Faith and Justice

by Peter O'Mahoney

  Her confused answers were going to annoy the jury very quickly. It was time for Law to encourage more direct answers from Rosa Santiago.

  “Can you please tell the court where you were on February 1st?”

  “I had attended a seminar on depression at the Grand Congress Hotel. I’ve suffered from bouts of nerves and depression my whole life and I like attending these types of seminars.”

  Law looked at her laptop and waited for more to come from the witness, as they had practiced, but she was silent. Law looked up, smiled nicely, and continued to encourage her.

  “Where did you go after the seminar had finished?”

  “I had drinks with Mary Gravely, who I went to the seminar with, and I also work with. She’s also an administration manager. We were in the hotel bar for over an hour before we decided to leave. We had two cocktails, then we hugged goodbye. She left in a cab, and I began the walk back to the train, to catch a ride home to Logan Square. I walked along Ida B. Wells Drive to get to the station.”

  “On your walk from the Congress Hotel to the train station, along Ida B. Wells Drive, did you see the alley at the back of the Congress Hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  Again, Law waited for more to come, but Rosa had stopped. The nerves were eating her alive.

  Law and her team had spent hours preparing each witness; taking them through their questions, confirming what they had said in their witness statement was correct, and preparing them for anything that might come from the defense. Law personally spent time preparing Rosa Santiago as she knew that her knowledge—of the time that she saw Reverend Green and then Amos Anderson—was a solid start to the eyewitnesses’ testimony.

  But none of that preparation mattered now.

  The nerves were winning.

  “Did you see anyone before you passed the alley?”

  “I saw Reverend Green standing next to the side entrance of the Congress Hotel.”

  Again, Law waited for more to come, but Santiago had forgotten everything they prepared.

  “Did you see anyone else standing at the end of that alleyway?”

  “I saw Mr. Amos Anderson at the end of the alley.” She pointed to the defense table. “The same man that’s sitting there.”

  “Let the court records show that Miss Santiago has pointed to the defendant.” Law paused, allowing time for Rosa to perform a number of loud breathing exercises. When she finished, Law continued. “How did you know it was Mr. Anderson?”

  “He gave one of the speeches that night at the seminar. I remembered him because he was very interesting and engaging and his picture was on the brochure. He was the first faith healer I had met, and I remembered his face.”

  “Did you talk with Mr. Anderson?”

  “No.”

  “And what was Mr. Anderson doing?”

  “Apparently, he was waiting for—”

  “Objection,” Hunter calmly called out. Rosa looked like she wanted to run and hide. “Speculation. The case needs to stick to the facts. No sentence in a testimony should start with the word ‘apparently’.”

  “Sustained. Miss Santiago, please stick to the information that you know.”

  “Yes, sir. Your Honor, sir. Yes. Yes, sir.”

  Law waited for Santiago to continue again, but her body was completely still. She didn’t even seem to take a breath.

  “Was Mr. Anderson alone?” Law was still soft in her approach.

  “Yes.”

  “And what time were you walking to the “L” train?”

  “10:30 to 10:35.” Rosa took a deep breath. “I caught the 10:45 train home, and it was ten minutes before then. I always arrive at the station five minutes before the train is due. I hate missing the train.”

  “Thank you, Rosa. No further questions.”

  Hunter leaned back in his chair and stared at Rosa Santiago before deciding to stand and ask his questions. She quivered under his stare, avoiding all eye contact. Hunter felt uneasy about intimidating her, but it was what the case called for. The freedom of an innocent man lay, in part, on his ability to discredit her.

  “Hello, Miss Santiago. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.”

  “Good,” she responded. “I mean, yes. Okay.”

  “How many drinks did you have that night, Miss Santiago?”

  “I had two cocktails.”

  “Two?” Hunter’s face expressed surprise. “You’re not a large woman, Miss Santiago. Did two drinks affect you very much?”

