Ghettoside (44 page)

Skaggs was called to confirm that he was likely the “tall white boy” wearing a shirt and a tie but no jacket that Starks had mentioned. Yes, he said, that’s how he dressed on the job. Yes, he said, he did wear a jacket sometimes: for court appearances and always at the scene of a murder. His face was grave: to Skaggs the homicide dress code was a serious matter.

By 10:45
A.M.
, it was over, except for closing arguments. Yadira Tennelle looked exhausted.

Closing arguments stretched over two days, since each of the two juries got a separate rendition. John Colello closed the prosecution’s case against Davis. He had a touch of color in his neck and cheeks, heightening the emotion in his delivery as he pounded home to the jury, once again, each and every element of the prosecution’s massive case. He was a tad bathetic and indulged in prosecutorial clichés. He held up an imaginary gun and yelled
“bam, bam, bam”
to reprise Davis’s motions.

Applebaum rose, stroked his beard, and leaned on his beloved lectern. He began speaking, his hands in his pockets, a watercooler pose, jiggling coins or keys in one pocket as he talked. He sought to address the emotion of the case, acknowledging how charged it was to be defending Devin Davis in sad circumstances such as this, and he deftly sought to neutralize the trial’s most affecting moment. “It’s hard,” he said. “John Colello here was almost in tears. All of us were almost in tears. Including me! Nothing worse than to see a hardened RHD detective … up here with tears running down his face.” But he begged the jurors to be dispassionate.

He argued for second-degree murder on the basis of intent. Starks’s intent had been to kill, but Davis, Applebaum said, had no idea of what he had gotten himself into until the last instant. He proceeded to hammer at what points he could. There weren’t many—that Midkiff had testified to Starks’s controlling ways, that nothing about the shooting suggested that Davis was particularly intentional or focused, and that much of the evidence suggested he was drugged out of his mind, terrified of Starks, and acting under pressure.

Applebaum mentioned that “Devin had snot coming out of his nose” and was crying for his mother during the confession. The image effectively reminded jurors of Davis’s age. Applebaum used John Skaggs’s relentlessness against him. “Because he was a police officer’s son, they are not holding back,” he said. Finally, Applebaum attacked Stirling’s tedious use of clicking slides, a point guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser, since the jurors had endured two weeks of remorseless PowerPoint torture at the hands of the prosecution. “I don’t need to show you a slide
show,” Applebaum said contemptuously. “I want to
talk
to you about this.”

But for all his skills, Applebaum’s most effective argument was sitting at the defense table. Jurors had watched the big-eyed, moon-headed, overweight Devin Davis fidget, fuss, yawn, and chuckle throughout the trial. The prosecution was trying to portray him as “sophisticated, smart,” Applebaum said. As he spoke, Davis sat back, his legs stretched out, feet poking out from under the defense table like a bored schoolboy. Applebaum motioned toward him once or twice. “If he is so smart, why would he put the tattoos on after he is in jail?” More likely, he was just trying to survive, Applebaum said.

The unspoken implication was clear: to suggest that Davis was a calculating criminal capable of premeditated first-degree murder was ridiculous;
just look at the kid
.

Phil Stirling’s rebuttal was so repetitive—he even reprised the pantomime of gunfire,
“boom-boom-boom!”
—that the judge chastised him for being redundant.

So much talk. John Skaggs had work to do. Forced to sit still through these overly long closing arguments was the worst kind of punishment imaginable for him. As the long day in court wore on, Skaggs had gone from irritated to seething without moving any part of his body except his mouth, which had grown steadily tighter. Wasting time appeared to affect even his circulation: his skin had grown pale.

The next morning, the Starks jury got their closings. Stirling stood up, his voice ragged and hoarse. He adjusted his jacket, yanked his chair around, and began by saying that he would try not to be too redundant, then was, repeating the prosecution’s case once again, giving due spotlight to what he called the “Perry Mason moment” when the D. Starks motel receipt had gone up on the screen.

Then Zeke Perlo stood to give the last closing of his career under circumstances that could only be described as a defense rout. He had been unusually quiet all morning.

Maybe the jurors felt for his predicament, for they seemed especially
attentive. Like Applebaum, Perlo was relaxed, mature, conversational. His pen in one hand, folded glasses in the other, he gestured naturally. He began his attempt at damage control by saying, “I wouldn’t expect you to believe Derrick Starks’s testimony—but don’t decide based on that.”

He argued that the jurors needed to evaluate how much of the mountain of evidence that had been heaped on them really pertained to Starks’s presence at the scene. This critical point, he said, was thin. The man in the wheelchair had reason to lie. Midkiff was not the innocent she pretended to be, he said. Was she an accomplice? He methodically sifted through the eyewitness testimony, noting the inconsistencies. Applebaum, who had come in late to observe, wore a look of quiet sympathy. Perlo was making the best of it.

When it was over Perlo walked out of the courtroom into the half sunlight, his forty-six-year career as a trial lawyer over.

Throughout the trial, the prosecutors had worried most about the case against Starks. But in the end, the case against Starks was concluded faster than the one against Davis. His jury deliberated only two days. With the Davis jury still out, they came back at 3:25
P.M
. that Thursday with a verdict.

The afternoon was moist and cool. Wally Tennelle was on a training day. He came in response to the call wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the lone member of the family to appear to hear the verdict. Sixteen RHD detectives also showed up. “The question arises, who is patrolling the streets of L.A.?” Perlo murmured, surveying the phalanx of business suits milling in the courtroom.

