“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin my closing argument, “I have never had a client like Andrew Chapman. Nor do I ever expect to have one like him again. Frankly, I’m not sure I ever want to have one like him again.” There is some laughter in the courtroom, and about half of the jurors smile.
As expected, Jill had painted a sinister picture of Andy and Olivia, telling the jury before launching into her conspiracy theory, that it would have to find Andy has the mind of a retarded child to allow him to escape guilt in this case.
Slowly, I take in each member of the jury. “In all candor, and most, if not all of you, know this to be true of the criminal justice system in America, much of what happens in America’s courtrooms seems like an elaborate game between the prosecution and the defense lawyer. It’s as if the object of the game is for the prosecutor to jump over a high bar, but the rules let the defense lawyer try to trip up the prosecutor during the attempt. The rules, as you know, are there in our judicial system to protect the individual defendant as well as to safeguard certain values we have said are important in this country. Now, that’s all well and good, and defense lawyers like myself at this stage in a criminal trial routinely launch into a speech about how the prosecutor hasn’t made it over the bar, and therefore you, the jury, are required to acquit the defendant.”
I come around from the podium, and feeling the eyes of the women on the jury, resist an urge to check my fly.
“You may have observed,” I say dryly, “that Dr. Chapman has not always been happy with me during this trial. At one point, as you saw much to my embarrassment, he asked the judge to allow him to represent himself. While I, as a defense lawyer, have been thinking I would play this game out ac cording to the ordinary strategy that usually prevails in criminal cases, my client has insisted on playing the game differently. He thinks lawyers’ games get in the way of the truth, and whether we have liked it or not, he has insisted on telling us the truth, and quite honestly, many of us don’t like it, because it involves a white woman and a black man. He has insisted on telling you that he continues to love Olivia Le Master, and that the physical expression of this love has persisted through last week. Now, this makes us all uncomfortable, because there is a little moralistic voice in the back of our brains saying to us: for God’s sake, shouldn’t a child’s tragic death in which they were involved put a screeching halt to all of that? Human nature doesn’t work that way.
Though it can be made to seem sordid examined clinically, we know we comfort each other in our grief through the act of sex just as we make love out of joy.”
I pause, hoping at least a couple of the jurors will have experienced this need. Though nobody is nodding, a few seem sympathetic. It is not something to dwell on, but I needed to make sure I touched this base. I come up to the railing, putting as much distance as I can between me and Andy.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Andy Chapman sincerely believes Olivia Le Master is a wonderful human being who has been the victim of one tragedy after another.
Love has a way of turning worry lines into signs of character: a birthmark becomes a beauty spot in our eyes; and so on. When I first stood in front of you yesterday, I still accepted my client’s picture of Olivia Le Master. But having heard her in this courtroom yesterday and comparing her testimony with my client’s, can’t do that any longer. A person blinded by love can find all kinds of excuses for his beloved’s behavior. As the person’s lawyer, I am not required to do that. Doubtless, if my client had been permitted to represent himself, he would be telling you a different story-one I don’t believe would be accurate, but knowing this man, it would be honest and straight from the heart. The truth is, I now think that Olivia Le Master set my client up and has been sleeping with him ever since to keep him from discovering the truth.” I turn to Andy and see him glowering at me, and I quickly turn back to the jury.p›
“No man likes to be thought of as a fool, but I’m afraid that is what my client is in this case. I think Olivia from the beginning played him like a violin and suggested a procedure she already knew was dangerous. She was around the Human Development Center enough to have entered Andy’s office and removed much of the insulation tape. She could have worked out some kind of plan with Leon Robinson, and I’ll talk more about him in a moment. But the prosecutor has just told you how much Olivia had to gain….”I want to leave them with the option of accepting my original opening statement, and it will do no good to get so far out on a limb I can’t climb back down. Moments later, as I begin on Leon, I sense some reluctance on the jury’s part to switch gears. This is for the blacks on the jury, I want to interrupt myself and tell them, but of course, I can’t.