  “A little.” She fumbled her words. “I was slightly tipsy when I left the seminar, and I was quite wobbly on the train. I don’t drink often, but the cocktails at the bar were half-price for anyone who attended the seminar.”

  “At the seminar, did you talk to Mr. Anderson in person?”

  “No.”

  Hunter tapped his finger on the table. He really didn’t enjoy discrediting people, but it was what his job called for. “They’re very nice glasses that you are wearing, Miss Santiago. How well can you see without them?”

  “Not very well at all.”

  “No?” Hunter paused and wandered around the courtroom. “They also look like they’re new glasses. Are they a recent purchase?”

  “Yes. They’re one month old.”

  “Only one month old? They look very stylish.”

  Rosa blushed from the compliment. “I like them.”

  “Did you receive those new stylish glasses after you claimed to have seen Mr. Anderson that night?”

  “Yes.” Rosa smiled. She was taken in by Hunter’s good looks. “About one or two weeks later. I bought them in the middle of February.”

  “Can you please tell the court if you made this Facebook post on January 15: ‘Dropped my glasses. Need new ones.’”

  “Um, yes. I think that was me. That sounds like me.”

  “Is this the photo you posted of the glasses that you dropped?”

  Hunter presented a photo of scratched glasses to the court, and he could feel Law’s disappointment behind him.

  Although her team prepared Santiago thoroughly, they didn’t conduct enough research on her. The easiest way to create doubt in an eyewitness statement was to discredit their vision, and Santiago’s details were easily found via her public social media profiles.

  “And would it be fair to say that you were wearing those scratched glasses on the day that you attended the seminar?”

  “I guess that’s right. I needed to save up to buy new ones. New glasses can be quite expensive, and I’m also saving to buy a new car.” Rosa looked at Hunter. The prosecution lawyers had warned her that the defense would ask about her vision, but all the preparation in the world wouldn’t have eased her nerves.

  “Did you walk directly past Mr. Anderson that night?”

  “No, I was on the other side of the street.”

  “On the other side of the street?” Hunter feigned surprise. “So perhaps twenty yards away when you saw him at the entrance to the dark alley?”

  “I suppose.” She looked like she wanted to cry. “I suppose it was twenty yards or so.”

  Hunter sighed. He hated doing this. She looked so innocent on the stand, so terrified, and all he wanted to do was protect the woman and give her a hug.

  But he had to do what was required.

  “Let me get this straight, Miss Santiago.” His voice rose. “Late at night, in the dark, in winter, you claim to have identified a man twenty yards away. A man that you’ve never met in person before. A man that you’ve never talked to. And all while you were drunk and wearing glasses that were scratched and needed replacement?”

  “Um.” She held back the tears. “I suppose.”

  “You suppose?”

  “I… I thought it was Mr. Anderson.”

  “You thought it was Mr. Anderson? Now, under oath, you’re unsure if you saw Mr. Anderson that night?”

  “It looked like him.”

  “Looked like him? You were drunk, it was dark, and you were wearing g
lasses that needed replacement, yet you claim to identify a man that you’ve never met. This is a court of law, Miss Santiago, and you need to be certain, have no doubt, that it was him. Your testimony may convict a man of murder.” Hunter focused his glare on her. “I will ask you again—are you certain that it was Mr. Anderson that you saw that night?”

  “No, I’m not.” She shook her head, blinking rapidly, avoiding eye contact with anyone. “I’m not certain.”

  “Could it have been someone else that you saw, Miss Santiago?”

  “Um, yes. Yes, it could’ve been someone else.”

  One of the jurors scoffed at the answer, another let out a disapproving sigh, and many were shaking their heads.

  Michelle Law resisted doing the same.

  “No further questions.” Hunter shook his head.

  Hunter had done what was needed—created doubt in the minds of the jurors. The perfect end to his day.

  CHAPTER 33

  The crowd was packed in for day two, thanks in part to the page three article that ran in the Chicago Tribune that detailed the case, complete with a picture of Anderson looking angry and arguing with a reporter. Although the picture was from two months earlier, it was the photo of Anderson that the paper wheeled out when they wanted to invoke emotion from the reader.

