To Hatred Turned (42 page)

It was a gamble, a carefully calculated risk. By deciding to rest, they effectively shut off the state from calling its rebuttal witnesses.

Judge McDowell, who was as surprised as anyone else in the courtroom over the sudden turn of events, sent jurors home to pack their suitcases. Come back after lunch, he told them, prepared to listen to final arguments and begin deliberations.

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As in the guilt/innocence phase, both sides were permitted to make final summations to the jury before the panel began deliberations. According to custom, the prosecution is allowed to speak first, followed by the defense. Then the prosecution gets one more chance.

In this case, Hagood led off for the prosecution, reviewing the evidence for the jury, emphasizing the viciousness of the crime.

“This victim had never done a thing to Mr. Hopper,” Hagood said. “She was a complete and total stranger to him. But he was her judge, jury, and executioner for fifteen hundred lousy dollars.” And that, he added, should say “volumes” about the defendant.

Three things were important to Andy, Hagood said: “money, self-gratification, and not getting caught.” Rozanne was not important to him, the prosecutor contended, nor was her child, who was sleeping in the next room. “Mr. Hopper knows the kid is there, but it doesn’t stop him. He lays her down. He strips her and he rapes her,” referring to Andy’s attempt to rape Rozanne. He wasn’t being paid to rape her, Hagood added, but he tried it anyway. “Well, he’s done with her. He gets up and calmly cleans himself off because he doesn’t want to leave any trace of evidence.” Hagood shook his head. “If you talk about deliberate,” he told the jury, “this is as deliberate as any crime that’s ever been tried.”

After the shooting, Hagood contended, Andy showed no signs of remorse. Instead, once he was caught, he tried to blame the crime on an innocent man. “Ask Chip if he thinks Mr. Hopper is a dangerous man. Clearly, you have a very dangerous man here in this room,” he said, “and only twelve people—you twelve—can stop him.”

Lesser, abandoning his earlier strategy of reminding jurors of the possible complicity of others in Rozanne’s death, pleaded for Andy’s life, claiming that he basically was a good man whose future had been ruined by drugs, a devout Christian who lost his “moral compass.” His mistake, he said, was succumbing to worldly temptations.

“You have to have a moral compass to lose one,” Lesser said. “And I submit to you that everything you know about Andy Hopper says he had a moral compass. He was brought up in a good family. He was taken to church. He was going to Bible college. He was good at what he did at work. He got married, had children, and somewhere in the Seventies, Andy Hopper lost his moral compass.”

He was not alone, Lesser said. Joy Aylor lost her moral compass, as did Rozanne Gailiunas. “These are tough years; a lot of moral compasses get lost.”

But, he said, the loss of a moral compass was not a reason to sentence a man to death. “This is a case,” he argued, “where life is the appropriate punishment.” Evidence presented by the state, Lesser said, was not sufficient to justify Andy’s execution. “It doesn’t mean that the crime is any less horrible. It doesn’t mean that the suffering of the Gailiunas family and the Agnostinellis is any less. It doesn’t mean anything more than our system of justice works.”

Chapman, perhaps frustrated by the defense decision not to put on a case, thereby closing off his opportunity to call witnesses who might have given damaging testimony against Andy, for the first time displayed strong emotion before the jury.

“They say you can’t fool anybody,” he said bitterly. “Well, Andy Hopper fooled everybody. Not one of those people [who testified in Andy’s behalf] can conceive of the fact that he committed that crime. It wasn’t in his interest for them to know that or to know that there was a different side. It wasn’t in his interest for them to know what Andy Hopper was really about.”

Chapman scoffed at the defense contention that Andy had never exhibited a tendency toward violence, reminding jurors of the abuses against his wife and others with whom he came in contact, such as Frances Ferguson, the apartment manager in Houston to whom Andy had exposed himself.

“Even back at age twenty-one, you know that he is in a totally sober state…and able to get pleasure from another perfectly innocent person’s horror. How many people can do that?”

