Among the other lawyers in the trial division, Doan’s reputation is reasonably good. He is said to be fair, reasoned and methodical with both evidence and witnesses. He preps hard for trials and his closing arguments are always competent, often skillful, though sometimes not nearly as strong or emotional as some think they could be. But in one respect, he is a rare prize for any homicide detective who happens to care about a case: Doan will fight. Assured that a defendant is guilty and that no reasonable plea can be taken, Doan isn’t afraid to take a borderline or marginal case to a jury. Like any trial lawyer, he hates to lose, but he is willing to lose if the only alternative is a stet or dismissal.
Garvey is counting on this: He knows Doan will fight, just as he knows that the evidence against Robert Frazier is sufficient but not overwhelming. Kidding aside, he’s glad to have Doan for this one.
Leaving the prosecutor’s cubicle, the detective walks down the side stairwell to the third-floor hallway outside Cliff Gordy’s courtroom. There are two benches in the hall and a third in the carpeted anteroom just outside Gordy’s court. Because he is a sequestered witness, Garvey will make the three benches his office for the next week, as a prosecution that he worked hard to prepare unfolds without him.
For Garvey, the relegation to prosecutor’s assistant is always hard to accept. Doan isn’t one of those lawyers who wants a cop to be seen and not heard; he’s willing to take advice. On the other hand, he’s going to listen to that advice, evaluate it, and then try the case his way. Garvey, who knows the Lena Lucas case better than any man, is not exactly known for his abundant tact; in fact, he’s never met an opinion he’d be unwilling to venture. Yet Doan must walk through Judge Gordy’s double doors and try the case on the merits; Garvey must sit outside and play shepherd to the state’s evidence and witnesses. The morning banter in Doan’s office suggests the change in status: In February, it was Garvey who was sweating this case, scratching for every available piece of evidence. Now Garvey has the time to joke and tease. Now he can pretend not to know whether Wilson from the crime lab is going to show up for trial. Now he can criticize the trial strategy and demand victory. Now it’s Larry Doan’s turn to carry the weight.
Yet Garvey wants very much to win this case. For one thing, he has never lost a case that has gone to a jury trial and he’d like to keep that admirable record intact. For another, he would like to see Lena Lucas avenged. She was using cocaine and helping Frazier to deal; still, she was a good enough mother to her daughters and she never hurt anyone but herself. Both of Lena’s daughters and her sister are scheduled as state’s witnesses, and all three are waiting with Garvey. The rest of the family is already inside the court, but earlier that morning, they greeted Garvey in the corridor as if he were Moses down from Sinai. Good people, thinks Garvey, settling in on the bench. They deserve to win this.
The man of the hour, Robert Frazier, is already inside the courtroom and behind the defense table, sitting next to his lawyer with a hardbound copy of the New Testament in front of him, a cardboard marker pressed inside the Book of Luke. Frazier is wearing a well-tailored dark suit and a crisp white shirt, but somehow there’s no mistaking his line of work. Just before the jury files in, Frazier stretches his tall frame, pushes his chair back and yawns like a man at ease in courtrooms. He turns to look at the members of the Lucas family in the back row, stares for a moment, then turns away.
The motions hearings were yesterday morning, with Doan successfully fighting off some routine efforts by Paul Polansky, who tried to have the identification of his client by Romaine Jackson-the young girl who saw Frazier enter Lena’s building from her third-floor window-ruled inadmissible. Polansky argued that Frazier’s photo had been given greater prominence in the photo array shown to the girl because it was in the upper left corner and because the other men seemed younger and less thin. Gordy denied the motion, as well as one that challenged a search warrant that Garvey and Donald Kincaid had written for Frazier’s Chrysler after the arrest. Live.38 ammunition had been found in the trunk.
The rest of the day was spent on the selection of a jury-voir dire-the elaborate process by which potential jurors are screened for bias by the court. Voir dire is, in itself, an essential part of the trial strategy, with prosecutors using their limited number of “strikes” to keep out those potential jurors who have been beaten by police, have relatives in the prison system, or generally regard the criminal courts of the United States as a sham perpetrated by running dog capitalist jackals. At the same time, the defense attorney endeavors to use his strikes to remove all who are related to a law enforcement officer, who were ever the victims of a crime, or who truly believe that if the man seated at the defense table is accused of the crime, he must be guilty. Because the population of Baltimore generally holds membership in one or more categories, voir dire in the Lucas case took quite a while-at least until the lawyers exhausted the allowable strikes.
From his seat at the trial table, Doan now watches the product of yesterday’s effort walk in from the jury room. A typical Baltimore jury-predominantly black, predominantly female. Polansky didn’t exactly go out of his way to find white jurors willing to sit in judgment on his black client; nor, for that matter, did Larry Doan strike any white strays from the jury box. Still, watching the jurors file in, Doan is generally satisfied. Most are working people, but with the sole exception of the girl in the front row, all seem sharp and attentive, which matters for a case such as this one. The girl in the front row, however, is trouble. Doan watches her slump into her seat, arms crossed, staring at the floor. She’s bored already; God knows what she’ll be like after four days of testimony.
Judge Clifton Gordy calls the court to order and begins his preamble, explaining the legal arena to the jurors. Tall, quiet, serious, Gordy cuts quite a figure on the bench. His language is precise, his humor is sharp, and his manner often seems, to lawyers at least, well suited to tyranny. Attorneys who fail to rise when stating their objections in Gordy’s court generally find themselves ignored. Gordy knows his law and he knows his lawyers; Doan, for example, worked for Gordy when the judge was heading the trial division. One other thing about the judge suits Doan in this case: Cliff Gordy is black, and that takes some of the edge off the fact that two white Jewish guys will be arguing the question of a black man’s freedom. It will certainly help the black jurors to believe that the criminal justice system actually represents them.
As Gordy finishes his introduction and Doan rises to begin his opening, Garvey sits in the anteroom, struggling with the morning Sun crossword.
“British gun,” says Garvey. “Four letters.”
“S-T-E-N,” says Dave Brown from the other end of the bench, where he waits in case the trial testimony turns to the Purnell Booker case. “A British gun is always Sten in crosswords.”
“You’re right,” says Garvey.
Lost to them is Doan’s greeting to the jury, his warning that this is a murder case, a nasty, ugly, gruesome murder case that involves the willful taking of human life. That accomplished, Doan begins the long, labored process by which jurors are shorn of preconceptions.
“This is not television,” he assures the jury. “Unlike TV shows, motive is not an element of the crime of first-degree murder. You don’t know exactly why it happened. It’s something you would like to know, it’s something the person trying the case would like to know, but it’s not necessary to know it to prove the crime.”