'Well, furniture had been knocked over in the living room and in the office. We found a fireplace poker that was stained with the victim's blood on the floor in the office. Then we discovered the victim's body on the floor in the bedroom. There was a nine-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic on the bed.'
'What did you do next?'
'While Lieutenant Spinoza called the medical examiner's office, I supervised while members of my unit started taking photographs of the scene, collecting blood, hair, and fiber samples and fingerprints if any were available. My usual drill at a murder scene.'
Mills duly marked and had her identify almost two dozen samples with the trace evidence from Nolan's place. When they'd finished, Mills pulled the gun out of a protective firearms box and gave it to the bailiff to clear, demonstrating on the record that it was unloaded and safe to handle. 'Now, Sergeant, did you personally dust the gun for fingerprints?'
'I did.'
'Did you find any usable latents?'
'Yes.'
'And were you able to identify whose fingerprints were found on the gun?'
'We did. It held the fingerprints of Mr. Nolan, as well as those of the defendant, Mr. Scholler.'
Again, a rush of comment swirled across the gallery. Mills let it go on for a satisfying moment before she turned to Washburn and gave him the witness.
Washburn had always believed that there were basically only two ways to defend against a murder charge. The first was to present an affirmative defense case that, on its own merits, created either mitigation or reasonable doubt. This former approach had been Washburn's stock-in-trade over the years and he'd done exceedingly well with it. He would listen to all the prosecution's facts and theories, and then introduce his own defense case, which might include self-defense, diminished capacity, temporary insanity, or any other of the many psychiatric defenses (including PTSD). In San Francisco, over time, these became pretty much slam dunks. But even in San Mateo County, such a strong affirmative defense would often convince a jury to convict only of a lesser charge. Washburn believed this was because people basically wanted to believe in the goodness of their fellow man. Even if they had done something truly heinous, if there was a semiplausible reason that they'd been driven to it by events outside of their control, jurors tended to give them a break.
The second way to win was, in Washburn's experience, both far more difficult and far less effective; this was the reactive defense, which challenged every fact and assertion made by the prosecution. Naturally, good defense attorneys also did this automatically even when they had a strong affirmative case, but debunking a carefully built prosecution was never an easy task. In most cases, of course, this was because the defendant was guilty. But beyond that, it was a huge hurdle for most jurors to disbelieve government testimony and to doubt the sworn testimony of authority figures such as doctors, forensics experts, and the police.
When Tollson had taken PTSD away from him, Washburn knew he was stuck with a reactive defense, and this was what had filled him with such a sense of dread. Now here he was with his second witness on his first day-a woman whom he normally would have dismissed without a cross-examination because she had nothing of substance that would help his case-and he was rising to question her, grasping at straws just to keep up the charade that he was putting on an enthusiastic, even passionate, defense.
'Sergeant Delahassau,' he began, 'you've testified that you tested Mr. Nolan's townhome for fingerprints, blood, hairs, and fibers, isn't that so? Your usual drill, I believe you called it.'
'Yes, that's right.'
'And you discovered matches with Mr. Scholler's blood and fingerprints?'
'Yes.'
'What about his hair?'
The gallery let out what seemed to Washburn to be a collective chuckle.
'Yes, we found samples of his hair too.'
'Did you find any other hair, besides Mr. Nolan's and Mr. Scholler's?'
'Yes. We found traces of hair from at least three other individuals.'
'Can you tell if that hair was from a male or female?'
'Under some circumstances, DNA can determine that. You need a follicle.'
'And to your knowledge, did anyone run DNA tests on these hair samples?'
For the first time, Delahassau's face clouded. She threw a troubled look over to Mills, then came back to Washburn. 'Uh, no, sir.'
'Why not?'
Another hesitation. 'Well. We had no other suspects with which to match samples.'
'But these hair samples surely indicated that someone else had been in Mr. Nolan's townhouse, isn't that true?'
'Well, yes, but they could have been years old, or…'
'But, bottom line, Sergeant, you do not know if the three hair samples found in the victim's home came from men or from women, do you?'
'No.'
Unsure of what, if anything, he'd just proven, Washburn decided he'd take his small victory now and move on to his other minuscule point. 'Sergeant,' he asked, 'did you recover the bullet that had killed Mr. Nolan?'
Letting out a sigh of relief that the other line of questioning had ended, Delahassau reverted to her confident self. 'Yes. It was embedded in the floor directly under the exit wound in his head.'
'So he was shot while he was already on the ground?'
'That appeared to be the case, yes.'
'And did you run a ballistics test on the Beretta?'
'No. The bullet was deformed too much for that.'
Washburn brought his hand up to his mouth in an apparently genuine show of perplexity. 'Sergeant,' he asked with an exaggerated slowness, 'are you telling me that you do not know for an absolute certainty that the bullet that killed Mr. Nolan came from the weapon that had my client's fingerprints on it?'
'No, sir, but…'
'Thank you, Sergeant. That's all.'
He'd barely gotten the words out when Mills was on her feet. 'Redirect, Your Honor?'
Tollson waved her forward. 'Sergeant,' she began before she'd even reached her place, 'what was the caliber of the bullet that killed Mr. Nolan?'
'Nine millimeter.'
'And what was the caliber of the recovered weapon?'
'Nine millimeter.'
'And was the recovered weapon a revolver or a semiautomatic?'
'It was a semiautomatic.'
'Now, sergeant, when a nine-millimeter weapon is fired, what happens to the casing-the brass jacket behind the actual bullet that holds the gunpowder that propels the blast?'
'It gets ejected.'
'You mean it pops out of the gun?'
'Yes.'
'And did you find a casing for a nine-millimeter round in Mr. Nolan's bedroom?'
'Yes. It was among the sheets on the bed.'
'Were you able to match that casing to the recovered Beretta?'
'Yes.'
'So there was one nine-millimeter bullet and no others recovered from the scene, one nine-millimeter casing and no others recovered from the scene, and although the bullet itself was not capable of comparison, the only casing at the scene that could have contained that bullet was fired by the nine-millimeter Beretta with the defendant's fingerprints on it.'
'Yes.'