His coworkers had come to support him, but Wally Tennelle did not mingle with them. He sat off to the side, an invisible wall around him, one arm draped along the back of the bench in a casual pose contradicted by the tension in his face. As the judge called the court into session, the prosecutors sat hunched together, flushed with emotion, Colello with a fist in his mouth. Skaggs did not attend, but Farell did.

Skaggs never went to hear verdicts, on principle: it was not part of his job. To attend would be a waste of time.

The jury filed in. As Judge Bowers began to read, Tennelle lifted his chin with an effort.

“Guilty,” Bowers said. “Murder in the first degree …”

Starks stared straight ahead. His rib cage expanded with a deep breath followed by a heavy sigh. Tennelle swallowed hard. His eyes reddened. He appeared swept with weariness, holding himself up with effort, tired, sad, and hollowed out. The jurors were polled in turn, every one of them wearing an expression of profound seriousness. None showed relief, or triumph. None so much as glanced at Wally Tennelle.

Olitha Starks did not get to the courtroom in time to hear the verdict. She arrived at the courthouse door with her husband just after the rest had gone. Told that her son had been found guilty, she nodded, her face full of resignation and disgust.

Corey Farell sent a text message on his cell phone to John Skaggs to apprise him of the verdict that Skaggs had refused to come and hear. Farell’s phone buzzed immediately with a blasé response. It was vintage Skaggs—one word:
sweet
.

The Davis jury came back the next morning. This time the courtroom was empty except for a gaggle of prosecutors, friends of Stirling and Colello. Wally Tennelle did not attend. Davis watched the envelope intently as it traveled across the courtroom in the clerk’s hands from the jury to the judge. When the guilty verdict was announced, he put a hand over his mouth, swung his head upward, and stared at the ceiling as the long list of findings was read. As court adjourned, Davis sat shaking his head.

Corey Farell did not attend because he had been called in early to his new job with the Foothill Division in the San Fernando Valley. His new station had seen two homicides in a week, the victims a Latino man and a young black woman. The cases were problematic: none of the witnesses wanted to cooperate. But Farell kept tabs on the court proceedings by phone and notified Skaggs of the guilty verdict. This time, his text message prompted an even more laconic answer from the cop with a tie and no jacket:
Rog
, for “Roger that.”

THE MISSING

Jurors reported being exhausted and emotionally spent. Several were terrified of retribution. Waiting to be escorted into the courtroom for the reading of the verdict, one juror admitted his hands were shaking. Despite their appearance of stoicism, several said that they had been churning inside and choking back tears.

Some thought the defense competent, others found it hopelessly passive. Some wondered why the defense had not gone more aggressively after Midkiff. A few thought the prosecutors’ open expression of emotion during the trial was overkill. A couple of jurors said they did, indeed, feel sorry for Zeke Perlo.

Several also thought Stirling’s cross-examination of Starks and the prosecution’s closing arguments were excessive: the problems with Starks’s deceptiveness didn’t need to be belabored. Similarly, the drama of the hotel receipt was impressive, but apparently not game-changing. The reference to a “Perry Mason moment,” however, elicited a spirited discussion in the jury room when it turned out a younger juror did not know who Perry Mason was.

The Davis jurors had more disagreements and prolonged discussions. They scrutinized the physical evidence closely to arrive at the conclusion
that Davis had not been shooting randomly. All said they had taken their duties seriously. “I’m not going to forget any day of this,” one said.

The defense attorneys, noting that the jurors were mostly white, had speculated that they could not relate to the circumstances of the case. But at least one juror was not as far from the ghettoside world as they thought. This was the Davis foreman, forty-four, a white man with blond hair and blue eyes who worked as an upper-level manager of a chain of local fast-food restaurants. His job often took him to Compton and other neighborhoods south of the Ten. He lived in the suburbs, but he had grown up in military housing in Washington, D.C., and attended schools that drew from the city’s black neighborhoods. He had been in many a street fight. As an adolescent, he had learned the rules of the black inner city—learned that when it came to fighting in a lawless place, “if you back down, you back down forever,” he explained.

Commenting on the Tennelle case, this juror proved more perceptive than some of the professional cops who had trailed in and out of the courtroom. He knew Midkiff had been a prostitute. He suspected, without its ever coming out at trial, that Starks had pimped her out. He was astounded by fellow jurors who couldn’t understand why Bryant was wearing what he called the “stupid hat.” “It’s to feel safe in his environment!” he said.

Speaking of Bryant, the foreman seemed to comprehend the place the struggling eighteen-year-old had occupied among his friends. Told that Bryant’s friends had thrown play punches, he nodded knowingly. They had to teach him to fight in order to risk hanging out with him, he remarked. A friend who was seen as weak could jeopardize one’s respect and status and therefore one’s safety.

Like many Angelenos, the foreman knew black-on-black homicide south of the Ten was deeply entrenched. He had picked up on Tennelle’s choice to live in the Seventy-seventh Street Division, “trying to do good, and trying to be a role model,” and realized that the killing had gotten little public attention. It bothered him.

“There is a perception that blacks are doing it to blacks, and if I’m
white, it doesn’t affect me,” said the white jury foreman. His eyes flashed with sudden anger. “Well, get over it.
It does
.”