The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  I got up and went to the lectern located between the prosecution and defense tables. The courtroom was one of the recently rehabbed spaces in the old courthouse. It had twin jury boxes on either side of the bench. Everything was done in a blond wood, including the rear wall behind the bench. The door to the judge’s chambers was almost hidden in the wall, its lines camouflaged in the lines and grain of the wood. The doorknob was the only giveaway.

  Fullbright ran her trials like a federal judge. Attorneys were not allowed to approach witnesses without permission and never allowed to approach the jury box. They were required to speak from the lectern only.

  Standing now at the lectern, the jury was in the box to my right and closer to the prosecution table than to the defense’s. This was fine with me. I didn’t want them to get too close a look at Roulet. I wanted him to be a bit of a mystery to them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I began, “my name is Michael Haller and I am representing Mr. Roulet during this trial. I am happy to tell you that this trial will most likely be a quick one. Just a few more days of your time will be taken. In the long run you will probably see that it took us longer to pick all of you than it will take to present both sides of the case. The prosecutor, Mr. Minton, seemed to spend his time this morning telling you about what he thinks all the evidence means and who Mr. Roulet really is. I would advise you to simply sit back, listen to the evidence and let your common sense tell you what it all means and who Mr. Roulet is.”

  I kept my eyes moving from juror to juror. I rarely looked down at the pad I had placed on the lectern. I wanted them to think I was shooting the breeze with them, talking off the top of my head.

  “Usually, what I like to do is reserve my opening statement. In a criminal trial the defense always has the option of giving an opener at the start of the trial, just as Mr. Minton did, or right before presenting the defense’s case. Normally, I would take the second option. I would wait and make my statement before trotting out all the defense’s witnesses and evidence. But this case is different. It’s different because the prosecution’s case is also going to be the defense’s case. You’ll certainly hear from some defense witnesses, but the heart and soul of this case is going to be the prosecution’s evidence and witnesses and how you decide to interpret them. I guarantee you that a version of the events and evidence far different from what Mr. Minton just outlined is going to emerge in this courtroom. And when it comes time to present the defense’s case, it probably won’t even be necessary.”

  I checked the scorekeeper and saw her pencil moving across the page of her notebook.

  “I think that what you are going to find here this week is that this whole case will come down to the actions and motivations of one person. A prostitute who saw a man with outward signs of wealth and chose to target him. The evidence will show this clearly and it will be shown by the prosecution’s own witnesses.”

  Minton stood up and objected, saying I was going out of bounds in trying to impeach the state’s main witness with unsubstantiated accusations. There was no legal basis for the objection. It was just an amateurish attempt to send a message to the jury. The judge responded by inviting us to a sidebar.

  We walked to the side of the bench and the judge flipped on a sound neutralizer which sent white noise from a speaker on the bench toward the jury and prevented them from hearing what was whispered in the sidebar. The judge was quick with Minton, like an assassin.

  “Mr. Minton, I know you are new to felony trial work, so I see I will have to school you as we go. But don’t you ever object during an opening statement in my courtroom. This isn’t evidence he’s presenting. I don’t care if he says your own mother is the defendant’s alibi witness, you don’t object in front of my jury.”

  “Your Hon — ”

  “That’s it. Go back.”

  She rolled her seat back to the center of the bench and flicked off the white noise. Minton and I returned to our positions without further word.

  “Objection overruled,” the judge said. “Continue, Mr. Haller, and let me remind you that you said you would be quick.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. That is still my plan.”

  I referred to my notes and then looked back at the jury. Knowing that Minton would have been intimidated to silence by the judge, I decided to raise the rhetoric up a notch, go off notes and get directly to the windup.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, in essence, what you will be deciding here is who the real predator was in this case. Mr. Roulet, a successful businessman with a spotless record, or an admitted prostitute with a successful business in taking money from men in exchange for sex. You will hear testimony that the alleged victim in this case was engaged in an act of prostitution with another man just moments before this supposed attack occurred. And you will hear testimony that within days of this supposedly life-threatening assault, she was back in business once again, trading sex for money.”

  I glanced at Minton and saw he was doing a slow burn. He had his eyes downcast on the table in front of him and he was slowly shaking his head. I looked up at the judge.

  “Your Honor, could you instruct the prosecutor to refrain from demonstrating in front of the jury? I did not object or in any way try to distract the jury during his opening statement.”

  “Mr. Minton,” the judge intoned, “please sit still and extend the courtesy to the defense that was extended to you.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Minton said meekly.

  The jury had now seen the prosecutor slapped down twice and we weren’t even past openers. I took this as a good sign and it fed my momentum. I looked back at the jury and noticed that the scorekeeper was still writing.

