Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  Goodwin glanced down at the paper, his face still animated from the conversation he had been having with his lawyer. As soon as he saw me, the lively expression faded. He turned back to Richard Lee Jones, and I heard his voice, eager and dismissive, start up again.

  Short and chubby, with large, astonished eyes and a small, bewildered mouth, the court clerk stumbled in like someone not quite sure she has come to the right place and, almost as if it were an apology, announced, "All rise."

  With a quick nod, Irma Holloway acknowledged our presence at the counsel table and took her seat on the bench. "Bring in the jury," she ordered with a peremptory wave of her hand, as she glanced down at the court file.

  "I have a matter for the court, your Honor," said Jones.

  The clerk froze in her tracks, looked up at the bench, and waited for instruction.

  Knitting her fingers together, the judge rested her hands on top of the file and gazed at Jones expectantly. "Yes?"

  "Your Honor, the counsel for the State has just handed us an amended witness list. The amendment consists of a single name, the name of the defendant's wife." He went on, speaking in slow, sweeping phrases. "The defense would like the opportunity to file a formal motion in opposition to the use of spousal testimony by the prosecution, and we would further request oral argument on that motion."

  I was on my feet, waiting for him to finish.

  Holloway turned her attention to me. "Mr. Antonelli?"

  "The decision was made only yesterday to call the defendant's wife, Kristin Maxfield, as a witness for the prosecution. I doubt if she has yet been put under subpoena. If Mr. Jones means, by his reference to spousal testimony, those statements protected by the spousal privilege, I can assure the court that is not the kind of testimony we hope to elicit. I would add, your Honor, that Mr. Jones cannot possibly claim that the decision to call the defendant's wife is a surprise. He is certainly aware that Mrs. Goodwin was not only interviewed by the police but testified before the grand jury that returned the indictment in this case."

  "

  Well, I am surprised!" Jones exclaimed.

  Angrily, Holloway turned on him. "Mr. Jones, in this courtroom you will speak when I ask you to and not one moment before. Now, what is it you want to say?"

  He went on as if he had not heard a word she had said. "I'm surprised that Mr. Antonelli is so desperate to win that he's thrown away all respect for a married woman's privacy. Leaving aside the question of whether Mrs. Goodwin's testimony does or doesn't fall within the legal prohibition on spousal communications, there is, after all, something called common decency. I can't imagine any lawyer asking a woman to help him convict her husband. I just can't imagine that, your Honor, and we're requesting a formal hearing to make sure it doesn't happen here."

  Holloway fixed him with a withering stare. "Save it for closing argument, counselor. Your motion is denied. At the time the witness testifies, you can of course raise any objections you might have." She paused, lifting her thin eyebrows. "Any objection, that is, that has some basis in the law." Turning away, she found the clerk still waiting to be told what to do.

  "You may bring them in now," she said.

  A few minutes later, the clerk returned, followed by a shuffling parade of a dozen men and women chosen for the anonymous notoriety of deciding if Marshall Goodwin had murdered his wife. As they settled themselves into the jury box, the elderly Mildred Willis exchanged a brief smile with the juror next to her, the motorcycle mechanic. They seemed to like each other.

  Chapter Twelve

  Irma Holloway was a study in formality. "Ladies and gentlemen," she began, in a steady voice, "we begin with opening statements from the two attorneys. The prosecutor will go first and the defense will follow. Opening statements are for the purpose of providing you with a preview of the evidence each side expects to produce during the course of the trial."

  With a look of the utmost seriousness, she went on to explain. "There are only two kinds of evidence. There is the evidence given by the testimony of witnesses, witnesses sworn under oath to tell the truth. And there is the evidence provided by things themselves, things that frequently serve as what we call exhibits. Simple examples would be a weapon that was used in the commission of a crime, blood samples, or fingerprints."

  Pausing, she looked from one end of the jury box to the other. "The opening statements of the lawyers are not evidence. I want you all to be clear about this. You are not here to be persuaded by the speeches the lawyers give, you are here to decide whether or not the evidence in this case—and only the evidence—proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant has done what is alleged in the indictment." With one decisive nod, like the last hammer stroke that drives in the nail, she folded her hands together, gazed straight ahead, and invited me to begin.

  "Mr. Antonelli."

