The Trial: Day 4 (May 8th)

Day 4

Super quick note here. Rereading my notes, I see that I mention that the defense lawyer was bad at making the criminologist look like she was incompetent. Um, I'm not sure why I wrote that, but there were definitely things he brought up that made her look not thorough at all, and really not particularly great at her job. Maybe I was distracted by how pretty she was. :)

5/8

Now THIS was a day in court. Things got very testy, we actually saw some evidence presented as opposed to shaky testimony, and we finally saw a picture of the crime. The day began with the other neighbors of the apartment in question, who were a Spanish-speaking only couple. They both presented relatively dull testimony, but the interesting thing was the interpreter. The interpreter was translating as the counsel was speaking, which was odd and disjointing; I don't want to think about how hard that must have been for the court reporter. From the scattered Spanish I know, the translation seemed to be dead on.

We also had a crime lab technician in today, specifically the one that analyzed the scene. A couple of things to note about her. She was incredibly pretty, almost overwhelmingly so compared to what you might expect from a criminal scientist. She's very young, and even though she has a good amount of experience (about fifty crime scenes), it did seem clear that she hasn't become as much of an expert in crime scenes as she will likely become (for example, she didn't feel comfortable talking about blood spatter; she'd only taken one class in it for her masters). Finally, her name is Michelle Madrid. Again, I can't make this stuff up; she sounds like she should be a hard boiled detective.

Anyways, as part of her testimony we got to see an actual picture of the deceased. Needless to say, it was horrifying. I consider myself to have a strong stomach when I hear about or even see disturbing things, but this was so raw and brutal, and the corpse was so frightening looking and mangled, that I definitely felt a bit queasy. Everyone was squirming in their seats at the picture, and there were some audible gasps. The thing that frightened me the most about the picture was the way her head was turned at a bizarre angle. I can't explain it, but when a head is upside down or turned in an odd way, I get freaked out. I still have occasional nightmares about the movie Ringu, where at the end when the girl comes out of the TV her head is attached to her neck but is literally turned upside down; I was beside myself during that scene.

Anyhow, Michelle Madrid was testifying pretty much all day. She was there from 11 to 4:30 (about two hours of that time was taken up with breaks). Our defendant's lawyer attempted to make her sound like she had been mildly incompetent at her job, but it wasn't working at all, and in fact, in one of the great moments of the trial so far, the judge started cracking up at his line of questioning and seemed to be waiting for an objection so he could ridicule the lawyer at asking her things that were clearly outside of her line of expertise.

The moment in question came when she was asked about a piece of toilet paper that was found next to the door knob, and she was asked, in a series of questions, if one would normally use toilet paper to open a door and for what other purposes it might be used. The judge pointed out that she was likely not an expert on toilet paper and asked the defense to go down a different path of questioning; this made the court erupt in laughter. Another similar moment was when there was a tangle over the phrase "anything's possible" which was asked by the prosecution. As the judge pointed out, anything is indeed possible, and since no one was there to actually witness the crime, it was ridiculous to ask her to speculate like this. The judge berated the prosecution a little bit this time, and we all cracked up again. Ah, court humor.

This was the most interesting day so far, and on Monday, the coroner comes in. Hoo boy.

Random Notes

Today, we had a bizarre moment where our defendant's defense lawyer was uncertain as to which defendant he had referred to in a question. The court reporter apparently messed this up in her transcript, since the judge couldn't read what she had written, but our jury (and I mean the jury I'm in, not the other jury) all leaped in and pointed out which defendant he had said. Way to go, us!

Michelle the crime lab technician was the only person so far on the stand to address the jury directly i.e. look at us as opposed to looking at the lawyers when answering. Kind of odd, but a nice change of pace.

Our defendant's defense lawyer seemed really tired today; his voice was strained and he made uncharacteristic mistakes like forgetting who he had referred to earlier.

The funniest thing to me so far has been how the defense and the prosecution are remarkably friendly with and helpful to each other. They refer to each other by first name, they occasionally make side comments to each other, and today in particular, there was a problem where one side needed some kind of pointer to show something on the screen, and the other side gave them a laser pointer! Clearly, the defense people are public defenders; there's no way prosecutors and defense lawyers would be this chummy normally.

That projector I keep mentioning? Today they tried to auto-focus pictures, and when it did, they were still really fuzzy. One of the jurors pointed out that the lens was dirty, which might be causing the problem. As I walked out for lunch, I checked, and indeed, it's filthy! You'd think they'd clean that thing once in a while.

I had some courthouse coffee today during the break, and oh my lord, was that stuff strong! Strong and disgusting. Now I know why on Law and Order and Homicide and all those shows, they complain about the coffee. Man...