But the incident in Houston, the district attorney contended, just set the stage for what happened in Richardson to Rozanne Gailiunas.

“What is the worst reason in the world to kill somebody?” Chapman asked the jurors. “People kill out of love. They kill out of anger. They kill out of jealousy. They kill during arguments. They kill for greed, a mere fifteen hundred dollars to cash in somebody’s life.”

While the money may have been the first attraction for Andy, the district attorney argued passionately, it was not Andy’s sole motivator. “That’s not the real reason that this woman breathes no more. The real reason,” Chapman said angrily, “is the thrill of it. He wanted to show himself that he could do it.”

And once he had done it, the district attorney added, he believed that he would never be found out. “He’s very talented, very intelligent. He committed this crime for the thrill of it with every expectation that he would never be caught.”

The district attorney shook his head in disgust. Why did he do it? he asked. “He lost his moral compass,” he spat sarcastically. “He had a bad day.”

Andy Hopper shot Rozanne because he was a killer, Chapman said, asserting that he was a killer on October 4, 1983, and remained a killer today. “This man is absolutely responsible for what he did,” Chapman said, his voice rising. “You will never find a criminal more responsible for their conduct than him. I know that he looks shiny and nice for his friends, but Andy Hopper is human only in court. He’s like an alien who could come down to this planet and move about and excel and be well-liked and have no compassion for anyone.”

The face that he presented to others, Chapman said, was a false one. The real Andy Hopper was a cold-blooded killer. “The horror that woman suffered, the death that she suffered, was delicious to him. You’ve got to know that it was. All this suffering,” he concluded, “was for his monetary, perverted sexual gratification.”

The case went to the jury at 5:47 that afternoon. Rather than begin deliberations that late in the day, jurors went to their hotel, vowing to start debating Andy’s fate early the next morning. By the time the jury retired, the lawyers from both sides appeared exhausted, as they should have been. The trial had been three years in preparation and five weeks in execution. It had been a psychological nightmare for Andy’s and Rozanne’s families, but it had been a physical as well as psychological ordeal for the lawyers, too.

Since well before the proceeding began on January 28, both prosecutors and defense attorneys had been working seven days a week, fourteen or more hours a day. Prosecutor Jim Oatman’s wife told D magazine’s Glenna Whitley that her husband had been getting by on three hours of sleep a night for more days than she wanted to remember. The end was almost in sight, but the tension, fueled by exhaustion, was almost unbearable.

Although it was impossible to predict what a jury was going to do, there was a feeling among many of those familiar with the case that Andy’s punishment was going to be as quickly decided as his guilt had been. Except the consensus was that the decision was going to be in Andy’s favor.

Many observers felt the jury would have difficulty justifying a death sentence based on the testimony of prosecution witnesses if Andy’s future dangerousness was a primary consideration, as it was required to be under Texas law.

To get a death sentence, all twelve jurors had to agree. But if one or two jurors held out against it, the result for Andy would be a sentence of life in prison. However, in Texas, as in some other states, life is not
life
. Texas and ten other states are among the thirty-six in the country with death penalty statutes without a corresponding law providing for life in prison without possibility of parole. Sensitive about this perceived deficit, the 1991 Texas legislature adopted a law requiring that anyone sentenced to life in prison for capital murder serve a minimum of thirty-five years before becoming eligible to be released. But Rozanne was murdered in 1983, and Andy would fall under the law that applied at that time. If he got a life sentence, he would be eligible for parole in twenty years. By then, Andy would be in his mid-fifties, his parents would almost certainly be dead, and his two daughters would be in their thirties.

Deliberations began on schedule the following morning, Tuesday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. The jurors argued, sometimes loudly enough to be audible to courthouse workers traversing the adjacent hallway. When Mitchell and Lesser learned that the jurors could be heard yelling at one another, their spirits soared; the more dissention, the better, as far as they were concerned.

