“I don’t even know what that means,” she said.
Snodgrass banged his fist down on the podium and bellowed at her, “The truth is that you’re a liar! And so is your friend. Isn’t that right?”
Alice looked down at her hands and shook her head slowly.
“Isn’t that right, Miss Dickson?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“That’s all I have for this… for this… tart, ” Snodgrass said dramatically as he turned his back on the witness stand and plodded to the defense table.
I was anxious to get up and start the redirect. Snodgrass’s attack had been passionate, and I didn’t want to give the jurors much time to let it sink in. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Judge Langley looked up from the notes he’d been taking.
“Redirect, Mr. Dillard?” he said.
“Absolutely,” I said as I stood and walked back up to the podium. It was time to spring the trap.
“Miss Dickson,” I said, “Mr. Snodgrass mentioned that you seem to have a very clear memory of the things that happened between you and Mr. Trent. Is there any particular reason why your memories are so vivid?”
“Yes,” she said, “there’s a good reason.”
“And what is it?”
“I wrote it all down.”
“Do you mean you kept a diary?”
“Yes,” she said.
Snodgrass got to his feet as quickly as his mass would allow.
“Your Honor, I absolutely object to any mention of a diary. A diary is hearsay; it’s an out-of-court statement, and it doesn’t fall under any of the hearsay exceptions.”
“Mr. Dillard?” the judge said.
“That would be true if I’d tried to use the diary during my direct examination,” I said, “but Mr. Snodgrass opened the door to the diary when he saw fit to accuse Miss Dickson of concocting a story and called her a liar. The diary becomes admissible as a prior consistent statement, and I can use it to rehabilitate my witness.”
“We had no notice of any diary!” Snodgrass yelled.
“That’s because I wasn’t planning to use it unless he attacked her credibility, and that’s exactly what he did.”
“He’s withheld evidence from us, Judge! He has an obligation to allow us to inspect any evidence in his possession, and he knows it. This case should be dismissed, Mr. Dillard should be held in contempt, and the court should immediately file a complaint against him with the Board of Professional Responsibility.”
“Judge,” I said, “I knew of the diary’s existence, but it wasn’t in my possession because I knew it was inadmissible. I asked Miss Dickson to bring it along with her today in case Mr. Snodgrass challenged her credibility. She has a written record of everything that happened to her, and it will corroborate perfectly everything she said here today.”
Judge Langley leaned forward and glared down at Snodgrass. “He’s right, Mr. Snodgrass, and unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last several years, you should know it. The relevant parts of the diary are admissible. I’ll take it back into chambers and determine which parts are relevant and which parts aren’t. Court’s in recess.”
As soon as the jury filed out, Snodgrass and Trent disappeared into an anteroom. Because I’d practiced criminal defense for so long, I had a good idea of what the conversation would be like. Snodgrass was undoubtedly telling his client that his goose was about to be cooked, and that he’d better start living in the real world and accept some kind of deal. Otherwise, it was entirely possible that he’d spend the rest of his life in jail.
Ten minutes after Judge Langley recessed court, a bailiff came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Judge wants to see you and the defense lawyer in chambers,” he said.
I walked back to the judge’s office. Langley was sitting behind the desk with the diary open in front of him. He looked up as I walked in.
“Where’s Mr. Snodgrass?” he said.
“Counseling with his client, I think.”
“That was a dirty trick you pulled, Mr. Dillard,” he said.
“I know.”
He smiled and looked back down at the diary. I heard the door open, and Snodgrass walked in. The wheezing was a little louder than it had been earlier.
“You can’t let this in, Judge,” he said. “It’s reversible error. It’ll wind up right back in your lap.”
“Spare me the melodramatics, Mr. Snodgrass,” the judge said. “Listen to this.”
Judge Langley picked the diary up off the table and began to read: “ ‘I got my first paycheck today. Bill made me suck his thing in the bathroom before he would give it to me. He shot his stuff all over my face. He is really sick. I wish I could quit but we need the money so bad so I just try to imagine that I am floating on a cloud until it is over. I made over four hundred dollars. I gave half of it to Jeanine to help with food and rent and stuff like that and I am keeping the rest. I need to get a car as soon as I can so Jeanine will not have to pick me up every day. I should have enough by the time I am old enough to get my license.’ ”
He set the diary back down on the table and looked at Snodgrass.
“Are you sure you want to continue this?” he said. “If the jury convicts him, and I have no doubt they will, he’ll be looking at a minimum of thirty years. Even if they don’t convict on the counts involving the second girl, I’ll max him out. That child was the same age as my granddaughter when he got hold of her. This is one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen.”
Snodgrass seemed to deflate. His giant head turned slowly towards me.
“If you’d told me about the goddamned diary in the first place, we could have made a deal and finished this,” he growled. “How much fucking time do you think he deserves for dipping his wick in a willing teenager?”
“Ten years if he serves it flat,” I said. “Fifteen if he wants to take his chances with the parole board.”
He turned and started shuffling slowly towards the door, his huge, rounded shoulders slumping forward, the soles of his shoes making a swooshing sound as he dragged them across the carpet. When he got to the door, he paused.
“I’ll sell it to him,” he began slowly. Then he lifted his chin and turned on his now-familiar glare. “But don’t you think for one second that I’m going to forget what you did to me today. Somewhere down the road, I’ll find a way to even the score.”
“I think I just heard him threaten you,” Judge Langley said after Snodgrass stalked out.
“It’s not the first time.”
I sat down in the chair across from the judge with a loud sigh.
“What’s the matter?” the judge said. “You won. Seems to me you should be smiling.”
“I just had a thought that scared the hell out of me.”
“Must have been some thought,” Langley said. “Your reputation is that you’re not scared of anything, including judges.”
I smiled. Langley had turned out to be a rarity-a good judge and a decent human being.
“I was thinking that less than two years ago, I was doing the same thing Snodgrass is doing: defending lying scumbags like Trent. I guarantee Trent told Snodgrass he’d never touched those girls. Then Snodgrass comes into court and gets ambushed by something like the diary. It’s scary enough to think that I used to do that kind of stuff, but you know what scares me even more?”
Langley shook his head, a half smile on his face.
“What scares me even more is the thought that if I hadn’t quit doing it, I would’ve ended up just like Snodgrass.”
The transfer hearing in juvenile court for Levi Barnett was straightforward and uneventful. Fraley and a couple of TBI lab experts took the witness stand and laid out the evidence we had against him-his shoes perfectly