  I walked close to the jury box and let my eye go from face to face until I had looked at them all. "This is a terrible case. You will wish you were somewhere else when you hear some of the things that will be said in this courtroom and see some of the photographs of what happened two years ago, when Nancy Goodwin was raped and murdered in a motel room a hundred miles away. I'm not going to ask you to imagine what it must have been like for her—what she must have felt, what she must have thought—when, with her mouth taped shut, she saw the blade of the knife and felt a hand grab her by the hair and pull back her head—when, just before he slashed her throat, she heard the killer say that her husband, Marshall Goodwin, had paid him to do it. No one can really imagine what that must have been like. No one needs to. The act itself is brutal enough."

  I went back to the beginning and started over. Dispassionately and concisely, I described the sequence of events that led from the discovery of Nancy Goodwin's body to the voluntary confession of the man who had killed her. "The law insists, quite properly, that no one can be convicted of a crime on the testimony of a co-conspirator alone. The law requires additional evidence: first, that a crime was actually committed and, second, that the defendant was involved.

  "The law does not require that this additional evidence be the testimony of an eyewitness, or evidence which by itself would be sufficient to convict. We will provide all the evidence necessary to corroborate the testimony of the killer, Travis Quentin. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, Marshall Goodwin, had a private conversation with Quentin, dropped the serious criminal charges that were pending against him, gave him precise instructions on the time and place his wife would be alone, and, in addition, gave him ten thousand dollars in cash as payment for murder."

  I spoke for less than thirty minutes; Richard Lee Jones spoke for more than an hour. The glittering blue and grey snakeskin boots he had worn at the arraignment were now replaced by plain brown ones. With sorrow and contempt, he recited a tale of police incompetence and official misconduct with such earnest conviction that by the time he got to the end he had probably talked himself into believing it.

  The premise was straightforward, and once you accepted it everything else seemed to make sense. Moving slowly back and forth in front of the jury box, stopping just long enough to fix them with looks of studied sincerity, Jones insisted that the police had bungled the initial investigation by failing to secure the crime scene in a way that would have preserved evidence left behind by the killer.

  "Imagine what it must have been like to find out that the wife of the chief deputy district attorney of the largest county in the state has been murdered and you've managed to destroy any chance there might have been to find her killer. Now imagine what it must have felt like when someone saved you all that embarrassment not only by confessing to the crime but also claiming that lurking behind this whole thing, masterminding it, was none other than this evil genius, the chief deputy district attorney himself!

  "Imagine how eager they all were," he said, shoving his shoulders forward as he began to pace, "the local police, the state police, all of them—to get this thing behind the
m. You think for a minute they doubted what this confessed killer told them? They were too busy writing it all down to wonder whether they maybe should listen with just a little doubt, just a little suspicion, to the accusations of someone trying to save himself from the gas chamber."

  Suddenly, he stopped and looked at me over his shoulder. "Mr. Antonelli failed to mention that, didn't he?" he asked, turning back to the jury. "He merely said something about a plea bargain. Some plea bargain! Their chief witness—their only witness—confessed to killing Nancy Goodwin only after he'd been arrested for killing a couple more people down in California. The deal he made was that if they gave him life instead of death—and isn't that a deal anyone would be pretty desperate to make?—he'd tell them not only about the murder but about who paid him to do it. And he promised them—you can bet on it—someone big, someone really big, someone prominent, someone the rest of us read about in the newspapers."

  Pausing, he studied them with a shrewd eye "We all do that, don't we? I do it myself. We see somebody getting ahead, getting somewhere we never got and know we never will, and we believe the first bad thing we hear about them. And then when someone like that is brought down, someone famous, someone we may think is just a little too self-important, whatever we say in public and whatever we say out loud, inside ourselves, where no one else will ever know, we cheer a little, don't we?"

  He had them, every last one of those twelve jurors. They followed him with their eyes, bound to him by a shared confession of human weakness."That's what this case is all about," he assured them. "Travis Quentin wants to save his life, so he makes up a story. The police want to save their reputation, so they choose to believe that story. Everyone wants to be in on the kill, the chance to bring someone down, so they line up for the chance."

  He was standing at the far end of the jury box, his hand on the railing as he stared down at the floor. Then he slowly looked up, until across the distance his eyes met mine."This case is poisoned with politics," he warned. "Everybody knows that Marshall Goodwin was about to become district attorney. And now they have the chance to stop him."

  I was on my feet, ready to object, but Judge Holloway was ahead of me. "You make one more unsupported accusation like that, Mr. Jones, and you'll be held in contempt!"

  Without a word, Jones turned his back on her and faced the jury box. She never saw the caustic look that told everyone that, as far as he was concerned, the force of her reaction had only proved him right. "Marshall Goodwin has not only had to endure the agony of losing the woman he loved in a vicious murder. Now he's had to undergo the humiliation of being accused of her death. No one can bring Nancy Goodwin back, but at the end of this trial he can at least walk out of this courtroom with the knowledge that no one could honestly believe he had anything to do with it."