Deliberations continued all that day and into the evening without a decision. That, too, was good news for the defense. As a result, Mitchell and Lesser’s hopes were high when jurors finally announced at 3:55
P
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. on Wednesday that they had a verdict. Popular wisdom has it that the longer a jury takes to make a decision, the better it is for the defense. Since this jury had taken almost two full days in deciding Andy’s punishment, as opposed to less than four hours in deciding his guilt, Mitchell and Lesser were ready to celebrate.

The time factor had not been overlooked by the prosecution team either. When the lawyers were summoned to hear the jury verdict, Hagood leaned across the aisle and offered his congratulations to Mitchell and Lesser. “It looks like you guys won,” he whispered.

The defense hopes collapsed, however, when Mitchell and Lesser heard Judge McDowell, out of the jury’s presence, issue a caution. “The jurors have said that they don’t want to talk to anybody after this case is over with.”

When he said that, Lesser felt like sobbing. “I knew that was bad,” the defense lawyer said later. “I knew it was a terrible verdict for us.”

True to his expectations, the verdict was against Andy.

In a deathly quiet courtroom, McDowell summoned the jurors and read them the first of the questions they were required to answer.

“Was the conduct of the defendant, George Anderson Hopper, that caused the death of the deceased, Rozanne Gailiunas, committed deliberately and with reasonable expectation that the death of the deceased or another would result?”—legal jargon for “did he intend to kill her?”

Equally as legalistic, the jurors replied: “We, the jury, unanimously find and determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the answer…is yes.”

The judge then moved rapidly to the second question. “Is there a probability that the defendant, George Anderson Hopper, would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society?”

Again, the jury answered yes.

Temporarily dismissing the jury, Judge McDowell turned to Andy and explained that his sentence could not be finalized until an appeals court could study the verdict, as was required by Texas law in any capital murder case. “But I do sentence you to death,” he said.

Looking Andy in the eye, Judge McDowell told him, “Good luck to you, sir, and God bless you.”

When the verdict was announced, many of those in the courtroom burst into tears, including Andy’s parents and usually stoic court officials.

Before filing out of the courtroom, the jurors huddled quickly and announced a reversal of their earlier decision not to discuss their reasoning in reaching the verdict. They would, they said, meet with one representative from the prosecution and one from the defense.

Chapman went first, closeting himself with the panel shortly after 4
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. When he was still inside an hour and a half later, and when Mitchell and Lesser were told that laughter could be heard inside the room, the discouraged defense attorneys packed up their papers and left. Although Lesser later met with several jurors on an individual basis, neither of the defenders ever talked to the panel as a group.

In the long run, it made little difference. Mitchell had already documented, at least in general terms, the outline for an appeal.

In reality, the decision to sentence Andy to death had not been easily reached. One juror told Lesser that the first vote among panel members was 9-3 in favor of execution. If that had held, the jury would have been decreed deadlocked and Andy’s sentence would have been life in prison. But the jury foreman, a stocky engineer named Randy Cuevas, argued vigorously for the death sentence, badgering the holdouts to switch their votes, asking them if Andy Hopper was the kind of man they would like to have living in their neighborhood, which he might do one day unless they voted in favor of lethal injection. Even if his release was not likely, Cuevas argued, he would still be a threat because he might kill a fellow prisoner. In the end, Cuevas proved very persuasive.

Unhappily, Mitchell and Lesser learned afterward that the juror who may have been their staunchest ally never got a chance to vote or even debate the case with the others. The woman alternate, who was dismissed when testimony was concluded in the guilt/innocence phase, was particularly interested in the testimony about Thorazine and how it got into Rozanne’s system. The woman, at one time, had been under Thorazine therapy herself and she knew firsthand how debilitating the drug could be. As a result, she was highly skeptical of prosecution claims that Rozanne took it voluntarily. However, since jurors were prohibited from discussing the case among themselves until formal deliberations began, she never was able to pass along her experiences and thoughts.