A Case of Redemption (27 page)

Judge Pielmeier began by going over the ground rules for jury selection, which she referred to by its Latin name, voir dire. She would question each prospective juror and then give both sides a turn. She made clear her view that her questions would be the most pertinent, and therefore she didn't want the lawyers to plow the same ground she did.

After she made this same point at least three different ways, Judge
Pielmeier finally opened the floor to someone else. It was Kaplan's turn first.

“We don't have any issues to raise,” she said.

“That leaves you and your in limine motion, Mr. Sorensen,” Judge Pielmeier said. “I've read your papers and listened to the song in question. So tell me, Mr. Sorensen, why isn't the jury better informed if this song is admitted into evidence?”

“I'm going to be making this argument, Your Honor,” Nina said.

The judge clearly didn't care. With a bored expression she said, “Then you tell me, Ms. Harrington.”

“For the simple reason that it's not evidence,” Nina said. “It's a song lyric. Jurors might be confused into thinking that someone who is creative must really believe the things he writes, but the truth is that song lyrics aren't evidence of anything but creativity. If Stephen King were on trial, the court would not permit the reading of passages from
The Shining
to show that he had homicidal tendencies. The same rationale must surely apply to hip-hop artists as it does to novelists. Simply put, the ‘A-Rod' song is a work of fiction. For this reason, we plan to question the jurors closely during voir dire on their knowledge of Mr. Patterson's music and seek to exclude any who are very familiar with his song. All of that work will be for naught if the court then allows Ms. Kaplan to simply play the song for the jury during the trial.”

“Okay,” Judge Pielmeier said, and it looked as if she was trying to come up with a one-liner and couldn't. “Let me try to unpack what you're saying here, so we can deal with your objection in a systematic way. First off, on the jury issue, good luck to you finding twelve people who are not aware of Mr. Patterson's music. I tell you, I'd never heard of him before his arrest, but I can't turn on the radio now without hearing that noise he calls music.” She broke eye contact with Nina and looked directly at Legally Dead. “No
offense, sir, I'm sure you have many fans. I'm just more of a Luther Vandross kind of person.”

I knew that L.D. had no idea who Luther Vandross was. Nina probably didn't either.

“My second point,” Judge Pielmeier continued, “is that the lyrics in question concern the defendant bragging that he is going to beat to death a singer with a baseball bat.”

“That's not what it says,” Nina replied. “The ‘singer' referenced in the ‘A-Rod' song isn't Roxanne. The lyric in question doesn't even refer to a singer in the musical sense. It's about a
snitcher
, involved in a gang situation. If you listen to the preceding line—”

Judge Pielmeier interrupted her with a loud laugh, which stopped Nina in her tracks.

“Ms. Harrington, what all this tells me is that you may be right about one thing—if this song is art, as you claim, then it's subject to various interpretations. So maybe your interpretation that it's about . . . whatever you just said it was about, will carry the day with the jury. I'm not in any way preventing you from arguing that interpretation, or that your client is one of the great creative geniuses of our time. But I'm also not going to prevent Ms. Kaplan from telling the jury that the song means what
she
says it means. So the bottom line is that the jury
is
going to be able to hear the song and make up their own minds on what it means.”

I thought that was it, but then the judge said, “Now, off the record . . .” The court reporter lifted her fingers from the machine in front of her in a Pavlovian-like response.

I couldn't help but turn around.
Off the record
meant that what she was about to say would not be included in the court transcript, but there were more than a hundred reporters behind me that would certainly publish what she was about to say, and the prospective jury pool would no doubt read those stories.

But, of course, Judge Pielmeier couldn't resist a good sound bite.
“Mr. Patterson, I'll tell you this. If you wrote a song about killing a singer with a baseball bat, and then you went out and killed a singer with a baseball bat, you are, quite simply, the stupidest human being on the face of the earth.”

And right on cue, the courtroom, of course, exploded with laughter.