  “Finally, you will receive testimony from many of the state’s own witnesses that will provide a perfectly acceptable explanation for much of the physical evidence in this case. I am talking about the blood and about the knife Mr. Minton mentioned. Taken individually or as a whole, the prosecution’s own case will provide you with more than reasonable doubt about the guilt of my client. You can mark it down in your notebooks. I guarantee you will find that you have only one choice at the end of this case. And that is to find Mr. Roulet not guilty of these charges. Thank you.”

  As I walked back to my seat I winked at Lorna Taylor. She nodded at me as if to say I had done well. My attention was then drawn to the two figures sitting two rows behind her. Lankford and Sobel. They had slipped in after I had first surveyed the gallery.

  I took my seat and ignored the thumbs-up gesture given me by my client. My mind was on the two Glendale detectives, wondering what they were doing in the courtroom. Watching me? Waiting for me?

  The judge dismissed the jury for lunch and everyone stood while the scorekeeper and her colleagues filed out. After they were gone Minton asked the judge for another sidebar. He wanted to try to explain his objection and repair the damage but not in open court. The judge said no.

  “I’m hungry, Mr. Minton, and we’re past that now. Go to lunch.”

  She left the bench, and the courtroom that had been so silent except for the voices of lawyers then erupted in chatter from the gallery and the court workers. I put my pad in my briefcase.

  “That was really good,” Roulet said. “I think we’re already ahead of the game.”

  I looked at him with dead eyes.

  “It’s no game.”

  “I know that. It’s just an expression. Listen, I am having lunch with Cecil and my mother. We would like you to join us.”

  I shook my head.

  “I have to defend you, Louis, but I don’t have to eat with you.”

  I took my checkbook out of my briefcase and left him there. I walked around the table to the clerk’s station so that I could write out a check for five hundred dollars. The money didn’t hurt as much as I knew the bar review that follows any contempt citation would.

  When I was finished I turned back to find Lorna waiting for me at the gate with a smile. We planned to go to lunch and then sh
e would go back to manning the phone in her condo. In three days I would be back in business and needed clients. I was depending on her to start filling in my calendar.

  “Looks like I better buy you lunch today,” she said.

  I threw my checkbook into the briefcase and closed it. I joined her at the gate.

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  I pushed through the gate and checked the bench where I had seen Lankford and Sobel sitting a few moments before.

  They were gone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The prosecution began presenting its case to the jury in the afternoon session and very quickly Ted Minton’s strategy became clear to me. The first four witnesses were a 911 dispatch operator, the patrol officers who responded to Regina Campo’s call for help and the paramedic who treated her before she was transported to the hospital. In anticipation of the defense strategy, it was clear that Minton wanted to firmly establish that Campo had been brutally assaulted and was indeed the victim in this crime. It wasn’t a bad strategy. In most cases it would get the job done.

  The dispatch operator was essentially used as the warm body needed to introduce a recording of Campo’s 911 call for help. Printed transcripts of the call were handed out to jurors so they could read along with a scratchy audio playback. I objected on the grounds that it was prejudicial to play the audio recording when the transcript would suffice but the judge quickly overruled me before Minton even had to counter. The recording was played and there was no doubt that Minton had started out of the gate strong as the jurors sat raptly listening to Campo scream and beg for help. She sounded genuinely distraught and scared. It was exactly what Minton wanted the jurors to hear and they certainly got it. I didn’t dare question the dispatcher on cross-examination because I knew it might give Minton the opportunity to play the recording again on redirect.

  The two patrol officers who followed offered different testimony because they did separate things upon arriving at the Tarzana apartment complex in response to the 911 call. One primarily stayed with the victim while the other went up to the apartment and handcuffed the man Campo’s neighbors were sitting on — Louis Ross Roulet.

  Officer Vivian Maxwell described Campo as disheveled, hurt and frightened. She said Campo kept asking if she was safe and if the intruder had been caught. Even after she was assured on both questions, Campo remained scared and upset, at one point telling the officer to unholster her weapon and have it ready in case the attacker broke free. When Minton was through with this witness, I stood up to conduct my first cross-examination of the trial.

  “Officer Maxwell,” I asked, “did you at any time ask Ms. Campo what had happened to her?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What exactly did you ask her?”

  “I asked what had happened and who did this to her. You know, who had hurt her.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said a man had come to her door and knocked and when she opened it he punched her. She said he hit her several times and then took out a knife.”

  “She said he took the knife out after he punched her?”

  “That’s how she said it. She was upset and hurt at the time.”

  “I understand. Did she tell you who the man was?”

  “No, she said she didn’t know the man.”

  “You specifically asked if she knew the man?”

  “Yes. She said no.”

  “So she just opened her door at ten o’clock at night to a stranger.”

  “She didn’t say it that way.”

  “But you said she told you she didn’t know him, right?”

  “That is correct. That is how she said it. She said, ‘I don’t know who he is.’”

