certain of was that nine people, eight of them very young children, had died horrible, horrible deaths. Needless deaths. The second thing we were absolutely certain of, or at least thought we were absolutely certain of, was that it was my client who'd been driving the Audi when it ran the van off the road and caused those nine deaths. I was every bit as certain of that as you were. And for much of the trial, nothing happened to cause us to question that certainty. After all, hadn't the defendant turned himself in? Wasn't it his car? Didn't Concepcion Testigo point him out, remembering him from his yellow hair? And most of all, didn't the defendant himself tell you that he was driving? And even now, doesn't he continue to insist that he was?
'Well, it just so happens we were wrong, you and I. Carter Drake turned himself in because he wanted to protect his wife from getting into trouble, just as he'd wanted to drive home that evening because he wanted to protect his underage son from getting into trouble. And because he turned himself in, and because it was his car, nobody ever gave it a second thought. Not the police, not the prosecutors, not even I. So you're in pretty good company. And as far as Concepcion Testigo is concerned, the driver of the pickup truck, don't blame him. What did he tell you? 'I only got a quick look at the driver, but I did get his license plate.' 'Which plate?' Mr. Firestone asks him. 'Front or rear?' 'Rear,' says Testigo. 'Do you see the driver in court?' Firestone asks. 'I think that's him, over there,' says Testigo. 'I remember his yellow hair.'
' 'I remember his yellow hair.'
'Who else in this case just happens to have yellow hair?' Jaywalker asked them. And he saw the name Amanda on sixteen pairs of lips. So he simply nodded.
'How did we discover, you and I, that it was Amanda Drake who was driving? We discovered it purely by accident, Carter Drake's accident. He was trying to demonstrate how he tried to jam the stick shift into a lower gear. And then he was so intent on showing you that he made a mistake. And when you stop to think about it, it was the most natural mistake in the world. Because it was the truth. Carter Drake used his left hand, the one he actually used that night. Had he been behind the wheel, surely he would have used his right hand. There can be absolutely no doubt about that. If any of you aren't sure, look at Investigator Sheetz's photo of the interior of the Audi, and you'll see.' He held up the photo. 'Carter Drake used his left hand in the demonstration just as he used it in real life. And his doing so proves conclusively that he was in the passenger seat. There can be no other explanation. None.'
At least four jurors-now five, six-were nodding in agreement. They weren't happy about it, but they were nodding.
'But there's even more,' he told them. 'Why couldn't he get the Audi in a lower gear in order to slow it down? You saw how hard he tried. Well, we know there was nothing wrong with the car. Sheetz told us that. They checked it out thoroughly, inside and out, no doubt because they didn't want Drake coming in here and saying there had been some sort of mechanical failure that had caused him to speed up and swerve into the wrong lane. So we know we can rule that out.
'Once again, there's only one possible explanation. In order to change gears, you first need to do something else. You first need to use your left foot to step on the clutch, the pedal on the far left.' He turned his back to the jurors so he was facing the same way they were, and gestured from right to left. 'Accelerator, brake, clutch. Carter Drake couldn't depress the clutch because he couldn't reach it. And he couldn't reach it for one reason, and one reason only.
'He was in the passenger seat.
'I'd love to add one other thing, to talk about Amanda's refusal to say whether or not she was driving. But Justice Hinkley will tell you that you may draw no conclusion from that.'
Firestone objected, and the judge instructed the jurors to disregard the comment, but they were both too late. A lot of cases are won by putting something in evidence. Every once in a while, though, a case is won by putting something in the ear. Amanda's having taken the Fifth, invoking it at the precise moment when she would otherwise have had to incriminate herself, was simply too important to leave out. It would be worth another night in jail, if it came to that. It would be worth a week of nights, if only they could find him a no-snoring cell.