“Leon Robinson, by virtue of his membership in the Trackers, despises Andy Chapman. He didn’t have the guts to admit it, and I had to bring in his ex-wife to prove to you he has been a member. I think it is significant during this trial that it has become apparent that Olivia Le Master and Leon Robinson have told you lies, and Andy Chapman has not told you a single one. How can you be sure that Leon didn’t let go of Pam deliberately either in a moment of blind racial hatred or perhaps for a promise of cash from Olivia Le Master? Because when all is said and done, Pam would be alive today if he had merely done what he was told to do by my client, and nobody has denied that.”
Finally, before I sit down I leave the jury with the possibility that it was, as I told them at the beginning, an accident. “The fact is that after this case is over and you return to your everyday lives, you cannot be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that despite all inferences to the contrary, Olivia Le Master is as manipulative as she seems. Granted, it seems clear she has lied to you, but I can’t stand up here and swear to you that she is a cold-blooded murderer or that she isn’t telling you the truth about everything else.” I turn to Andy who is staring down at the table, refusing to even acknowledge my presence. For a moment I wish I had let him make his own closing argument. Truly, he might have convinced them.
“The one thing I am one hundred percent confident of is that my client has not lied to you. At a cost few, if any of us, would prefer to pay, I am certain he has told you what he believes to be the truth, and this is no small thing to take back with you to the jury room. He is simply not like anybody else I know. It is not that he is an innocent who got in over his head. What happened to Andy Chapman could have happened to any of us, but particulariy to a man who insists that society must become color-blind. It is my hope you will not punish him because he has the courage to live his life in a way that many of us, if we dare to admit, envy….”
Jill finishes strong. Preaching in her usual manner, she storms up and down in front of the jury.
“This case is not a love story; it is about responsibility for the death of a child.
Mr. Page wants to confuse you. And if he can’t do that he wants you to forgive and forget what his client stood to gain;
he wants you to forgive and forget his client’s total lapse of his professional responsibilities as a psychologist; he wants you to forgive and forget he used a cattle prod when the first rule of any professional is to do no harm. What is easy to forget is that it doesn’t matter how Dr. Chapman says he rationalized his behavior. He can say he did it in the name of love; his lawyer can argue racism to blame someone else;
it doesn’t matter a hill of beans. It’s your job to fix responsibility, and you’re under no obligation to accept one word either of them says….”
It is not an easy wait for the verdict. Tunkie, Frank, and Clan drift in and out of the courtroom all afternoon to see if there is any word from the jury. Clan, whose conviction, so the rumor goes, is going to draw him only a reprimand from the state ethics people, hangs around much of the time.
As soon as the trial is over and the jury has trooped out to begin its deliberations, Andy drops all pretense of civility and leans over to inform me that my services will no longer be needed for an appeal once the verdict comes back. Since then, he and Morris have been sitting together in a corner of the courthouse chatting off and on with a group of blacks, none of whom I recognize. It is a little late for group support, I think sourly. The case was too messy for the local NAACP to unite around. Morris, true to form, comes over to shake hands and to give me the rest of what I’m owed. I’m grateful I’m getting it before the verdict. I’m intensely curious about how he brought Andy around.
“How’d you get him to show up this morning?” I ask as we talk in the empty jury box.
“Guilt,” Morris says, poker-faced and unsmiling. It is obvious he fears the worst.
“If he spends his life in prison,” Morris says, looking past me at the American flag by the door to the judge’s chambers, “how can he save the world?”
I think of Morris’s impassioned plea to Andy and realize it worked. Maybe I should have asked if Morris could make the closing.
Later, Clan, who has brought a bag of popcorn into the courtroom with him, nods at Andy and his group.
“That’s gratitude for you,” he says loyally as I tell him Andy’s words to me after the trial.
“Not your average dope dealer from Needle Park,” I say, looking over at the group of rednecks sitting near the middle of the courtroom. If there aren’t some Trackers waiting with us, I’d be real surprised.
Clan understands just enough about the case to sound like an idiot.
“Looks like he wants to play both ends against the middle,” he says, nodding at Andy and his all black group.
His lawyer maybe.
“Not Andy,” I say, wondering if the jury will have to come back Monday. It has been just over two hours. Jill and I have agreed that we jointly will move to sequester the jury this weekend if they can’t reach a verdict tonight. They could get a few anonymous calls from somebody in this group, “I could be wrong,” I whisper, “but Andy may be one of those one in a million people who mean what they say.”
