by Gerry Spence
“And what was that reason?” Coker asked.
Lillian jumped up and ran to the podium and began whispering wildly to Coker. “You leave her alone. She’s trying to protect me. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“I’m beginning to see it all too clearly. You’re the one who’s insane, Lillian. I know what I’m doing,” Coker whispered back.
Judge Little hit his gavel. “The defendant will take her seat immediately!”
“I want a recess,” Lillian said in a high, frightened voice to the judge.
“I, too, need a recess, Your Honor,” Coker said.
“The court will stand in recess for five minutes.” Judge Little struck his gavel again and left the bench. As the jurors retired to the jury room, Deputy Huffsmith led Tina from the courtroom.
Lillian and Coker sat huddled at the counsel table. In a frantic whisper, she cried, “What are you doing, Timothy?” Her eyes were wild. “Are you trying to convince this jury that Tina killed Horace?”
“You’ve lost it, Lillian,” Coker said. “If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to ask the judge to have you examined. You don’t understand what’s happening. I’m trying to save both of you.”
“You want to turn my child into a confessed murderer?”
“She already is. If the jury believes Tina, the jury will acquit you. If they can’t figure it out, they may hang or acquit you. Don’t you understand?”
Lillian looked wildly around the courtroom, like one searching for something not yet identified.
“It’s our only chance to save Tina’s mother for Tina,” Coker said.
Lillian stared blankly at Cocker, and her lips started to form words, but none escaped.
When Judge Little called the court to order, and Tina was once more stiffly settled in the witness stand, Coker began anew. “I believe my last question to you, Miss Ford, was why did you kill your stepfather?”
Tina looked over at her mother. “We used to be close, Mother and me. That was before he came along. Then things changed. I saw why. He was teaching my mother to do those things. I saw them once. He is an agent—”
Lillian jumped up again.
“Sit down, Mrs. Adams!” the judge ordered.
Lillian, as if preparing to run to the witness stand to save her daughter, remained standing.
“I said, ‘Sit down, Mrs. Adams,’” the judge repeated.
Slowly, Lillian sunk into her chair.
Then Coker asked Tina, “What do you mean your stepfather was teaching your mother things?”
“I saw them. My grandfather told me that people who do that stuff should be killed, and that they are agents of the devil.”
“That’s objected to as hearsay,” Sewell said.
But before the judge could rule, Tina continued: “He was doing those things to my mother, and she was doing it, too. It was disgusting. I told my grandfather what I saw, and he said the man should be shot.”
“I have no further questions,” Coker said, and sat down.
Sewell took quick, determined steps to the lectern for his redirect examination. “I suppose you know what perjury is, Miss Ford.”
“Yes, it’s when you lie. And you’ve been lying about what I told you in your office. You are a perjurer.”
“You told me in my office that your mother was home when you got home, isn’t that true?”
“No, that’s a dirty, filthy lie, and you know it.” Tina turned to the judge. “Judge, he’s lying some more. I want you to put him in jail for lying, just like I’d have to go to jail for lying.”
Coker rose in support of Tina’s objection. “This is still another one of Mr. Sewell’s poisoned questions, Your Honor. No one was present except Mr. Sewell during his interviews with Tina. He didn’t record them. He’s impeaching his own witness, and by that means he’s testifying. I move that his question be stricken, that the jury be admonished—”
“Save your breath, counsel,” the judge said. “I sustain your objection, Mr. Coker. It’s repetitive. Proceed, Mr. Sewell.”
“I move for a mistrial,” Coker demanded. “The jury has again heard Mr. Sewell’s statement disguised as a question. You can’t unring that bell.”
The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, any inference of fact arising from Mr. Sewell’s last question is to be completely disregarded, do you understand?”
All the jurors nodded except the older woman in the front row. Her arms were still folded across her bosom.
“That should take care of it, Mr. Coker,” the judge said. “Your motion for a mistrial is overruled. Proceed, Mr. Sewell.”
“What did you say to your mother when she got home?” Sewell asked Tina.
Lillian cried aloud, “This child has been under the care of a psychologist, and she’s sick. Please order these lawyers to leave her alone.”
“That’s enough out of you, Mrs. Adams,” the judge said, pounding his gavel.
“You are the devil,” Tina said to Sewell. “You make me sick. Sick!”
“I agree!” Lillian Adams said. “You are the slimiest of them all.”
The judge slammed his gavel. “Have the sheriff remove Mrs. Adams from this courtroom.”
“I have no further questions of Miss Ford,” Sewell said with disgust.
Deputy Huffsmith came forward and loosened the handcuffs from his belt for Lillian Adams’s waiting wrists. Then he led her stumbling from the courtroom. As Huffsmith dragged her from the courtroom, she cried, “You are all sick. And you, Judge, are the sickest of them all.”
Judge Little turned to Timothy Coker and slammed his gavel to emphasize that he was still presiding. “Mr. Coker may re-cross-examine Miss Ford.”
Tina sat crumpled on the witness stand, her mother, her protection, now occupying the padded cell in the jail.