'So you can convict Carter Drake if you want to, as I'm sure Mr. Firestone will ask you to. He even told you in his opening statement that he would, back before any of us knew what we now know. If not for the admitted fact of Carter Drake's drinking too much, his wife never would have had to drive a car she was unfamiliar with, in a place she was unfamiliar with, in the dark, and in the midst of an argument, and this tragedy never would have occurred. So there'd even be a kind of poetic justice were you to convict him.
'But you're not here to impose poetic justice. You aren't poets. You are jurors, and you're here to impose real justice. And real justice, no matter how unpleasant and distasteful it sometimes becomes, requires us to ask ourselves one question, and one question alone. Are we convinced-convinced beyond all reasonable doubt- that it was Carter Drake, and not Amanda Drake, who was behind the wheel of the Audi at that fateful moment? Or do we have at least some hesitation when we get to that issue, some lingering doubt that leaves us less than convinced beyond all reasonable uncertainty? There can be only one answer to that question, jurors. And that answer is no, there's no way we can be convinced, not beyond all reasonable doubt. So it's up to you. If you do your duty, follow the law and impose real justice, you must f ind Carter Drake not guilty, and leave how he is finally judged in other hands.'
And with that, barely twenty-five minutes after he'd begun, Jaywalker sat down.
Abe Firestone spoke for twice as long, but not half as well. Despite Jaywalker's having done so, he, too, listed the names of the victims, though he read them from the captions beneath their photos on the oak tag exhibit. He accused Jaywalker of orchestrating the 'mistake' with the stick shift and the clutch, and of getting Amanda Drake to invoke her privilege so that both husband and wife would evade responsibility.
But Firestone was off his game. Apparently the same night in jail that had first panicked and then enervated Jaywalker, had simply exhausted Firestone. He lost his train of thought, repeated himself, backed up, and repeated himself again. Only toward the end of the hour did he seem to regain his composure, finishing strong as he demanded justice for the nine victims.
'If ever anyone was guilty of murder,' he told the jurors, 'it is this defendant. If ever anyone acted in a reckless manner, exhibiting a depraved indifference to human life, it is this defendant. And then for him to pull the kind of stunt he pulled and pretend he wasn't even driving… The nerve of him, the gall, the c hutzpah, to try to blame it all on his wife. Shame on him, shame on him.'
Firestone ended as Jaywalker had begun, reciting the names of the victims once more. Had it not been for the fact that his passion was misguided, devoted as it was to asking the jury to convict an innocent man, it would have been an extremely effective closing, at least the last part of it. But from the looks on the jurors' faces, they weren't buying it.
Then again, Jaywalker had been wrong about such matters before. The thing about jury verdicts was that you never knew.
Never.
Justice Hinkley's charge to the jury took exactly an hour, and it was just before one o'clock in the afternoon when the twelve regular jurors retired to deliberate. The four alternates, rather than being discharged, were led off to a separate room, just in case one of the regulars became sick or otherwise incapable of continuing.
As for Jaywalker, he became both sick and incapable of continuing. Exhausted from a night spent listening to Firestone's snoring, to fighting off claustrophobia, and to tweaking his summation to fit the trial's latest twists and turns, he'd gotten through the morning on adrenaline and caffeine. While his summation had been short, far shorter than he'd originally planned, it had been emotional, and had taken a lot out of him. Listening to Firestone for an hour, and then to the judge for another hour, had been an ordeal, and at times he'd had to bite the inside of his cheek or pretend to be taking notes just to stay awake.
He found an empty stall in the men's room and tried to throw up, but he'd eaten so little over the past four days that all he could do was gag. Dry heaves, they used to call it back in college, when they'd come back to the dorm, knelt before the porcelain god, and paid the price for having been stupid boys trying to act like stupid men.
He left the stall and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Amanda had come through once again with a pressed suit, a clean shirt and a new tie. She'd brought a razor and comb this time, both of which he'd used in the twenty minutes the judge had allowed before summations started. But none of it had helped much. He looked as if he'd been on trial for three weeks. His eyes were dark and sunken, his skin pale, his clothes loose from the fifteen pounds he'd no doubt lost.