  “And did you put this in your report?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I introduced the patrol officer’s report as a defense exhibit and had Maxwell read parts of it to the jury. These parts involved Campo saying that the attack was unprovoked and at the hands of a stranger.

  “‘The victim does not know the man who assaulted her and did not know why she was attacked,’” she read from her own report.

  Maxwell’s partner, John Santos, testified next, telling jurors that Campo directed him to her apartment, where he found a man on the floor near the entrance. The man was semiconscious and was being held on the ground by two of Campo’s neighbors, Edward Turner and Ronald Atkins. One man was straddling the man’s chest and the other was sitting on his legs.

  Santos identified the man being held on the floor as the defendant, Louis Ross Roulet. Santos described him as having blood on his clothes and his left hand. He said Roulet appeared to be suffering from a concussion or some sort of head injury and initially was not responsive to commands. Santos turned him over and handcuffed his hands behind his back. The officer then put a plastic evidence bag he carried in a compartment on his belt over Roulet’s bloody hand.

  Santos testified that one of the men who had been holding Roulet handed over a folding knife that was open and had blood on its handle and blade. Santos told jurors he bagged this item as well and turned it over to Detective Martin Booker as soon as he arrived on the scene.

  On cross-examination I asked Santos only two questions.

  “Officer, was there blood on the defendant’s right hand?”

  “No, there was no blood on his right hand or I would have bagged that one, too.”

  “I see. So you have blood on the left hand only and a knife with blood on the handle. Would it then appear to you that if the defendant had held that knife, then he would have to have held it in his left hand?”

  Minton objected, saying that Santos was a patrol officer and that the question was beyond the scope of his expertise. I argued that the question required only a commonsense answer, not an expert. The judge overruled the objection and the court clerk read the question back to the witness.

  “It would seem that way to me,” Santos answered.

  Arthur Metz was the paramedic who testified next. He told jurors about Campo’s demeanor and the extent of her injuries when he treated her less than thirty minutes after the attack. He said that it appeared to him that she had suffered at least three significant impacts to the face. He also described a small puncture wound to her neck. He described all the injuries as superficial but painful. A large blowup of the same photograph of Campo’s face I had seen on the first day I was on the case was displayed on an easel in front of the jury. I objected to this, arguing that the photo was prejudicial because it had been blown up to larger-than-life size, but I was overruled by Judge Fullbright.

  Then, when it was my turn to cross-examine Metz, I used the photo I had just objected to.

  “When you tell us that it appeared that she suffered at least three impacts to the face, what do you mean by ‘impact’?” I asked.

  “She was struck with something. Either a fist or a blunt object.”

  “So basically someone hit her three times. Could you please use this laser pointer and show the jury on the photograph where these impacts occurred.”

  From my shirt pocket I unclipped a laser pointer and held it up for the judge to see. She granted me permission to carry it to Metz. I turned it on and handed it to him. He then put the red eye of the laser beam on the photo of Campo’s battered face and drew circles in the three areas where he believed she had been struck. He circled her right eye, her right cheek and an area encompassing the right side of her mouth and nose.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the laser back from him and returning to the lectern. “So if she was hit three times on the right side of her face, the impacts would have come from the left side of her attacker, correct?”

  Minton objected, once more saying the question was beyond the scope of the witness’s expertise. Once more I argued common sense and once more the judge overruled the prosecutor.

  “If the attacker was facing her, he would have punched her from the left, unless it was a backhand,” Metz said. “Then it could
have been a right.”

  He nodded and seemed pleased with himself. He obviously thought he was helping the prosecution but his effort was so disingenuous that he was actually probably helping the defense.

  “You are suggesting that Ms. Campo’s attacker hit her three times with a backhand and caused this degree of injury?”

  I pointed to the photo on the exhibit easel. Metz shrugged, realizing he had probably not been so helpful to the prosecution.

  “Anything is possible,” he said.

  “Anything is possible,” I repeated. “Well, is there any other possibility you can think of that would explain these injuries as coming from anything other than direct left-handed punches?”

  Metz shrugged again. He was not an impressive witness, especially following two cops and a dispatcher who had been very precise in their testimony.

  “What if Ms. Campo were to have hit her face with her own fist? Wouldn’t she have used her right — ”

  Minton jumped up immediately and objected.

  “Your Honor, this is outrageous! To suggest that this victim did this to herself is not only an affront to this court but to all victims of violent crime everywhere. Mr. Haller has sunk to — ”

  “The witness said anything is possible,” I argued, trying to knock Minton off the soapbox. “I am trying to explore what — ”

  “Sustained,” Fullbright said, ending it. “Mr. Haller, don’t go there unless you are making more than an exploratory swing through the possibilities.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “No further questions.”

  I sat down and glanced at the jurors and knew from their faces that I had made a mistake. I had turned a positive cross into a negative. The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim’s face were self-inflicted. The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.

  Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury’s feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.