Thaddeus concluded by asking the M.E. whether he had an opinion whether John Steinmar was moving when shot.
“My opinion, he was immobile.”
Thaddeus was surprised. The M.E.’s report had mentioned nothing about movement.
“You don’t have evidence that he was immobile, correct?”
“Correct, no evidence. Only my interpretation.”
“And your interpretation could be right or wrong, correct?”
“Correct. It’s only opinion.”
“Based on your experience in these cases.”
“Based on my experience.”
“Let’s talk odds. Do you gamble when you go to Las Vegas, Doctor?”
“I might play the nickel slots for an hour. I find it boring.”
“Do you ever play blackjack?”
“Maybe once a year I fill in at the physicians’ Friday night game.”
“Do you know the odds of drawing to an inside straight?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s do it this way. If I asked you on a scale of one to ten how confident you are that John Steinmar was immobile when shot, what number would you pick?”
“Eight. Maybe nine.”
“So there would perhaps be two chances out of ten that you could be wrong?”
“Yes.”
“And would you be wrong twenty percent of the time? In other words, what factors have a bearing on that?”
“Well, in this case I reviewed a carpet sample. No tread marks.”
“That would be the carpet removed from the Steinmar residence?”
“Yes.”
“And based on that carpet sample you believe your opinion that Mr. Steinmar was not moving when he was shot would be wrong two times out of ten?”
“That would be my rationale. My interpretation is probably right, however.”
“Probably meaning more likely than not?”
“Yes.”
“More likely than not is fifty-one percent, correct?”
“Objection,” said the AG, rising slowly to his feet. “Argumentative and relevance.”
“Counsel, where are you going with this?”
“Your Honor, I’m trying to understand how certain the witness is about his testimony.”
“And the relevance of that?”
Thaddeus realized the judge was giving him the opportunity to make a mini closing argument.
“Judge, the relevance is that if Mr. Steinmar was moving, he was an aggressor. The doctor says there’s a twenty percent chance he was moving, which would mean there’s a twenty percent chance he was advancing on Mrs. Steinmar to continue his attack. Now the doctor has said the odds he was not moving is ‘probably,’ which, I believe, is much less than eighty percent. It could be as low as fifty-one percent or more likely than not. I’m just trying to get a percentage we can rely on.”
“Objection to counsel’s argument and move that it be stricken!” cried Jimmy Moroney. “That’s argument, Judge, and inappropriate!”
“Well, I suppose it might be, but the court needs to understand where the questions and answers are going in order to rule on your objection or argument and relevance. Having said that, the court denies your objection. Counsel, you may proceed with your questions.”
Jimmy Moroney slowly took his seat. His neck was red and all could see he was highly displeased. Frown lines furrowed his forehead and he was squinting as if taking aim. Thaddeus was pleased. First blood.
“So, Doctor”—he came back to his line of questions—“you were about to tell the jury that Mr. Steinmar was probably not moving when shot and I was asking you what percentage ‘probably’ is. Can you answer that?”
The doctor picked at lint on his sleeve. He drank from the witness’s water glass.
“‘Probably’ is just that. Probably.”
“Can you give us a number?”
“Sixty-five percent.”
“So now you’re saying your opinion of not moving is correct two times out of three?”
“Right.”
“Which means your opinion is incorrect one times out of three?”
The doctor sighed. He was committed to numbers, something an expert witness never meant to do under these circumstances. “Correct.”
“Now, Doctor, is being correct two times out of three equal to ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’?”
“Objection!”
“Sustained.”
“Thank you, Judge. I have nothing further.”
Jimmy Moroney took over on redirect and tried to rehabilitate his witness, but the more he asked, the more confused and tired the doctor became. He was a man of about seventy years of age, had been to the wars for forty years or more, and in the end began coming across as detached and unsure of earlier opinions that had been given with much certitude. The AG finally backed off and sat down. Everyone was left wondering how the carpet sample figured in. Its evidentiary value had never been made clear, at least not by this witness. The air in the courtroom was still. The jury had long ago set notepads aside and ceased scribbling. It had all been said and done. Thaddeus could read their faces. Maybe the district attorney had been the aggressor when he was shot, “probably” not. The witness couldn’t clarify that for them, but not for lack of trying. Thaddeus had done what he set out to do: confusion reigned.
Next up was a firearms expert from the state crime lab. He had examined the decedent’s skin and scalp in an effort to determine distances when the fatal shot was delivered. His opinion was that the muzzle to scalp distance was in the neighborhood of around five feet.
“But maybe closer?” Thaddeus asked on cross-examination.
“Unlikely. I would say a good five feet from gun to head.”
“From muzzle to scalp.”
“Correct.”
