Josefina Jovita Baroso was attractive and bright and combative, and seemed to enjoy all three. We debated politics, religion, sports, and her brother. We didn’t agree on anything except the virtues of hard pretzels and cold beer. She voted straight Republican, and like most Cuban Americans, viewed Ronald Reagan as a combination of Jose Marti and Teddy Roosevelt. I always thought of him as a Notre Dame running hack, and I never liked Notre Dame.
Eventually, we broke up. Okay, so I broke up with her, but there were no major explosions, just a disengagement of lives going different directions. Blinky kept me informed of major events in her life. On a ski trip out west, Jo Jo met a man and had a whirlwind romance. She took a leave of absence from the state attorney’s office, spent six months with the guy on his Colorado ranch, but came back alone. On the few occasions we would run into each other, she never referred to the relationship. To this day, I don’t know what happened, though Blinky says it’s simple. “She busted his chops, like she did to you, to me, to everybody. Nobody measures up to Josie.”
I caught another glimpse of her over my shoulder. She wore a beige cotton dress that stopped just above the knee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail, emphasizing the strong bone structure of her face. It wasn’t her trial uniform, and because of the conflict of interest, she couldn’t be assisting Socolow with the case.
I must have been staring at her.
“ Hard to believe she’s my sister, isn’t it?” Blinky whispered, reading my thoughts.
I glanced at Josefina Baroso and then at Blinky Baroso. My client resembled a sausage stuffed into an Italian silk suit. A green Italian silk suit that shimmered under the fluorescent glare of the courtroom lights. Jo Jo was tall and slim and in an earlier age would have been called elegant.
I turned my attention back to Abe Socolow, who was prattling on about the utter depravity of preying on the virtuous. He reminded the jury of the witnesses he had brought before them, a retired airline mechanic, an Amway distributor, a widowed schoolteacher. Abe believed in swamping jurors with testimony. As Charlie Riggs, the retired coroner, likes to say, “ Testis unus, testis nullus.” One witness, no witness.
When the victims are likable, the prosecutor’s job is easy. Put ‘em up there, extract a tear or two, and get a guilty verdict in time for everyone to get home to watch Roseanne.
Socolow seemed to be winding down now. “You folks are contributing to a sacred function of government.’’ Abe was not a naturally down-home guy, but he was getting into his flag-waving, Fourth of July, you-folks shtick, and it sounded pretty good. “As envisioned by our Founding Fathers, you folks from the community, not some wigged and robed judges, are to determine what is true and what is false, who is innocent and who is guilty. And when you look at this man…” He pointed at poor Blinky again. “What do you see?”
I couldn’t help myself. My eyes darted to my client, just as did the jurors’. I didn’t know what they saw, but to me, he looked like a big, fat crook.
“ You see a thief, a con man, a deceiver,” Socolow said, lest there be any mistake. He was dying to mention Baroso’s criminal record but he couldn’t get it into evidence because I had kept Blinky off the stand. A prior conviction can only be used for impeachment, and that was enough reason to keep Blinky at the defense table during the trial. So was the nervous twitch that made Blinky look like a pathological liar when he was giving his name and address.
“ So on behalf of the people of the state of Florida…”
All of them, I wondered?
“…I ask that you convict both defendants on each and every count of grand theft, fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy. Thank you and God bless you.”
Socolow gathered his notes from the podium, took down his Technicolor charts that detailed various feats of grand larceny, and lowered himself majestically into his seat at the prosecution table. I stood up, cleared my throat, and thanked the jurors for their rapt attention to the case, but I left God out of the equation. Then I pointed to the U.S. flag behind Judge Gold and started talking about the Constitution, Mom, and apple pie. I wasn’t about to let Abe out-folks me.
“ Our great democracy depends on citizens like you, leaving your homes, your jobs, your loved ones and serving as the last bastion of protection for your fellow citizens…”
I always try to make jury service sound like joining the Marines.
“ We have the greatest legal system in the world…”
Excluding trial by combat, of course.
“ Now Mr. Socolow and I have other cases to try, other fish to fry…”
Other fish to fry? Did I say that? Sometimes the mouth moves faster than the brain.
“ But Louis Baroso has only one case…”
Pending, that is.
“ It is here and it is now. This is Louis Baroso’s case. This is his life, his fate, and it’s in your hands.”
I shot a look at my client. He blinked at me. Thrice.
“ Our Constitution provides certain rules that protect men and women accused of crimes. Anyone accused is innocent until proven guilty, innocent until you say otherwise, innocent until and unless you conclude after considering all of the evidence, after searching your conscience, after using all your powers of common sense and intelligence and fairness, that the state has proven guilt beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt. A jury’s job is not to presume evidence where there is none. It is not to assume evidence, to fill in evidence, to believe there must be evidence just because the prosecutor says so. We don’t guess people into jail. We don’t assume people into jail.
No, the jury’s job is to look critically at the evidence and ask, ‘Did the state prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt?’
I blathered on for a while about reasonable doubt. That’s what you do when you don’t have much of a defense. When I have favorable evidence, I use it. Hell, I hoist it up the flagpole and salute it. Lacking a defense, I tap-dance around the state’s evidence and say it just isn’t enough.
“ Now, Mr. Socolow told you the evidence indicates that Mr. Baroso conspired with Mr. Hornback. The evidence implies that Mr. Baroso profited from Mr. Hornback’s endeavors. The evidence suggests that Mr. Baroso knew what was going on. Well, there’s a phrase for that kind of evidence, and you’ve all heard it. It’s called circumstantial evidence
…”
The jurors nodded en masse. Good, they’d heard the phrase on Larry King.
“…And I’m going to tell you a story about circumstantial evidence. A mother bakes a blueberry pie and puts it on a shelf to cool. She tells her little boy not to touch that pie, but he climbs up on the shelf and digs in anyway. Now he hears his mom coming into the kitchen, so he grabs his pet cat and rubs the cat’s face in the pie. The mother walks in and yells for the boy’s father. The father takes the cat out to the barn, and then, boom! There’s a shotgun blast. The boy is still there in the kitchen licking off his fingers, and he says, ‘Poor Kitty. Just another victim of circumstantial evidence.’ “
I paused just long enough to let the jurors chuckle. Then, becoming serious, I lowered my voice and said, “I’m pleading with you not to let Louis Baroso be another victim of circumstantial evidence.”
This time, only two jurors nodded, and one of them might have been asleep. I wrapped it up with an appeal to the basic decency of the American people, then sat down. Blinky gave my arm a good squeeze and patted me on the back.