“Good idea.”
I heard her getting her phone out of her purse.
“I’m sure Berg will object to it,” she said. “But worth a try.”
“If the judge knows there’s a photo, she’ll want to see it,” I said. “Human curiosity.”
I heard her snap the shot.
“Okay, Mickey,” she said. “Rest up.”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
I heard her step toward the door.
“Jennifer?” I said.
I heard her steps come back to the bed.
“Yes, I’m here,” Jennifer said.
“Look, I can’t really see yet, but I can hear,” I said.
“Okay.”
“And I hear doubt in your voice.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“Look, it’s a natural thing. To question things. I think you—”
“It’s not that, Mickey.”
“Then, what is it?”
“Okay, look, it’s my father. He’s gotten sick. I’m worried about him.”
“Is he in the hospital? What’s wrong?”
“That’s the thing. We’re not getting straight answers. He’s in a care home up in Seattle and my sister and I are not getting answers.”
“Is your sister there?”
“Yes, she thinks I should go up. If I want to see him before... you know.”
“Then, she’s right, you need to go.”
“But we have the case — the trial. The motions hearing is next week and now this attack.”
I knew that losing her could be devastating to the case, but there was no choice.
“Look,” I said, “you gotta go. You can take your laptop and there’s a lot you can do from up there when you’re not with your father. You can write motions, Cisco can get them to the court clerk.”
“It’s not the same,” she said.
“I know it’s not but it’s what we can do. You need to go.”
“I feel like I’m leaving you all alone.”
“I’ll figure something out. Go up there, see him, and, who knows, maybe he’ll start feeling better and you get back down for trial.”
She didn’t respond at first. I had said my piece and was already thinking of alternative ways to go.
“I’m going to think about it tonight,” Jennifer finally said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow, okay?”
“That’s okay, but I don’t think there is much to think about. It’s family. Your father. You have to go.”
“Thanks, Mickey.”
I nodded.
I heard her steps again as she headed to the door. I tried to relax my throat and ease the pain. Talking felt like swallowing glass.
Then I heard Jennifer tell the investigator waiting outside the room that he could go in.
Part Four
Bleeding the Beast
37
Wednesday, February 19
The world seemed to be on the edge of chaos. More than a thousand people were dead from a mystery virus in China. Almost a billion people were on lockdown there and American citizens had been evacuated. There were cruise ships out on the Pacific that were floating incubators of the virus, and no vaccine was on the horizon. The president was saying the crisis would pass, while his own virus expert was saying brace for a pandemic. Closer to home, Jennifer Aronson’s father had just died in Seattle of an undiagnosed illness, and she was not getting any answers.
In L.A., it was the second day of jury selection in the trial of my life.
We had been proceeding at a rapid pace. The four days scheduled for voir dire had been cut in half by a judge who also felt that there was a coming wave. She wanted this trial over with before the wave hit, and while I wasn’t comfortable hurrying to pick a jury, I was right there with the judge. I wanted this over. Some of the deputies at Twin Towers had started wearing masks and I took that as a sign. I didn’t want to be in lockup when that wave the judge was worried about came in.
Still, picking the twelve strangers who would deliberate the case involved the most important decisions of the trial. Those twelve would hold my life in their hands, and the time allotted to choosing them had been chopped in half. This had caused me to take extraordinary measures to quickly try to find out who these people were.
Jury selection was an art form. It involved research, knowledge of social and cultural data, and, finally, gut instinct. What you want in the end is a panel of attentive people who are there for the truth. What you look for and hope to root out are those who view the truth through the prism of bias — racial, political, cultural, and so forth. And those with ulterior motives for serving.
The process begins with the judge weeding out jurors who have conflicts of schedule, can’t sit in judgment of others, or can’t grasp the meaning of legal tenets like reasonable doubt. It then moves to the lawyers, who may question jurors further to determine if they should be dismissed for cause — reasons of bias or background. The prosecution and defense are also given an equal number of peremptory challenges allowing them to dismiss jurors for unstated reasons. And that is where gut instinct most often comes into play.
All of this must be synthesized into decisions about whom to keep in and whom to kick out. That is the art — to finally arrive at a panel of twelve people you believe will be open to your cause. I fully admit that there is an advantage to the defense in that it has to win the belief of only one juror to be successful — one doubter of the state’s case. One holdout for the defense can hang a jury and force the state to start over, or even reconsider whether to go forward with a second trial at all. The state must win all twelve hearts and minds to get a conviction. Still, the state’s advantages beyond this one are so enormous as to make the defense’s jury advantage negligible. But you take what you are given, and therefore jury selection has always been sacred to me, made all the more so this time because I was the defendant.
It was 2 p.m. and the judge was expecting — no, demanding — that a jury be empaneled by the close of court in three hours. I could push it into the next day, because the judge ultimately wouldn’t want to enforce a demand that was potentially reversible on appeal. But if I did force the issue, there would be consequences down the line in terms of rulings from the bench.
Besides that, I was down to my last peremptory challenge and I knew there was no way I would be able to milk it for three more hours. We would fill the box before the courtroom went dark and the prosecution in the murder of Sam Scales would begin in the morning.
The good news was that the panel was largely set with jurors who I believed ranged on the defense meter from yellow — the middle ground — to deep green for pro-defense. Because of long-embedded and rightful distrust of police in minority communities, Black and brown jurors were always prized by the defense because they tended to view the testimony of police officers with suspicion. I had managed to keep four African Americans and two Latinas on the panel, fending off Dana Berg’s efforts to jettison the Blacks in particular. When one Black panelist revealed under questioning that she had once made a donation to the local Black Lives Matter organization, Berg first asked for the woman to be dismissed for cause. Making the request to an African-American judge took a certain level of courage, but it also underlined Berg’s singular purpose in convicting me. When the judge denied the motion, the prosecutor then attempted to use a peremptory challenge. That was when I swung in with an objection that the move was based on race, a clear exception to the rules of peremptory challenges. The judge agreed and the juror was seated. The ruling put Berg on notice in regard to future efforts to sculpt the jury along racial lines but then allowed me to do just that.