T
hat evening, Nina suggested we take the night off. The idea was, in her words, to be like normal people.

“I'm a little out of practice,” I said. “What do you normal people do?”

“I'm far from an expert,” Nina said, “but I think they watch TV. Some type of guilty pleasure, maybe.”

“Like a singing competition, or do you want something more
Real Housewives
–ish?”

“You choose. But nothing involving the legal system. So, no
The Good Wife
or
Law and Order
reruns.”

We settled on a block of sitcoms. I sat on my sofa, feet on the coffee table, with Nina nestled under my arm, her head resting against my chest.

We bantered about gibberish, a welcome change from our usual discussion topics of pubic hair and blood spatter. Nina told me that her favorite TV show of all time was
Saved by the Bell
.

“You're kidding, right? The Saturday-morning thing?”

“Very good,” she teased. “Yeah, I loved that show. That to me was what being a kid was like. I was positive I was going to marry Zack.”

“Wouldn't the one who was in
Showgirls
have gotten jealous?”

She shot me a snarky look. “Figures that that's your connection to TV's gold standard. And for your information, Zack's girlfriend on the show was Kelly, not Jessie.”

“I stand corrected.”

“So what are your favorites? Movie? Book? Television?”

I rattled off my answers. “TV show:
Seinfield
; movie:
The Godfather
; book:
The Great Gatsby
.”

“My God,” she said. “How old are you, anyway?”

“What? These are classics.”

“C'mon, you're flipping the channels and you have the choice between watching
Godfather
or . . . one of the Batman movies. You're not telling me that you watch
The Godfather
.”

“Christian Bale Batman I'll watch, but not the Schumacher ones. No way.”

“My point exactly,” she said with obvious self-satisfaction.

“Are you going to rag on
The Great Gatsby,
too?”

“No, that I saw coming from the day I met you. A romantic who lives in the past . . . might as well have your picture on the cover.”

“Am I that predictable?”

“We all are, I'm afraid. My favorite book is
Anna Karenina.
Feel free to insert your own jaded-about-love joke.”

She slid into me even more, like a cat nuzzling. I reciprocated by rubbing the small of her back, occasionally slipping my hand under the waistband of her sweatpants, tickling her soft skin.

“This is really nice,” she said, a purring sound that matched her feline movements. “It's been a really long time since I spent a night like this.”

“No cuddling with the married man?”

I must have said this too sharply, or else Nina was right and I was utterly predictable, because she knew what I was really thinking.

“Are you jealous, Dan?”

“No,” I said, sounding unconvincing even to myself.

“What a sorry pair we are,” she joked. “I'm jealous of your dead wife, and you're jealous of some guy who strung me along.”

“Please don't be jealous of Sarah,” I said.

My mind flooded with what I wanted to say next. I tried to think about how I'd said it before, and I couldn't remember. For some reason I knew that this time I'd always remember.

Nina must have thought I had nothing more to add, because she'd returned to her position under my arm. I ran through the words in my head.

“I know it hasn't been very long, but I'm pretty sure that I'm in love with you, Nina.”

“Pretty sure?” Nina said.

Even though I knew she was teasing, I felt like an idiot. It was the kind of thing to be said without any qualifier, or not to be said at all.

“Let me try that again. I know that all I think about is how happy I am when we're together, how grateful I am that you came into my life, how much better a person I am than the day before I met you, and how I never, ever want this feeling to stop.”

She pulled herself up, so her face was inches away from mine. I could smell the lilac scent of her shampoo.

“That was much better,” she said. Then, after a beat, “I'm not pretty sure, I
know
that I'm in love with you, Dan.”

T
he first day of trial is like picture day during grade school. Everyone is wearing their best clothing. For me that meant the same charcoal-gray Brioni suit I wore when Nina and I visited L.D. for the first time, which now seemed a lifetime ago.

Two lifetimes ago, in fact.