  By the noise of the crowd on day two, it had certainly worked.

  Three more witnesses came to the stand and claimed that they saw Anderson near the alley that night—claimed that in the dark, in the middle of winter, they identified a man they had never met in person. It was easy for Hunter to discredit their eyesight, their story, or their memory; however, the prosecution was building their evidence in the weight of numbers.

  The more people that claimed they saw Anderson at the entrance to the alley that night, the more the jury became convinced. Even if every single one of the witness statements were incorrect, the numbers pushed the evidence in the prosecution’s favor.

  By the close of day two, the defense was fighting an uphill battle.

  Day three of the case saw the prosecution’s next witness, DNA identification specialist and forensic scientist, Dr. Stephen Phillips, walk to the stand. While some people found passion in activities such as sports, fitness, or reading, Dr. Phillips’ passion was researching DNA. His business website had a banner that declared DNA was “the last unexplored section of the human body.” He spent his life exploring DNA, often putting in eighty-hour weeks in the lab, much to the detriment of his family.

  Passion was one thing; obsession was another.

  Law spent the first hour and a half of the morning laboriously discussing the finer details of DNA evidence, trying to establish there was no doubt that it was Anderson’s skin found under the fingernails of Reverend Green. She harped on the same points repeatedly, Hunter objecting where he could, but it became clear that in the mind of Dr. Phillips, there was little doubt about where the skin came from, and that it was there for only a few hours before the murder.

  However, without an admission from Anderson, Hunter had a chance to discredit the details. He had a chance to throw doubt over their evidence.

  Dr. Phillips wore a fitted black suit, presenting the image of a respectable person. It was a good look for the jury, and Hunter was surprised that he wasn’t wearing a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck—just to emphasize the point.

  “Thank you for your time, Dr. Phillips,” Hunter began.

  “My pleasure,” Dr. Phillips replied in a soft tone.

  “Dr. Phillips, you’ve provided a lot of evidence about the DNA that was found at the crime scene. Fifty pages of evidence. In fact, it might even be more evidence than necessary. I guess the real question is, the one we all want to know the answer to; in your expert opinion, does the DNA prove that Mr. Anderson murdered Reverend Dural Green?”

  “No,” he scoffed. “The evidence is—”

  “Thank you, Dr. Phillips.” Hunter interrupted. “The information that you’ve included in your detailed report, is it exact?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure which part of the report you’re referring to.”

  “In your summary of the report, you’ve stated that the likelihood of a DNA match to be incorrect is an ‘estimate’ of one in ten billion. Is that number exact?”

  “It’s an estimate.” He scoffed again. “But there are only seven billion people alive, Mr. Hunter.”

  “As stated in page fourteen of your report,” Hunter opened the report to the highlighted section. “This estimate that you’ve provided, this one in ten billion, is it a mathematical calculation?”

  “It is.”

  “In your expert opinion, do you believe that the accused should be sent to prison on the basis of a mathematical equation?”

  “Objection.” Law stood up. “Relevance. This is merely wordplay by the defense.”

  “Your Honor, this witness is here to provide their expert opinion on the DNA evidence. I believe it’s important that the jury understands what this evidence represents and they don’t take the evidence on face value alone.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with the defense here. The objection is overruled. Please answer the question.”

  Hunter knew that there was growing doubt in the minds of the public when it came to DNA evidence. After the jury was formed, Hunter’s team had studied the publicly available social media posts of the jurors and found that two jurors had expressed their anger when a murder conviction was recently overturned by the court due to incorrect DNA testing. In the eyes of the public, DNA testing was no longer the infallible answer, no longer the magic bullet, and he needed to emphasize that point.

  “I’m here to testify whether the DNA samples found at the crime scene matched the accused. That’s all I can comment on. I can’t comment on when it got there, how it got there, or why it was there. The data doesn’t give us the answers to those questions.”