“My client, Lillian Adams, is entitled to be present during my cross-examination of her daughter,” Coker said to the judge. “After all, she is the legal guardian of her child, who now sits without representation.”
“That may be so,” Judge Little acknowledged, “but your client has, by her conduct, deprived herself of her right to be in the courtroom to represent this juvenile.”
“Under your ruling, the child has no guardian present,” Coker argued.
“I will watch over the child’s rights,” the judge said.
“Are you saying that you will act as her guardian during my cross-examination, and so long thereafter as Lillian Adams is not in this courtroom?”
“I will,” the judge said.
“In that case, I ask Your Honor to step down. You cannot act as the self-appointed guardian of this witness as well as the judge in this case.”
The judge aimed his rheumy old eyes at Coker. Then he peered out over the spectators. “I see Mrs. Mildred Maines in the audience. She is a lawyer and an officer of this court. Will you come forward, Mrs. Maines?”
A sober, businesslike woman in a brownish suit got up from the middle of the courtroom, excused herself as she edged to the aisle past the other spectators, and walked with authoritative steps toward the bar. She’d made no attempt to disguise the gray that etched her dark hair at the temples. Her hair was in bangs and concluded with a ponytail in the back. Once inside the bar, she faced the judge, who administered the guardian’s oath to her and directed her to a seat at Timothy Coker’s table. She tendered Coker an embarrassed smile and sat down.
“Proceed, counsel,” Judge Little ordered, withholding any suggestion of triumph.
Coker fumbled at buttoning his suit coat. Finally, he said, “Tina, you know your mother loves you?”
“Yes. She does. But he put her under a—”
“And your mother has attempted to protect you all along from the likes of Mr. Sewell, including her willingness to take the blame for your having shot your stepfather.”
Mrs. Maines rose to object. “As the guardian of this child, I instruct her not to answer the question, on the grounds that her answer might
incriminate her.”
Tina turned to Mrs. Maines. “I’m old enough to say ‘Go to hell.’ So I say, you can go straight to hell!”
Sudden silence in the courtroom. The judge acted as if he hadn’t heard.
“Do you have any further questions of this witness, Mr. Coker?” the judge asked.
“Yes, I do.” He turned back to Tina. “You remember when you tried to stab your stepfather with a butcher knife?”
She nodded her head.
“Why did you try to stab him?”
“He was doing that with my mother. I saw them through the transom on the roof.”
“I have no further questions,” Coker said.
Sewell approached the witness cautiously. “Miss Ford, it’s true, is it not, that your stepfather attempted to do that same thing to you, and you told your mother about it?”
“No, it is not true. You are such a filthy, lying beast.”
Coker jumped to his feet. “When do these fictional, groundless, poisoned questions end? The prosecutor obviously has no foundation whatever for that question. It is just Sewell stating his own concocted fictions to this jury.”
“I agree,” Judge Little ruled. “The jury will disregard the prosecutor’s last question. Any more of this, counsel, and I will have you removed from this courtroom, as well. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Sewell said. He offered the jury a knowing look, as if to suggest that even the judge had been captured by Lillian Adams. “I have no further questions.”
“The witness may step down,” the judge ordered. And with that, Tina Marie Ford exited the courtroom, accompanied by a deputy, who’d been instructed to return her to the care of Mrs. Houseman and the psychiatric nurse, Roberta Clemmins, until further order of the court.
Haskins Sewell rested his case, and Timothy Coker moved the court for a directed verdict, on the grounds that the state had offered no competent evidence by which Lillian Adams could be found guilty of first-degree murder. Judge Little found that the evidence, taken in a light most favorable to the prosecution—as was the standard test—was sufficient to go to the jury.
* * *
That evening, Hardy Tillman called Judge Murray. “I been in court all day, Judge, and just to keep you up-to-date, they throwed Lillian’s pretty ass into jail for raising hell in the courtroom. She went plumb nuts.”
When the judge told Betsy the news, she said, “My God, you have to go get her out of jail.”
“That’s the safest place for her right now,” the judge said. “She can’t do her case any more harm than she’s already done it. Timothy knows that.”
“I know Lillian is innocent.” She turned to the judge. “She is, isn’t she?”
He saw the deep, tired worry in Betsy’s eyes. “Yes, honey, she’s innocent.”
But the judge understood one simple truth: that mothers are governed by the same natural impulse as the goose that will fight off the coyote or die in her attempt to save her goslings. Then the judge asked himself the overriding question: How can mothers be held to the law of man when the law of nature is in supreme command?
CHAPTER 45
THE JUDGE DIDN’T want to get out of bed. Finally, he found his way to the bathroom, and as he passed the mirror, he refused to look at himself—“to behold the face of an old liar” is how he put it to himself.
He’d lied to the jury about Lillian’s confession to him when she’d been waiting for him in his pickup. He abhorred perjury. If witnesses felt free to lie under oath, the entire judicial system would be reduced to a meaningless charade, and he’d sentenced more than one convicted perjurer to prison for a substantial term of years.
Yes, Sewell habitually lied. For Sewell, lying was a customary weapon. But what if Lillian had killed her husband out of compassion—to save him from the protracted hell of his lost mind, wounded by the onset of senile dementia? Or what if Horace, in a passing moment of clarity, had killed himself, and both Tina and Lillian were innocent?