There was the life I led with Sarah and Alexa, the life in which I was a partner at Taylor Beckett. Then there was the life after that, where I was, more or less, a recluse and a part-time drunk. And now, at forty-three, I was beginning my third life. For all intents and purposes, it might have looked like a replay of the first one—respected lawyer—but I knew that everything about me was different now. If Nina and I were going to have a life together after the trial, I'd be a different man than I'd been with Sarah. Better, in every way.

Nina wore a dark suit that hugged her figure and a light blue shirt. Lisa Kaplan must have shopped in the same store because she had on pretty much the same outfit.

The law clerk called out: “
People of the State of New York vs. Nelson Patterson,
criminal case number 085572.”

In the end, we hadn't said anything about Calvin Merriwether not being Nelson Patterson. Nina had done the legal research on the issue and concluded that making that kind of revelation would implicate L.D.'s Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. “Besides,” Nina had said, “what difference does it make? It's not like what they call him is really going to matter. If he's found guilty, he's going to jail either way.”

“Good morning, all,” Judge Pielmeier said after only a short twenty-minute wait. “Please be seated. And let me extend a warm welcome to those of you in the gallery. I know you all are packed in there pretty tight, and for that I'm truly sorry. But better to be cramped in here than to be outside in the corridor with lots of elbow room.”

The huddled masses behind me gave the judge her sought-after laugh, which was also apparently the cue for the judge's law clerk to notify the prison officials to bring Legally Dead into the courtroom. A minute later, L.D. entered through a side door marked “Do Not Enter.”

It was the first time I'd ever seen L.D. without restraints of some type. That he was still rubbing his wrists indicated he had not been free for very long.

I'd bought him a suit, rejecting the ones he already owned as way too flashy. The one I picked was from Brooks Brothers, figuring it didn't get more conservative than that. It was a light gray, which I thought would contrast with the darker hues Nina and I were wearing. He'd told me that he was a 44 jacket, but I'd bought a 46, for fear that if the suit was cut small, it would give him a more imposing look, like he was about to burst out of it, Incredible Hulk–style. Instead, it swam on him a little, and he seemed less than comfortable in it.

The guards were dressed in suits, as per the judge's order. They looked more like undertakers than spectators, however. For a moment I wondered if it wouldn't have been better to have had them wear their uniforms. They weren't fooling anyone.

Nina caught me taking a deep breath. “It'll be okay,” she whispered.

“I know,” I said back, but in reality, I was far less certain.

In the trials I'd done while at Taylor Beckett, we always relied on high-priced jury experts and focus groups to help us decide which members of the jury pool to select. But the advice always boiled
down to the same thing—defendants want jurors who will empathize with them, and that means people like them.

The obvious juror for Legally Dead, therefore, was a young African-American man. After them, I favored older African-American men and younger white men. Women of any race or age came with the risk that they might identify with Roxanne. Last on my list were older, white males, whom I feared would view themselves as fatherly protectors of Roxanne.

When the first pool of fifty entered, I couldn't believe that any random collection of New Yorkers could be 90 percent white. I scanned the faces and it wasn't until nearly the end of the second row that I saw someone who I thought might be under thirty-five, and even then I wasn't sure. To add to our bad luck, the pool appeared to be more than 50 percent female.

Judge Pielmeier gave the prosecution six peremptory challenges and our side nine—the free lives of jury selection. Each peremptory represented a pool member who could be removed without cause, which meant that if the prospective juror's answers didn't reveal a preconceived bias, we could still dismiss that juror. Unfortunately, we'd need a lot more than nine to get a decent jury out of this group.

L.D. saw the problem immediately, too. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Damn, it looks like a fucking country club over there.”

There were only two black men in the entire pool. One was the first prospective juror, who, according to the questionnaire he filled out, was twenty-nine years old and worked in the warehouse of a paint manufacturer. He was our ideal juror, and so it was no surprise that Kaplan barely paid attention to his answers regarding his ability to adjudicate L.D.'s fate without prejudice. When it was time to vote, Kaplan used her first peremptory to excuse him.