“Sure,” Clan says, leering at Kim Keogh, who is waiting by the double doors to the courtroom.
“Women fall for that kind of guy every time.”
I have to laugh, knowing Dan’s views on the human condition.
The truth is, between Andy and Morris, I’d take Morris every time. Morris lives out of his experience; his brother lives out of his head. As a behaviorist, Andy ought to know better. I smile at Kim, but I don’t go over to her yet. I am going to catch enough grief from the other journalists present when this is over. I will keep my end of the bargain, but I never screwed up the nerve to ask Andy to honor my commitment to Kim. A black female deputy comes through a side door, stopping my heart. Is the jury back? As she comes over, Clan says, “I figure thirty years. You saved him from the chair at least.”
I try to swallow but can’t manage any spit. Was it that bad? I guess so. I can’t imagine how Andy will stand even a year in jail.
Her uniform still starched and crisp at five o’clock in the afternoon, the deputy reads my anxiety and shakes her head.
Coming over to the table, she says, “The judge says to tell you the jury reports it thinks it can reach a verdict tonight.
They don’t want to fool with it this weekend.”
Fool with it? My mind seized on these words. What does that mean? I stand up.
“Did the jury foreman say that?” I ask.
She makes a face.
“No, I did.”
Clan chuckles at me, “Down, boy. You did all you could.”
As she leaves, the deputy frowns as if to say, bullshit. She’s right. You never do enough, and the mistakes you make may be the difference in the verdict. For all I know, the jury resents the hell out of what I tried to do to Leon. Sure, he was a member of the Trackers, but so what? As Jill said, he loved that little girl. He wouldn’t have let go of her intentionally.
“Mr. Page has tried to smear a man to save his client. A cheap lawyer’s trick playing on the racial fears of the community.
Well, Blackwell County is bigger than that. Stunts like that don’t work here….” As Jill was saying this to the jury, I look over at Andy. His chair was as far away as he could get it and still be at the same table. It was cheap. Now I wish I hadn’t done it. Still, knowing myself as I do, I’d probably do it again.
At seven Rainey appears in the middle of the main door to the hallway and motions me over. In the hall, bearing gifts from McDonald’s, is Sarah. The two together somehow make me more nervous than I already am. Maybe it is that Kim Keogh is lurking about. They could all have a nice chat about me: My dad was ready to bail out as soon as he heard you might have cancer. Your dad’s got a prostate as hard as a walnut; by the way, did he tell you he screwed me on the first and only date? Did you know that besides being a jerk your dad’s a first-class demagogue with the race issue?
I wolf down the hamburger and fries so I will not have to say anything.
“I told Sarah,” Rainey says dryly, “you’d be too nervous to eat.”
Perhaps smelling food, Clan comes outside.
“Ah, the longsuffering women in your life,” he says to me, winking at Sarah.
“Have some of Dad’s trench fries, Mr. Bailey,” Sarah says, recognizing him by my description.
Clan bows, simultaneously digging his fingers into the sack, which has enough salt in it to preserve a herd of cattle, and says, “A woman after my own heart.”
I make the introductions, wondering what they must all be thinking. They’ve heard enough about each other. After I’m finished, I say, “All we need to round out this group is my rat burner.” This gets a laugh from everybody. Confidentiality is not my long suit either. Rainey gives me a wan smile as if to say that I’m hopeless. For some reason it occurs to me that if she has a mastectomy, I will never have seen both her breasts, but that won’t be anything new. For the few minutes we were in bed together, we were as innocent as newborn kittens.
“Where’s Dr. Chapman?” Sarah asks. She is wearing a rare outfit, a dress. Rainey’s advice, I suppose. I note approvingly that it conceals her lush figure. Usually her clothes are too tight.
“He’s waiting in the courtroom,” I say, knowing she’s curious.
“It’s not a real good time to meet him.” I am worried, actually, about what he might say.
Clan, who is rubbing the salt from his fingers onto his pants, cracks, “It may be her last chance.”