  Still angry, Judge Holloway watched with the rest of us while Richard Lee Jones swaggered back to his place at the counsel table.

  Everything had to be proven, even the fact that Nancy Goodwin was dead. A long list of witnesses took the stand to tell their part of the story: the maid who found her, the police officers who investigated the scene, the coroner who performed the autopsy. Photographs taken from every angle of the hotel room and the gruesome pictures taken later of Nancy Goodwin's body were passed through the reluctant hands of the jurors and made permanent exhibits in the record. This necessary prelude to the heart of the case lasted the better part of a week. Then it was time to hear the testimony of the man who had raped and killed her.

  On more than one occasion I had defended an inmate charged with an act of violence, and I knew first-hand there were few things more likely to prejudice a jury than a prisoner brought into court bound and chained. It didn't occur to me to have Quentin appear any other way. I wanted the jury to see for themselves how dangerous he was and how utterly depraved a man had to be to hire someone like Travis Quentin to kill his wife.

  When I called his name as the State's next witness, the door at the back opened and two burly uniformed guards escorted Quentin into court. Locking his knees together was a heavy iron chain, wrapped several times around his legs, looped over his neck, crossed back over his chest, and fastened with a padlock at his waist. Stretching the chain as far as it would go, he could barely raise his right hand to his shoulder as he stood in front of the witness stand and listened to the clerk administer the oath. With the help of the two guards, he sat down, two strands of the chain sagging heavily in his lap.

  Though he was my witness, I attacked him. "How many people have you murdered, Mr. Quentin?" He pulled his head slightly to the side, lining me up with his eyes. He did not answer.

  Moving behind the counsel table, I walked over to the side of the jury box. With my hand on the end of the railing, I rephrased the question. "Let's make it simpler. In the last two years?"

  He sneered. "Three, I guess. The two in California, the one up here."

  "You guess three. By the one up here, you mean Nancy Goodwin, correct?"

  "Yeah, I guess that was her name."

  "You killed her in a motel room in Corvallis, correct?"

  His eyes stayed focused on mine. "Yeah, that's right."

  "You cut her throat?"

  Jones was out of his chair. "Your Honor, for some reason Mr. Antonelli here keeps leading his own witness." He turned toward the jury and added, "Maybe he's forgotten he's the prosecutor in this case."

  There was a ripple of laughter from the benches, silenced by a single crack of Irma Holloway's gavel.

  In no hurry, Jones turned back to the bench. Judge Holloway was waiting for him. "The questions put by Mr. Antonelli to the witness, while a little unorthodox, are, in light of the circumstances surrounding the witness's appearance, an acceptable departure from the usual form of direct examination. On the other hand, Mr. Jones, there is no equally compelling reason to allow an exception to the required form for raising an objection. If you don't know what that form is, the court clerk will be glad to show you the way to the law library during the next recess. Are we clear now, counselor?"

  She did not wait for an answer. "Mr. Antonelli," she said, turning for the first time to me. "Please continue."

  Slowly, deliberately, I repeated the question. "You cut her throat with a knife, didn't you?"

  Quentin had no mind for abstractions. The colloquy between the defense attorney and the judge had nothing to do with him, and with lowered eyes he had passed the time weaving his thumb in and out of the chain around his wrists.

  When he heard my voice, he lifted his dull eyes."Yeah, that's what happened," he muttered.

  "You've made a full confession to the police, haven't you?"

  "Yeah."

  "I want you to be completely honest about this, Mr. Quentin. The only reason you confessed to the murder of Nancy Goodwin is because you were otherwise facing the possibility of the gas chamber for the murders you committed in California, correct?"

  Putting one shoulder forward, he tried to move the chain away from the side of his neck.

  "It was part of a deal. I told them everything I knew about the killing in Corvallis, and I was sentenced to life."

  "Without possibility of parole, correct?"

  "Yeah." His lips parted, exposing crooked yellow teeth. "I'm not getting out."

  "And you've also now entered a plea of guilty on the charge of murder in the first degree here in Oregon for the murder of Nancy Goodwin, haven't you?"

  "Yeah. Couple months back."

  "What about sentencing?"

  "Doesn't really matter, does it? I'm spending the rest of my life in prison in California."

  "We both know it matters, Mr. Quentin. If you don't testify truthfully in this case, you could get the death penalty, couldn't you?"

  His mouth barely moved when he replied in the affirmative.