“And you base this on test firing the pistol, as you described on direct examination?”
“That’s correct.”
“Now Mr. Adamson, what does the gunshot distance tell you about this case?”
“That the victim and the defendant were a good distance apart.”
“And you told us that your opinion is based on the fact there are no powder burns or stippling on the district attorney’s skin, which would place the gun muzzle farther away, correct?
“More or less, yes.”
“Does that indicate to you that the shot was fired other than in self-defense?”
The witness smiled. He was a black man, thick glasses that kept slipping down on his nose. His head was shaved and he had been very confident on direct examination. Thaddeus knew he would be extremely experienced in the ways of court and would be all but impossible to shake in his opinions. So, he was going to get in and get out. Get what he could and leave.
“That indicates to me the shot wasn’t fired in self-defense, since you ask.”
Thaddeus stepped back a step from the podium, as if the answer had injured his case. It was all an act, however.
“Now, when you say self-defense, you’re using a legal term, correct?”
“Correct. But I’m also talking about what was likely going on at the moment the shot was fired.”
“You were there and saw what was going on?”
“Please. I wasn’t there, no.”
“Yet you can tell this jury what was going on when the shot was fired?”
“I can tell you that the two actors were apart far enough that the shooter wasn’t in imminent fear of great bodily harm or death.”
“You’re not saying that John Steinmar wasn’t coming for her, are you?”
“Well—”
“Let me make that easier. You have no idea what John Steinmar was doing when he was shot, do you?”
“Actually, no.”
“He might have been pointing a gun at my client for all you know, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And he might have been screaming that he was going to kill her, correct?”
“I wouldn’t have any way of knowin
g.”
“But he might have been screaming, correct?”
The man removed his eyeglasses and began polishing with his pocket square.
“He might have been screaming, yes.”
“And he might have just finished biting her on the genitals, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And he might have been coming back for more, correct?”
The little man put his eyeglasses back on. He nodded. “All I was trying to say was that he wasn’t touching her at the moment he was shot. They were farther apart than that.”
“But you’re not saying he couldn’t have closed that distance in one second and been on top of her, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“And really, what you’re telling us is merely based on the lack of gunshot residue on John’s head?”
“And shirt. No burns or stippling there either.”
“Head and shirt. No powder marks.”
“Correct.”
“Other than that, you really don’t know much else about what happened that morning, do you?”
“No.”
Thaddeus decided to take one more run at the guy, just to make an upcoming point.
“In fact, the best evidence about what happened that morning would be the testimony of Mrs. Steinmar herself, correct?”
“Objection!”
“Sustained. Anything else, Mr. Murfee?”
“No. We’re finished here.”
Chief Investigator Art Handelman was next called. He rolled back from counsel table, stood up, touched Thaddeus on the shoulder as he passed by, and climbed up on the witness stand. He pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and made a washing motion of it with both hands. The jury watched this routine and a couple of them shrugged. Unusual, but we’re still open to what he has to say, their looks said.
Jimmy Moroney asked all the right questions, the Who, What, Why, When, and Where of being second on the scene following the shooting. First to arrive had been Dean Drake, a uniform from the Flagstaff PD. He entered the house, made sure there were no live shooters still on the premises, had the new widow sit at the kitchen table so as not to walk through the crime scene, and went back to his squad car for yellow police tape. The dispatcher had notified Art Handelman of the shooting at the same time and he made a beeline for John Steinmar’s house. It was less than three miles from where Art lived and was just beginning his day. A second prowl car had arrived on the scene a minute before Art. Art parked across the front drive to keep gawkers off the property, and sauntered up to the front door and went inside. There was no hurry at this point, he testified, John Steinmar was dead, shot in the head, and no amount of hurry was going to change that.
Art went into the family room where the shooting had occurred. He found the district attorney lying face-down in a pool of his own blood. Actually not a pool, he then corrected himself, as the floor covering was carpet and the blood had soaked into the carpet and was spreading below on the rubber padding substrate. He went to the body, felt the carotid for a pulse (there was none) and went to join Mrs. Steinmar Her hands were shaking and she asked if he minded if she smoked. He said it was her house and immediately she was trying to light a cigarette. They knew each other very well. He nodded at her, patted her hand, removed the Bic from her tight grasp, and held the flame up to her cigarette. She puffed, inhaled, and slapped the table with her free hand. “Damn him!” she cried. “Damn him!”
He told her he would need to record initial impressions. He Mirandized her, just to be sure, right on the recorder. First words out of his mouth, “Do you understand you have the right to remain silent...” and her responses to the standardized questions followed. He then played the recording for the jury. It was clear from her statements that John Steinmar was the aggressor and she his intended victim. It was unclear exactly what he had been trying to accomplish that morning, other than, as she put it on the recording, he “...was trying to maul me.”
