could've been the weapon, and we couldn't search the entire park for a
stick. But my partner, Chuck Forbes, noticed that the park put garbage
cans along the side of the road. We decided to look in the cans along
the road on the way out of the park on the long shot that the suspects
threw the weapon in one of them.'
'Did you locate anything in any of the garbage cans that might have
been used to sodomize Kendra Martin?'
'No, ma'am, we did not.' Mike's rough edges were barely detectable
when he testified, I noticed.
'Did you find anything that you deemed to be relevant to your
investigation?' I asked.
'We did,' he answered.
'And what was that?'
Calabrese turned his head toward the jury box and answered.
'Approximately a mile from the crime scene, I found a black leather
purse on top of the garbage in one of the containers.'
I cut in. 'At this point in your investigation, Detective, were you
aware that the suspects had taken Kendra Martin's purse from her?'
'No, ma'am, I was not.'
'OK. So what did you do when you found the purse?' I asked.
'I wasn't sure whether it was related to our case or not, but it was
suspicious in any event. I've been trained that discarded property is
considered abandoned under the Constitution, so I'm permitted to search
it without a warrant. I removed the purse from the garbage and opened
it.'
As long as he actually gets it right, I like it when an officer tells
the jury the basis for conducting a search. It's not actually the
jury's job to decide whether evidence was obtained lawfully. That's
for the judge to determine. But you never know when you're going to
get some wise-ass wanna-be ACLU'er on the jury who decides to convince
the rest of them that some constitutional violation has occurred. 'OK.
And did you use your bare hands to remove the purse from the garbage
and open it?'
'No, ma'am. I was wearing police-issue latex gloves during my search.'
He looked at the jury. 'It wasn't much fun poring through that stuff
even with the gloves.' Some of the jurors laughed quietly, and he
continued speaking to me. 'Once I saw the purse, I removed the gloves
I had been wearing and replaced them with a new pair. I was wearing
those when I picked up the purse and opened it.'
'And what did you find in the purse when you opened it?'
'Things that looked to me just on first appearance like they might
belong to the victim, given her age. She had some gum in there, a tube
of lip gloss, a change purse with a Hello Kitty sticker on it. Turned
out to be empty. There was no official identification in the purse.
The victim's just a kid, so there wasn't going to be a driver's license
or the standard type of ID. I did find one of those wallet inserts
that have the see-through plastic pockets to put pictures and credit
cards in. It had a few pictures in there that looked like school
photographs of some little kids. Some of the kids had written messages
on the back of their pictures. They were addressed to
Kendra. I figured at the time that must've been the victim's name, but
I subsequently confirmed that information with other detectives.'
'Once you determined that the purse belonged to Kendra Martin and was
involved in your investigation, what did you do?'
'My intention was to preserve the purse as I found it, so a crime
technician could process it for fingerprints or anything else of
evidentiary value. I took a plastic evidence bag from my car and,
still wearing my gloves, I placed the purse in the bag, sealed it, and
marked it with the date and my initials.'
'And, detective, why did you mark the bag like that?'
'Whenever we seize physical evidence, we seal it in an evidence bag to
protect it from tampering, then mark the bag with our initials and the
date and time. The bag isn't opened until it gets to the crime lab.
It's a way for us to make sure that what the crime lab gets is what we
actually seized in the field.'
In the same tedious question-and-answer format, we made our way through
Mike's link in the chain of custody. He brought the bag with the purse
inside of it back to the precinct and put it in the evidence locker.
Luckily, he was the person who had 'lab run' duty the next day, so I
didn't have to bring in an extra witness to vouch for the walk from the
Justice Center to the crime lab. Mike delivered it to Heidi Chung
personally.
I spent the rest of the morning continuing to work step by mechanical
step through my trial outline. I was running the show in the
courtroom, since Lisa appeared to be doing little in the way of
cross-examination. Of Brittany Holmes, Parker
Gibson, and the EMTs, she asked one question: 'Do you have any personal
