No Way Out

Andi and Alex were in the car, driving back to the office across the Bay Bridge to finish some paperwork. The atmosphere was tense. They had been sitting there in stony silence until Andi broke the silence with her hint of moral criticism.

“I know,” said Alex, uncomfortably.

“And you also know that Orlando forced her to perform several sexual acts while threatening to bust head open.”

“I know she said he did,” Alex replied, still not giving anything away by his tone.

“And you think she made all that up?” asked Andi, contemptuously.

Alex shrugged. Andi spoke again.

“You know that another girl came forward at the time of the Orlando case and confirmed that Orlando had done the same thing to her?”

“Yes.”

“She said he pulled her hair and treated her like a rag doll, just like Bethel Newton said.”

“So?”

“And he boasted to her about having assaulted other girls and threatened to ‘rearrange her face’ if she told anyone. Do you think they both made it up?”

“How do you know all this?” asked Alex glancing sideways briefly to assess what she was thinking by the look on her face.

“It’s in the report. Pity you didn’t bother to read it.”

Alex’s face was neutral.

“I did read it,” he said coolly.

Alex kept his eyes on the road, but when he turned to check his blind spot she saw that the neutral expression had given way to feint trace of an embarrassed smile.

“You bastard,” she said coldly.

It was too quiet for anger; too lacking in intensity for passion. It was revulsion; the sort of revulsion one might feel towards an old piece of decomposing food. She turned her face to the road, unable to bear the sight of him any longer.

“We’re up against a century-old stereotype,” said Alex, “the black man as sex-driven predator who goes hunting for white women to violate. We have to counter that stereotype any which way we can — even if it means fighting dirty.”

“You’re still living in the past, Alex. That stereotype died with To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s been replaced by another stereotype, and one that’s no less pernicious: the lying woman who consents the night before and then screams rape the morning after.”

Wednesday, 19 August 2009 — 13:05

“The trial of Elias Claymore crossed an important milestone today as alleged rape victim Bethel Newton was subjected to a grueling cross-examination by defense co-counsel Andromeda Phoenix on the second day of the trial.”

Martine Yin was standing in front of a news camera giving her report, while a group of women behind her demonstrated outside the court building, shouting slogans demanding justice for rape victims.

“Cross-examination had been expected to last several days, but appears to have been cut short to avoid creating any more sympathy for the alleged victim.”

Andi was watching the report via the internet on the computer at her desk in Alex Sedaka’s law office when she heard a knock on her door.

“Come in,” she said, not looking up.

The door opened and Juanita walked in with two ice cold cans of diet coke.

“Oh hi Juanita.”

“How are things going?” asked Juanita, pulling up a chair and practically yanking the ring out of her diet coke can.

“Okay. Still slogging away trying to make sense of these demography and jury stats.”

“I thought you’d put that on the side.”

“Alex wants me to. He thinks we can break the prosecution case with old-fashioned courtroom methods. But I’m not so sure. And in any case there’s something not quite right going on. And I want to know why.”

Part of the cause of Andi’s obsession was the feeling that some one was operating against her in the background. All her efforts at demographic analysis seemed to have come to nothing when she walked into that courtroom and looked at the jury panel. To add to that, the obscene messages she had received had both angered and frightened her. She sensed that there was an enemy out there trying to stop her — and she was determined to stand up to that enemy.

“What exactly are you hoping to find?” asked Juanita.

“Well firstly, I guess I want to rule out any other explanation. But the more I look the more obvious it seems that the other explanations don’t work.”

“Maybe you just haven’t considered the right one.”

“Like what?”

Juanita shrugged and her eyes squinted as she gave Andi an awkward, embarrassed smile.

“Like whatever you haven’t thought of. If I knew, then one of us would have thought of it and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Great!” said Andi at the wry humor.

“What did David say, when you phoned him?”

“David? Oh Alex’s son. He told me about some case in Kent County, Michigan a few years when they found a glitch in the software that had been running for eighteen months. It excluded the higher number zip codes — which just happened to be the ones with the black population.”

“And what was the outcome?”

“Well I looked up the case and it turned out that the Michigan Jury Commission determined that the error was accidental so it didn’t result in any successful challenges to convictions. But I did a broader internet search and found that the Grand Rapids area has been plagued by other problems concerning minority representation in jury pools. They found things like greater laxity of standards in requesting jury exemption from black applicants than whites and also problems with which they were summoned to appear at.”

“And is it possible that that’s what’s happening in Alameda?”

“Well first of all it isn’t just Alameda. It’s… not exactly every county in the state, but certainly quite a few of them. I mean I haven’t yet been able to check all the counties, but I’d say around a third of the ones I’ve checked seem to have the same problem. The stats vary but it’s all to within one standard deviation.”

“It’s strange that it should be only a third.”

“Well no, that’s the other thing. You see not every county uses the same jury selection software. I’ve checked up online and there are at least four companies that supply jury selection software. I mean software for the courts, not the software that lawyers use to help with the voir dire.”

“And?”

“Well I was wondering if maybe the ones who are having the problem are all using software from just one of these companies and the ones who aren’t are using software from the other three. In other words, maybe one of the companies is selling defective software.”

“Have you checked it out?”

“I’ve tried to. But it seems that nobody in the court administration knows what software they’re using and nobody knows who does know — at least nobody I can get on the phone.”

“Well I mean somebody must know! And they can’t just refuse to tell you.”

“Well the problem is no one seems to know. They’d have to go back through the court admin financial records, to when the software was purchased. And no one wants to be bothered with that. Also the courts are