Question: “He was trying to maul you. Describe that, please, Mrs. Steinmar.”
Answer: “Jamming his hand between my legs and digitally penetrating me. Ravishing me with his mouth even to the point of biting me. I have bite marks between my legs and on my breast.”
Comment: “We’ll have the police department crime scene tech take pictures of those when we take you to the hospital.”
Response: “I don’t need to go to the hospital. I’m not sick, just scared.”
Comment: “Still, we need to have you examined. A rape kit and photographs of your injuries will only help you on down the road.”
The recording ended, the machine was put away, and AG Jimmy Moroney stood at the podium and flipped through yellow page after yellow page, ostensibly in search of some script or note to himself. The jury stretched and yawned during this. Thaddeus saw that Jimmy was passing a few minutes just to let it soak in, the recording, so notes could be made and interior monologues processed. The tape was inordinately helpful to the prosecution, of course, as all suspect statements almost always are. In the end it was clear that Art Handelman had left his prints all over the case in the way he had formulated his questions and obtained answers she would regret from the woman who had just shot and killed his boss, District Attorney John Steinmar. It was also clear that he wanted her. She wasn’t going to just walk away from what she had done. Justice cried out for payback and reform.
Then Jimmy Moroney launched into a new page of questions.
“Please describe her demeanor as she answered your questions.”
“You mean describe her emotional state?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she was pretty well pulled together. After the first cigarette the shakes went away. We went into the kitchen, where she made us each a cup of coffee, and we talked like it was a Christmas Eve get together like we’d both attended at her house over the past several years.”
“You had been her guest?”
“My wife and I had attended her Christmas Eve open house.”
“Who else attended these open houses? Anyone in this courtroom today?”
“Judge Gerhardt.”
Whereupon the judge nodded and continued with his own notes.
“Anyone else?”
Art looked around the room. “Not right off-hand.”
“So you knew Mrs. Steinmar pretty well.”
“That’s hard to quantify except this way: I had been in her presence maybe thirty-forty times before that morning.”
“So, a lot.”
“If you say so.”
“Did you have an agenda that morning, as the Chief Investigator of the Coconino County District Attorney’s Office?”
“To learn what happened and preserve evidence. That was all I was there to do.”
“Tell us what you learned about how the shooting occurred.”
“Do you mean in addition to what she said on the tape?”
“Yes, your investigation.”
“It was a .38 caliber Detective Special that killed Mr. Steinmar. A single shot to the top of his head. When the crime lab examined the carpet sample I learned that there were no hair and fiber transfers from the carpet to the body or clothing of the victim.”
“The ‘victim’ meaning John Steinmar.”
“Yes.”
“Tell us what that means, no hair and fiber transfer.”
“Objection, argumentative.”
Judge Gerhardt: “He can tell us what hair and fiber transfer, or lack of, means generally. Just not in this case, that would be conclusory and he hasn’t yet been qualified as an expert from whom I’m going to allow conclusory testimony. Mr. Handelman, just tell the jury generally what hair and fiber transfer means.”
“Means he wasn’t scooting across the carpet on his belly or up on his knees.”
“Indicating what, to you?”
Art leaned forward, closer to the jury. “Indicating that he wasn’t in pursuit.”
Thaddeus’ head snapped up. He hadn’t
been expecting that. It was an opinion reserved for the domain of an expert witness and Art Handelman hadn’t been qualified as an expert witness—not in that arena, at least. They had snuck one by him. He almost objected but restrained himself. A bell once rung cannot be un-rung. The words had been said: no pursuit. And couldn’t be unsaid. Damn, he thought, get into the game.
The AG didn’t hesitate. “So if John wasn’t in pursuit of his wife when the trigger was pulled, she wasn’t in threat of great bodily harm or death?”
“Well—”
“Objection. Invades the province of the jury.”
“Sustained. Mr. Moroney, he can answer questions about the physical scene and what he personally saw and observed throughout his investigation, but let’s leave the interpretation of those facts to the jury. Move along, please.”
“Withdrawn.”
“Objection sustained before the question was withdrawn. Proceed, please.”
“One thing I forgot to ask.”
Here it comes, thought Thaddeus. The coup d’état. A mercy killing.
“On the recording you just played, Mrs. Steinmar says Mr. Steinmar bit her that morning. Did you in fact obtain photographs of any bite marks on or about her person?”
“We did. The CSI photographer went with her to the hospital when the EMTs took her. He took lots of pictures.”
“Have those pictures been analyzed?”
“They have.”
“Are there bite marks in those pictures?”
Defending Turquoise (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thriller Series Book 5) Page 22
