I let that phrase hang in the air. I hoped one of them would repeat it in the jury room.
“What the government has to prove,” I said, “beyond any reasonable doubt in your minds, beyond any troubled conscience with the Lord, is that on the night of June 6, a boy with no history of aggression whatsoever got on his father’s boat, rode out with him somewhere on the water, physically overpowered him even though Karl was larger, and beat him until he was dead.
“But there just isn’t any evidence of that. And you have been called, as jurors, as Americans, to decide whether the government can prove to you that this boy is a murderer and that his freedom should be taken away. I think, once you’ve heard the state’s evidence, your answer will be no.”
I looked at them all again, gave them a nod, and said, “Thank you, and God bless.”
I felt good walking back to the table, and I could see on Terri’s and Jackson’s faces that they liked what I’d done.
There was nowhere to go but down.
32
Monday, December 16, Afternoon
Ruiz was not a flashy lawyer. Once we were past setting the stage with our opening statements, he got down to work. A documentary about accounting methods would have been more interesting to watch, but I soon realized what he was up to.
I’d expected him to call the medical examiner first, to discuss Karl’s autopsy. That was the usual order of a murder case: start with the hideous crime, the innocent victim and the violence done to them, the gruesome pictures that would shock the jury into understanding how real this was. The blood and emotion would make them realize, on a level they hadn’t before, that a person was dead. That would make them care, so they’d pay attention to the mind-numbing technical evidence coming later.
But Ruiz had heard my point about the investigation not being thorough. His first witness seemed designed to show the jury that wasn’t the case at all. He called the crime scene investigator who’d examined Karl’s boat and written the report listing every species of tree leaf and each kind of dirt found on board. The man was about as charismatic as I would expect a dirt analyst to be. Ruiz had him walk the jury through the entire process of examining the boat, with photographs: the rubber-gloved hands using plastic tongs to pick up bits of debris and slide them into numbered plastic bags, the chemicals used to find hidden bloodstains, and the exact measurements of each stain. Ruiz made sure to ask how long each step took and how long it had taken to do each lab test and write the report. A very long time, was the message: this was a solid investigation.
At one point Ruiz stood at his table leafing through the report—looking for something, he said. Since he was not the type to improvise at trial, and I could see from all the Post-Its that he knew how to mark a page, I figured he was just letting the jury see how long the report was. It was the dullest start to a murder trial I had ever seen, but it was a one-two punch: my argument that the investigation wasn’t thorough seemed pretty flimsy now, and I looked foolish for having painted with such a broad brush. Now I would have to make the distinction between the forensic investigation, which was solid, and the police’s search for suspects, which had stopped at Jackson and gone no further.
When Ruiz finished his direct, I did one of the shortest cross-examinations of my career. In about sixty seconds, we established that Karl must’ve lost at least a liter of blood, based on the size of the stains. To translate the investigator’s metric system into something our jury could understand, I said, “So that’s a whole wine bottle’s worth of blood and then some, correct?”
“I believe a standard wine bottle is 750 milliliters.”
“So a wine bottle plus a can of Coke?”
He looked at me like I was a member of some different, and less intelligent, species. “If you prefer to think of it in terms of beverages,” he said, “it would be a wine bottle plus three-quarters of a can of Coke. And that’s just what was on the boat, not what went into the water.”
“Thank you.”
I took another minute to establish that one of his techs had found heroin on Karl’s boat and that they’d handled the sample correctly and had a clear chain of custody for it. Then we got to the evidence I wanted: the fact that, unlike typical street-level heroin, which had a median purity of just 13 percent—“The other 87 percent,” he said, “can be anything from baking soda to rat poison”—this sample was 91 percent pure.
“And where do you more typically see that level of purity? What level of the drug trade?” The answer wasn’t in his report, but I knew it from prosecuting drug cases up in Charleston.
“Well… I’m hesitating,” he said, “only because in my lab we have no direct knowledge of drug distribution hierarchies. We’re informed by police investigators and others with direct knowledge.”
“And what do they inform you?”
“That those numbers would more typically be seen at a higher level of the hierarchy.”
“Higher-level dealers, in other words,” I said. “Correct? Before the little guys cut it to increase their profits, and the littler guys cut it again, and so on down
