d feel sorry for us. But the truth was, since Emily was so checked-out, I was feeling lonely and beleaguered and needed the company.
This was the painful part of criminal defense, the grunt work of sitting through the prosecution’s case, springing up after each witness finished testifying, taking a few potshots, and then sinking down again. When the coroner told the jury that the cause of death was internal bleeding as a result of a stab wound to the abdomen, I stood up and asked him, “How do you know that the cause of death wasn’t really Mr. Watkins’s stubborn
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