While Clan takes Sarah into the courtroom to point out (quietly, I hope) which one is Morris-she has seen Andy’s picture in the paper or on TV a half-dozen times, Rainey takes me aside and tells me she thinks she got Charlene on a bus headed west without anyone following her.
“She said to tell you that no matter what happens, she isn’t sorry.”
I nod, thinking I wouldn’t have been so brave. What was her reinforcement? It surely can’t be a two-day bus trip to California. Maybe just the knowledge she stood up to Leon.
In her own way, Charlene is probably as stubborn as Andy.
It is at this moment we are told the jury is coming back in. I have a premonition this is going to be worse than I expected. I hope to hell Morris won’t try to cancel his check.
We hurry back into the courtroom and I motion to Andy to come forward. Jill come hurrying in, followed by Kerr, and I see the look of expectation on her face. She knows it is not a question of “if” but how long. After the jury went back, she admitted she doesn’t expect the death penalty-just life without parole. Despite his principles, Andy would kill himself.
Who could blame him?
It is a piece of conventional wisdom that if members of the jury look at your client and smile on their way back in to the jury box then you’ve won. It was my experience at the Public Defender’s that juries almost never smile, no matter what they’ve done, until the verdict is announced. No one is smiling now. The two African-Americans, at opposite ends of the first row, seem particularly dour to me, and I prepare for the worst. Beside me, Andy stiff as a mannequin, speaks voluntarily to me for almost the first time all day.
“They don’t look happy, do they?”
I feel nauseous, as a wave of indigestion rumbles through my lower intestines. It is all I can do to nod in agreement.
Judge Tamower, who now at the end of a long day and a long week looks exhausted, pats down curls that already seem limp (so much for that perm). “Has the jury reached a ver dict?”
The foreman, a slenderly built accountant in his mid-forties with a rim of fat around his middle, says, “We have. Your Honor.”
I look back over my shoulder at Sarah and Rainey. Twisting her hair in anxiety, Sarah doesn’t see me, but Rainey nods, a look of sympathy crossing her face. Wednesday she faces her own verdict. I hope I am more help to her than I have been to Andy.
As Judge Tamower silently reads the verdict form handed to her by the bailiff, I steel myself not to react if they have come back with the death penalty. I have been here before, but that time the man standing beside me. Harry Potter, who killed two convenience-store clerks deserved to die and, in fact, his appeals exhausted, was executed last week.
“To the charge of capital felony murder,” Judge Tamower reads, her voice solemn, but not without a note of satisfaction, “not guilty.” I watch the air go out of Andy’s chest.
We have exhaled simultaneously.
“To the lesser included charge of second degree murder, not guilty,” the judge says quickly.
Involuntarily, Andy clears his throat, but I am not terribly surprised, since they didn’t come back with capital felony murder. It is the manslaughter charge I am now worried about.
“To the lesser included charge of manslaughter,” the judge I reads, looking up at the jury, “not guilty.” With this, the small contingent of African-Americans begin clapping, only to be silenced by Judge Tamower’s quick gavel.
My heart has begun to race. Is it possible the jury will acquit Andy entirely? Again impassive, Andy stares straight ahead, as if he has not heard a word the judge has said.
“To the charge of negligent homicide,” the judge says, and looks directly at Andy, “guilty.”
I look at Andy, who blinks rapidly, but the maximum is only a year in the county jail. He could be out in four months.
Judge Tamower continues.
“The jury recommends that ; Dr. Chapman be placed on probation for one year and be required to perform sixty hours of community service.” I Judge Tamower looks at the twelve men and women seated } to her left and says, “I will accept the jury’s recommendation.
This court is adjourned.”
So quickly I will later wonder if I imagined it, Andy ; brushes his left eye beneath his glasses. Then, turning to me, : he says, sounding for all the world like a priggish old-maid i schoolteacher, before Kim Keogh can reach me, “I still don’t I think the end justifies the means.”
Somehow I keep my mouth shut. At least the sanctimonious asshole has the decency to shake hands. Besides, who knows why the jury didn’t convict him of murder or at least ; manslaughter? They may not even know themselves. As Kim I Keogh opens her lovely mouth to ask her first question, I think again that I’d take Morris any day.