  Hunter nodded, as did some of the jury.

  “Are you certain that the DNA belonged to Mr. Anderson? Are you certain that the DNA sample you found matched Mr. Anderson’s DNA sample?”

  “There’s a one in ten billion chance that the DNA extracted from under the fingernails of the deceased didn’t belong to the sample that was provided by Mr. Amos Anderson. With the information we had, with the processes that exist for DNA analysis, that’s the best we could’ve hoped for. The way the analysis works is that the result is one in ten billion, to the exclusion of all others. That’s referred to as the probability of accuracy.”

  “The probability of accuracy? But, Mr. Phillips, we’re not here to deal with probabilities, nor are we here to deal with mathematics. We are here, in this court, to deal with the truth.” Hunter stood, placing his hand down to press onto the table. “Is there doubt in your DNA evidence that the match belonged to Mr. Anderson?”

  “Objection,” Law intervened. “Asked and answered. It has already been established that the DNA test is not one hundred percent certain.”

  “Sustained. Move on, Mr. Hunter,” Judge Lockett stated.

  “In layman’s terms, so the court can understand DNA testing without decades of studying, do you and your colleagues know everything there is to know about DNA?”

  Dr. Phillips sighed and shook his head. “In the field of DNA analysis, there are still known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns. There’s still a lot that we don’t understand, comprehend, or appreciate about DNA. It’s a very complex field.”

  Hunter paused, ran his fingers through his hair, and turned the pages over in the file. He read over his notes, and then looked to the jury.

  “The sample of blood found on the shirt of Reverend Green, what did it match?”

  “We matched the DNA drawn from that blood sample to Mr. Anderson’s DNA sample, which was taken after his arrest.”

  “And, of course, you’re absolutely one hundred percent certain that it matched, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Hunter acted surprised
. “You’re telling this court, this jury, that you’re not one hundred percent certain of the bloodstain match to Mr. Anderson?”

  “That’s correct.” Dr. Phillips wasn’t being drawn into playing games. Instead, he sat still on the witness stand, giving straight answers based on his scientific knowledge.

  “If it’s not one hundred percent certain, what does that magical missing percentage represent then?”

  “The very, very tiny percentage represents the amount that we could not match to the exclusion of all others.” Dr. Phillips thought about it for a moment, his eyes looking to the right, trying to think of a better term. “An insignificant amount of uncertainty.”

  “Uncertainty.” It was Hunter’s turn to scoff. He lifted his hand and then placed his hand back on the table. “Dr. Phillips, is there uncertainty in the DNA results that you’ve presented to the court?”

  “Objection. Misleading. This is another play on words; it does not represent the scientific testing that has to take place.” Law had made a last-ditch effort to avoid that answer.

  “Overruled.” Judge Lockett was quick to respond.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Hunter stated firmly. “Dr. Phillips, is there uncertainty, no matter how small, in the DNA results that you have presented to this court?”

  Dr. Phillips squirmed in his chair. Looked to the ceiling.

  “Dr. Phillips?”

  He looked away.

  “Can you please answer the question, Dr. Phillips?”

  He sighed. “The testing does have an insignificant amount of uncertainty in the scientific result.”

  Hunter sat back down. “No further questions.”

  CHAPTER 34

  For Chicago PD Detective, Daryl Browne, policing wasn’t a way to serve his community. It wasn’t a way to do good for the people of his city. It wasn’t even a way to gain respect.

  It was a way to make money.

  He wasn’t interested in the law as it was written; his rule of law was governed by his lack of moral compass—formed during a hard, abusive childhood with an unemployed single mother. He had lived his life with the foundation that no one stayed in his life for long, no one had his back, and life was meant to cause pain. That pain had become a connection to his past, a way to hold onto his childhood terrors. He self-medicated with alcohol, ignoring the pleas of his ex-wife to see a doctor for his health issues, and his adult children no longer spoke to him—due to the regular beatings they had received growing up.