The judge staggered back to bed, and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Finally, he saw a woman take form in his mind’s eye.
She wore a plain cotton dress and her hands showed traces of fresh soil. Her arms were strong. He saw her breasts as she leaned forward to loosen the dirt around a climbing tomato plant. Then she came up close to him, and he could smell the scent of earth and growing things. She expanded like fog, and her arms spread around him, and after that there were no boundaries between them. She disappeared into the fog, and when she returned, she picked a tomato and handed it to him.
“These are delicious,” she said. She held it up for him to taste. “If there’s a God, it’s in a vine-ripened tomato.” He held her close to him, and felt her strength, and her youth. Then he said, “Betsy.”
“You called, honey? Your breakfast is getting cold.”
* * *
Timothy Coker announced that Deputy Arthur Huffsmith would be his first witness. The deputy trekked to the stand and pulled himself up straight like a schoolboy about to be admonished by the teacher. Without his sheriff’s cowboy hat, his bald head was exposed and white. His deep-set eyes shifted from side to side and his jaw was clenched. His stomach protruded, covering his wide cowboy belt with the letters ART carved next to the buckle. He shifted nervously in the witness chair like a bull rider getting settled for a dangerous ride. With both hands, he protected the brown expanding file on his lap.
“You were the deputy who first arrived at the death scene?” Coker asked.
“Yes, sir.” Small beads of sweat appeared on the man’s temples.
“Did anyone accompany you?”
“No.”
“Other than receiving evidence from you, did Mr. Sewell ever talk to you about this case?”
“No.”
“Do you find that strange?”
Sewell objected. “This is irrelevant.”
“He may answer,” the judge ruled.
“Kinda, because I was the first at the scene. I figured he’d wanna talk to me.”
“What were your duties as the first officer at the death scene?”
“To secure the area.”
“What did you do in that regard?”
“I first asked Mrs. Adams and her daughter to leave the room. They was crying. Mrs. Adams was shaking all over. I asked her what happened. She couldn’t speak except to say over and over, ‘Oh, Tina. Oh, Tina.’ She was holding on to her daughter and both of them was crying. I asked them to leave the room. Then I waited until the other officers come.”
“Did you do anything else?”
“Yes, I had the camera I carry along. It ain’t my job, but I usually take a few shots of my own because it makes it easier for me to write up my report.”
Coker asked Huffsmith to produce the photos he’d taken that night, marked them as exhibits, and offered them into evidence. Sewell objected that the photos had not been shown to him twenty-four hours in advance, which was the court’s rule. Coker responded that he hadn’t been apprised of their existence until the evening before.
“Let’s see where this takes us,” Judge Little said.
Coker continued, “So, Deputy Huffsmith, you took these photographs before anyone else arrived?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I call your attention to Defense Exhibit A, your photo. Does this accurately reveal what you saw on the desk at the time you first arrived?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see any paper there, any writing, any so-called suicide note?”
“No.”
“Are you saying that you found the corpse of Horace Adams the Third at his desk, and that you found no suicide note there?”
“Yes, sir, that there is exactly what I am saying.”
Coker went to the clerk’s desk, retrieved the supposed suicide note that had been examined by the handwriting expert, Widdoss, and handed the note to Huffsmith. “Have you seen this note before this moment?”
Huffsmith took the note, held it as far awa
y from his body as possible, as if it were contaminated, but examined it carefully. “No, sir, I ain’t never seen this before.”
“Do you know where it came from?”
“No, sir.”
“You say you were the custodian of the evidence in this case?”
“Yes.”
“But this is the first time that you’ve seen this note?”
“Yes, sir. Sure is.”
Coker continued: “In the upper-right-hand corner of Exhibit A—your photo of the scene when you first arrived—there appears to be a Cracker Jack box, and something that looks like a cigar stub. Do you have those items in your possession?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What do you make of those two items?”
“Don’t know,” Huffsmith said. “They was on the desk when I found him. The Cracker Jack box was old and beat up and empty.” He pointed to the cigar stub. “That there was a toy cigar—just brown paper. They used to put a toy in every box, along with the caramel popcorn.”
“Did Mr. Sewell know you had custody of the Cracker Jack box and the toy cigar?”
“Yes, I told him.”
“Who next arrived at the scene?”
“Sheriff Lowe, and Undersheriff Bromley was the next to arrive, and then Sergeant Illstead. After them, Mr. Sewell come.”
“Did you ever discuss the so-called suicide note with them?”
“Yes, I did. After I heard about this note during this trial, which was the first I heard about it, I asked the sheriff about it. But he said he figured I had the note all along with all the other evidence I took that night.”
“What other evidence did you take into your possession that night?”
“The pistol, and Mr. Adams’s journal. That’s about it.”
“What can you tell us about his journal?”
“Well, I found his journal there on the desk. You can see it here.” He pointed to a notebook clearly visible in his photograph. “I took it along with the pistol.”
“Do you have the journal?”
“No. I delivered it to Mr. Sewell.”
