Ruiz went on in that vein for twenty minutes. In his telling, Jackson was a child brutalized for years, powerless to protect himself or his mother. His story was compelling. I could see the jury rising and falling on his words, and I felt it myself: the anger, the childhood suffering. Ruiz told us that “when Jackson reached manhood, when at last he was strong enough to rise against his father,” he decided to take revenge.
“And we know this,” Ruiz said, “because on the night of the murder, a police officer saw Jackson walking toward the marina where Karl moored his boat, on a road that led nowhere else, holding a crowbar. And the officer testified to that, under oath, five weeks before—ladies and gentlemen, before—the autopsy came back showing that the murder weapon most likely was exactly that: a crowbar.”
Ruiz spoke of bloodshed, betrayal, Cain and Abel. He knew his audience; the flags-and-Bibles approach worked well around here.
I knew Ruiz had to do his job. But I couldn’t help but think that in a case where, I knew, he himself had some doubts, he was under no obligation to do it that well.
When he sat down, it was my turn. I wasn’t used to going second, and I could feel the disadvantage. The story had already been told, and now I had to change it.
I thanked the jury and apologized for interrupting their Christmas plans with this trial. “But as the government told you,” I said, pointing to Ruiz, “you have been called here on a matter of the highest importance.” I planned to frequently refer to Ruiz and the police that way, since along with flags and Bibles, distrust of the government was a cherished value in these parts.
“A man was killed,” I said, “at night, out on the water on his boat, and then he either fell or was pushed overboard. We’re not sure what happened, or exactly where, because there were no witnesses to the crime, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon ever found. There’s no security-camera footage, no cell phone records, no confession, no DNA left by the killer, no bullet casings to analyze. Nothing.” I let that sink in for a second. “And, as I’m sure you folks can understand, a crime like that is very hard to solve. I don’t envy the police force tasked with solving that.”
Three of the jurors nodded.
“It’s a hard task,” I said, “when it’s done right. It leaves no stone unturned. You’ve got to interview everyone who knew the victim. You’ve got to figure out if he had shady business dealings or, God forbid, criminal activities. You’ve got to see if he was using drugs, or gambling, or sleeping with another man’s wife. And you don’t do that to sully his good name, of course not. You do that because it’s the only way to figure out who the people in his life were, and which of them might have been angry at him or wanted something that was his.”
I looked at each juror before continuing. I had their attention.
“But the government didn’t do that here,” I said. “They did not investigate. It seems to me, and I think by the time you hear all the evidence it’ll also seem to you, that they just decided that since Karl was a man who beat his son, it had to be his son who killed him. His son, Jackson.”
I gestured to him at the table. He was wearing my old suit and looking a little overwhelmed.
“Now, Mr. Ruiz has said a witness saw Jackson walking near the marina on the night. When you hear that witness on the stand, I think you’ll agree that he was mistaken.” I couldn’t say anything specific about Blount’s testimony, since he hadn’t given it yet.
“Jackson is a high-school graduate, and at the time all this occurred, he had a steady job at Barrett’s Hardware here in Basking Rock. But according to the government, this hundred-and-fifty-pound kid somehow managed to overpower his hundred-and-eighty-pound father, on the deck of Karl’s motorboat, and beat him to death. That’s what they’re going to ask you to believe, on faith, without any physical evidence—no footprints from Jackson on the boat, no DNA, no nothing.”
One juror, a gray-haired Black man, had the look on his face that I wanted to see: a skeptical squint that I read as, “That can’t be right.”
“The government wants you to think,” I said, “that this boy, who has no history of aggression, suddenly turned into a murderer. Now, child abuse is a terrible thing, but I think we all know that the vast majority of abused children don’t turn around and kill their parents. That almost never happens, and it didn’t happen here. Matter of fact, one more thing the government is not going to tell you, but you will hear it from our witnesses, is that six months before Karl was killed, Jackson actually stepped forward and saved his life.” I paused, looked from juror to juror, and said, “The government will be telling you that Jackson wanted his father dead. But last Christmas, at a family dinner, when Karl swallowed something wrong and started choking, Jackson sprang into action, gave him the Heimlich maneuver, and saved… his… life.”
They were listening closely. This mattered to them.
“A man lost his life here,” I said, “and that is a terrible thing. And now his son, this nineteen-year-old boy, might lose his freedom. He’s facing thirty or more years in prison for supposedly killing the man whose life he saved just a few months earlier. Does that make sense to you?”
After a pause, I said, “This is America. And in this country, we have a presumption of innocence. You must,
