suddenly come forward and shoulder some of the responsibility for what happened to Pam, they are smashed thirty seconds into his testimony. Spath, whose English accent delights the jury, must be fighting to save his job, because he acts as if Andy were a rogue elephant who had totally disregarded written policies and procedures that might well have been part of the Ten Commandments. His bird wing of a mustache almost napping with indignation, Spath turns on Andy with the fury of a petty tyrant. If he knew Andy was going to try shock, he will take the secret to his grave.
On crossexamination, I can’t even get Spath to admit that Andy cared about the persons he was supposed to be helping.
“The way a true professional shows his concern,” Spath says in reply to a question, “is by the way he works with his staff on the most difficult cases. I can’t stress enough that highly aversive procedures are never used without exhaustive debate first. In every institution I’ve worked in that has been the rule, and Dr. Chapman was well aware of that.”
They teach you in the trial advocacy course in law school to end any crossexamination with at least some concession, but Spath is so adversarial and difficult to shut up after a while I sit down abruptly, hoping the jury will realize Spath wouldn’t publicly say anything good about Andy even if he had been his own father.
“Can you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you hired Dr. Chapman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all. Your Honor,” I say, taming my back on him.
With Spath through, Jill rests her case. After the briefest of recesses in chamber Judge Tamower, pleasant again now that Andy is acting the part of a typical defendant, perfunctorily denies my motion for a directed verdict, and immediately we begin Andy’s defense.
As I have feared, my Mississippi expert is a disaster, since he comes across in person like a former Nazi labor camp guard. Shock is simply not a technique easily justified by even the most distinguished-sounding of experts, and Goza, talking out the side of the mouth, begins to sound more like Jill’s witness than my own. After his direct testimony in which he said in his crablike fashion that Andy’s use of shock was appropriate, Jill gets Goza to admit on crossexamination that he has not even read of a cattle prod being used on a person in at least fifteen years. He admits his own research has just been published in a journal that is so obscure it hasn’t even been abstracted. Human Rights Committees, he concedes, his lips barely moving, are routinely consulted before decisions about procedures like shock are used.
When Goza doggedly defends Andy’s decision, Jill, dressed in a dark blue suit today instead of a black dress, asks, “Dr. Goza, would you agree that you’re an expert on the amount of pain required to stop a child from hurting herself?”
Forced to answer whether he is the Dr. Joseph Mengele of the Nazi death camps, Goza stared at Jill with the squint of a man who has just been released from a long stretch in prison.
“I’m a psychologist,” he says, blinking rapidly, surely knowing he has been mortally wounded by this question
“Paid a handsome amount, I presume,” Jill asks, enjoying this piece of cake, “to try to defend Dr. Chapman?”
Coached yesterday, Goza remembers the right answer.
“Compensated for my time,” Goza responds haughtily, but it is no use. He is dying up there, and by the time Jill is finished, he is a corpse. Preferring to get his body out of the jury’s sight, I don’t redirect.
It’s now or never, and I call Andy, who mounts the witness stand like a man climbing on a scaffold to put his head in a noose. I glance back at Morris, who is shaking his head. He and I know that the only thing I am trying to accomplish is to save Andy from being convicted of outright murder. It is a foregone conclusion in my mind that Andy will do some time, even if Leon Robinson were to come back in and testify he is the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Andy, sullen and balky, at first comes across woodenly as he gives his credentials as a psychologist; however, as he begins to try to explain himself, he becomes the warm, compassionate man who took me on a tour of the Blackwell County Human Development Center. His defensiveness evaporates and he admits that he might have done things differently if he could begin over again.
“But I was in love,” he says, looking directly at the white faces on the jury, “and the child of the woman I loved was in a horrible situation. Olivia was desperate, as are all parents who see their children tearing themselves to bits, and I got caught up in her desperation….” As he speaks, I realize that Andy, in the process of accepting his own guilt, has been finally freed to do what he has always secretly wanted: he is preaching a sermon about an ideal world in which people risk themselves, no matter what the costs. Yet, instead of coming across as an ideologue, he seems a romantic figure from another century. He is no longer intellectualizing about prejudice; his text is the power of love, and in his hands, it is not, despite the results, destructive but liberating.
“Every previous psychologist had approached Pam as a problem to be minimized. You could see that in their approach: they drugged her; they kept her in restraints.
After I began to love her mother, I could no longer do that….”
I would love to be inside the brains of the jurors right about now. From the podium I sneak a look, but their faces are strangely blank, as if they have no idea what to make of this man who yesterday was ready to fire his lawyer and represent himself. In a sense he has done exactly that: his lawyer has no control over him today, and this one fact keeps his testimony from seeming like pure melodrama. As he testifies, I find myself gently injecting myself from time to time to play to him: “Do you now think,” I ask, more as if we were discussing this five years from now over a drink in a bar than like a lawyer fighting to keep his client alive, “Olivia was manipulating you from the very beginning into using a dangerous procedure in the hope that it would end her child’s suffering one way or another?”
Jill pops up out of her seat before Andy can answer. “Objection, Your Honor, it’s not relevant what he thinks Mrs. Le Master thought.”
“It goes to his intent,” I argue, “and that’s what a murder charge is all about. Judge.”
“Overruled,” Judge Tamower says irritably as if Jill had interrupted her favorite soap opera. She is interested, and I wish desperately that this case were not being tried in front of a jury.
“Of course not,” Andy says.
“Every person in Olivia’s situation wishes at some point her child’s suffering would end through death, because that seems the only alternative.
Olivia expressed that wish as any human would. Initially,
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Harriet Tamower duck her head slightly as if she is nodding in agreement. Is Andy trying to outsmart all of us? As he tells the jury his version of the story, I stay out of his way as much as possible. As I wind down, I debate whether to risk confronting him with Olivia’s denial or to let it go. I decide I have no choice, knowing a denial from Andy will put me in a position no lawyer ever wants to be in- knowing without a doubt his client is lying under oath. Though it is seldom done, a lawyer is supposed to request a moment to confer with his client and then ultimately inform the court if his client persists in his prevarication. If it comes to this, the only way I’ll ever get another client is in hell.
I take a deep breath and ask as if I don’t have a care in the world, “You heard Olivia testify yesterday that she had not had sexual relations with you since you were originally charged is that correct?”
For the first time Andy seems flustered, and I prepare for the worst. I have halfway convinced myself his answer won’t be crucial enough for me to confront him if he lies, when he says, his voice sorrowful, “We continued to be physically intimate until last week.”
I see no need for the details.
“Even now, you still love her,” I ask, dropping my voice as much as I dare, “don’t you’ Andy
With great dignity, my client says, “Yes, sir, I do.”
When I sit down, the jury, especially the two blacks, are clearly wondering whether they are looking at the first entirely honest man they have ever seen or a consummate con artist.
Jill makes the mistake of trying to tear into him, but it is like ripping through a souffle: there’s no resistance, no angry denials, only the faintly bemused air of an African-American male who seems at peace with himself. Gradually, Jill realizes her mistake, and her questions, instead of sounding shrill, become heavy with sarcasm.
