On
Monday Brad’s first witness was Grant Lasley, the Pahl attorney
who had lost his arm in the ambush. He had planned to call Lasley toward
the end of the case, but after Poplin’s performance on Friday Brad
needed someone to put the jurors back on track. Lasley was a money
grubbing bastard, but he had a gift when it came connecting with jurors
and he showed up in full theatrical mode. Since the amputation he
usually wore a long sleeve shirt and jacket with their sleeves pinned up
to hide his damaged arm. Today he wore no jacket and his shirt was
tailored so that the left arm had a short sleeve that ended two inches
above the place the doctors had cut off his arm. As Brad questioned him
Lasley made sure to keep his arm in sight and he waved the stump in
front of the jury whenever he was emphasizing something he said.
Brad
asked a few general questions and let Lasley weave his spell. After a
brief explanation of why everyone was in the alley, Lasley started by
describing the horror of seeing bullets tear into the Pahl brothers.
Then he recounted the chaos as everyone else in the alley came under
fire. He told them how he pushed Father Pahl to the ground behind the
deputies and clung to the ground himself, helpless as rounds flew over
their heads, hit the ground around them, and pinged off the big tank
which the deputies were hiding behind. He ended his account with the
sudden shock of the explosion followed by waking in a hospital in
Tennessee with his arm gone.
By
the time Lasley finished he had the jurors mesmerized. Brad returned to
his chair satisfied that the case was back on track. Even Pinsky seemed
to recognize that having Lasley on the stand was bad for his client.
The only question he asked was whether Lasley had seen his client, Jeff
Sanger, at the ambush. Once Lasley said “No”, Pinsky immediately stopped
questioning and sat back down. Jeff schooled his face not to smile as
he asked the judge to dismiss Lasley and called his next witness.
------------
Gil
and the prosecutor had spent the last two days skirmishing over the
self-serving testimony of the scumbags who worked for his client. Gil
had won across the board and he liked how this trial was shaping up.
Unlike most of his death penalty cases, there was a solid chance that
this time his client might actually be found not guilty. It was too
close to call at the moment and Gil was enough of a realist to know that
no matter what the law said a jury on a murder trial would almost
always find guilt if the case was close. Jurors were unwilling to take
the chance of releasing a murderer back into the world. However, juries
that convicted with some residual doubt almost never voted for the death
penalty.
Gil's
main hope for a not guilty finding came in the person of one Father
Jerome Tolton. Or, as he was known prior to his mental breakdown, Andre
Trevor Banks. Sitting at the desk in his motel room Gil clicked on the
ten gigabyte file folder on his computer filled with reports and
recorded interviews about Andre. It was by far the largest file on any
prosecution witness and it made for an extremely interesting read.
From
everything the investigators found, Andre was the poster boy for
affirmative action. Third child of single mother from Norfolk, Virginia,
he parlayed mediocre academic performance, white guilt, and Catholic
“social justice” silliness into a full scholarship at some Jesuit
University in West Virginia. Then he parlayed the same package into a
law degree from Boston College.
Despite
finishing outside the top quarter of his class, Andre had his choice of
job offers from lily-white firms and he took a position at Spears,
Allenby, Austerlitz, Evans, and Metcaffe. Once there, he got buried in
Wealth Management Services, writing wills for rich people. By every
account, he did a decent job, but nothing partner worthy. Also by every
account, the firm dragged him out whenever it wanted to prove it was in
compliance with the diversity shibboleth. In fact, for three years
Andre’s smiling face was the one you saw when you clicked the
“Diversity” link on the firm’s web page. When Andre became a junior
partner in his fourth year at the firm it was a defensive move, meant to
keep him from taking a position he was offered at ClineBarton, where he
would have become that firm’s face of diversity.
Less
than a year after becoming a partner Andre snapped. Gil’s investigator
was never able to find any psychological records, but there were plenty
of people who recalled Andre having long philosophical and theological
conversations with a person who was not there. One paralegal the
investigator interviewed recalled sitting outside Andre’s office for
over an hour while he argued with an empty chair about
transubstantiation. However, Andre’s work remained constant and his
oddities were tolerated until a senior partner and some important
clients walked into a conference room and found Andre arguing heatedly
with thin air about “the prayed for intercession of the church
triumphant into the affairs of the church militant.” That
embarrassment, combined with a hefty fear that Andre was turning
militant, led to a number of frantic emails between senior partners.
The only reason they did not fire him outright was the fear the firm
would be labeled racist. Nevertheless, within a week they put him on a
two year “medical leave.” The termination package was amazing. Andre was
paid his salary for two years and then given a fifty thousand dollar
yearly stipend for a ten year period - all contingent upon not
disclosing the terms of his separation.
They
seemed to have assumed that Andre would go get psychiatric help. They
were wrong. The first thing Andre did was change his name to “Jerome
Tolton.” Then he shopped himself around until he got Saint Benedict the
Moor church in Hampton, Virginia to sponsor him to a seminary in
Cincinnati. Eight years later he came back to Virginia as Father Jerome
Tolton and promptly became a hitman for the bishop in Richmond.
If
Jerome Tolton showed up at your church’s doors you were in trouble. To
date he had closed five churches and reorganized another nine,
resulting in the removal of seven priests and the indictment of a church
secretary when Tolton found kiddie porn on the sole computer in the
office of Blessed Sacrament church. Gil did not entirely believe the
secretary’s confession to the police; given the Catholics’ history,
there was more than a passable chance that the secretary was taking
blame to protect the church. Or, at least the jury would see it that way
once Gil was through.
In
reality, the priest would contribute little to the prosecutor’s case.
The only thing the priest could testify to was the conversation at the
veteran’s hospital and that implicated the other defendants, not Gil’s
client. Yet, everyone in the courthouse knew that the prosecutor was
going to call Tolton. He would be called to show that the prosecutor was
bringing this case with moral authority from God. The prosecutor had
obviously failed to perform due diligence in checking the background of
his witness - as they always did.
Most
of the people on the jury were white, Protestant, and either working
class or poor. By the time Gil was finished showing them the crazy
priest, who was an affirmative action baby, who worked against God by
closing churches for a living, and who probably covered up yet another
Catholic priest who wanted to bugger little kids, the case would be
over. Gil would take the moral ground upon which the prosecutor wanted
to base his case and burn it to the ground. Then he would salt the earth
so that no conviction could be grown from it.
-----------------
Jerome
sat in the hallway outside the courtroom. It was Thursday morning and
he leaned over his Vulgate and a Latin dictionary which were both
sitting open on the chair next to him. Yesterday he had worked his way
through three pages of Job. Today, he was working on the first full
paragraph of the fourth page when a deputy tapped him on the shoulder
and told him he was being called as a witness.
Jerome stood and squared his shoulders as he walked through the doorway. It was time to go do his duty as a servant of God.
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