Ambush in Bartlette: Chapter 34

Jerome telephoned Bishop Mannion as soon as he got back to Saint Berlinda.  He hoped to get a new assignment somewhere as far from this trial as possible. Instead, the Bishop ordered him back to the courthouse "to sit in as prominent a position as you can and provide a reminder to the conscience of the jurors." Jerome pointed out that the jury selection process had removed all the jurors who claimed a religious objection to the death penalty, but the Bishop was of the "easy to say,  harder to do" school of thought and he was convicted that if Jerome sat in plain view it would make "harder to do" even harder.

So, the next day Jerome found himself sitting in the courtroom as the two attorneys made their closing arguments.  Trials in movies always showed loud, emotional closing arguments and the mock trials Jerome had participated in law school had been full of law students being clever.  In contrast, the real world closing arguments plodded along and were boring. Dollerby, as the prosecutor, went first and he went step by step, laying out everything that happened and all the things that connected Jeff Sanger to the murder,  He never raised his voice and never made a single plea to emotion. It was a coldly rational explanation of why Sanger should be convicted of the murder which took a little less than three hours.

Pinsky then stood and took his shot at the evidence. He wasted no time on the murders themselves, acknowledging them from the beginning and then ignoring the ninety minutes or so Dollerby had spent going over the forensics and the various deaths of the victims.  Instead, he piled a double heaping of scorn on the testimony of the “murderers who got their lives spared by the prosecutor as long as they got on the stand and said exactly what the prosecutor wanted.” He went on and on about how the actual murderers - the ones who pulled the triggers - were the only people who tied Sanger to anything and how the recorded conversations were nothing without their self-serving testimony. In substance Pinsky’s argument was much shorter than Dollerby’s; in actual time Pinsky’s argument was ten minutes longer than the prosecutor’s.

Then Brad Dollerby stood back up and, at least to Jerome’s mind, wiped away Pinsky’s argument in less than thirty seconds.

“If the recordings are meaningless, why did Ian Minor and Dave Jordan make them and keep them? These were evil men doing evil things - all of them. They pretended to be loyal. They pretended loyalty to the community they were supposed to protect while they brought drugs into it. They pretended loyalty to the law while they broke it every day. They pretended loyalty to each other while they recorded each other so they could do blackmail or use the recording to save their own skin. They didn’t record the defendant having tea with his grandmother; they recorded him saying things they knew they could use later.”

“That’s the short and simple answer to everything Mister Pinsky just spent hours saying.  Evil men do evil things for evil reasons and in this case they killed people. Jeff Sanger ordered those murders. Why? Because he wanted to be sheriff. Because he wanted to protect the drug dealers. Because he was evil. Hold him responsible. Find him guilty.”

--------------

The jury was out four days, returning its verdict on the eighteenth of December. When they returned the forewoman handed the verdict forms to the bailiff, who handed them to the judge, who arranged them and handed them to the clerk of the court. The clerk stood and started reading.

“In the matter of Commonwealth versus Jeffrey Sanger:

“Count one, aggravated murder of Kyle Pahl - not guilty.”

“Count two, aggravated murder of Justin Pahl - not guilty.”

“Count three, aggravated murder of Mark Carr - not guilty.”

“Count four, aggravated murder of Edward Boyd - not guilty.”

“Count five, aggravated murder of Keith Tolliver - guilty of murder in the second degree.”

Count six, aggravated murder of Theodore Pahl - guilty.”