Gil
Pinsky sat in the courtroom alternating between boredom and worry.
There was no other place to go. His client was being held by the
deputies in the room they jokingly called a law library and the
prosecutor was up in his office. That left the defense table for Gil
and his people.
Not
that Gil was wasting the time. He was reading through files in his
other capital murder case out of Newport News. However, it was a
little difficult to concentrate on because he didn't really expect
that one to go all the way to trial. The local African-American
prosecutor had gotten himself elected a year back promising “equal
justice for people of all hues and hopes.” When he charged a young
African-American man with capital murder it sparked an uproar and Gil
was doing everything in his power to fan the flames. The local NAACP
chapter had proven easy enough to get active, but the higher ups both
in the NAACP and ACLU were proving skeptical. There was nothing too
unusual there. It was always easy to manipulate the dedicated and
gullible members of local organizations, but their leaders in D.C.
had to be at least a little perceptive to rise to the top. And they
weren't proving too eager to fall in behind a guy who killed six
people on a ten day armed burglary spree. Still, he'd find some
leverage somewhere to force them to get involved. Within six months
the prosecutor would cave and offer murder one or maybe – if Gil
played got the national organizations to play the media right –
murder two.
It
would be good to get back to a part of the world where things made
sense. There was no media here that was worth a dam. Sure, there were
three television news vans out front of the courthouse, but one was
from a Roanoke channel nobody even got on their cable here, one was
from a Tennessee channel, and one was even from Kentucky. The
situation with the local paper was even worse. The Mountain Democrat
published once a week and mostly ran puff pieces on the front page
with coverage of the local high school's sports on page two. Gil read
it from front to back the first two weeks he was here and never
picked up another copy. There was no worthwhile local media to engage
with during this case.
And
that was just one of the multitude of things that were wrong with
this place both inside the courtroom and out. Everything he tried
here fell to pieces. The latest failure had been the Christmas
gambit. He'd been certain that the good Christian jurors of Bartlette
would never go to Christmas dinner with the prospect of ordering
someone's death hanging over their heads. The judge had even
cooperated, although Gil had no illusions that it was to help his
defense. The judge was obviously worried about what would happen if
this case ran into the new year when the new prosecutor took over.
Still, whatever his motivation, the judge held the jury in the
courthouse until three in the afternoon the day before Christmas. The
deputies and clerks had been beside themselves and the courthouse
emptied in seconds once the judge released the jurors.
But,
the judge wasn't finished. He'd ordered the jurors to return Friday
the twenty-sixth and Saturday the twenty-seventh. When Gil objected
to the Saturday – pointing out that he could not work on Saturdays
for religious reasons – the judge had been singularly unimpressed
and reminded Gil that he wasn't the only attorney appointed to the
case. Gil was forced to leave Saturday in the hands of the local
co-counsel and by some miracle nothing happened which required a
lawyer who knew what he was doing.
Now
it was eleven o'clock Monday the twenty-ninth and Gil was really
starting to worry. Every day that Christmas faded into the past the
chance for a sentence of death increased. These people weren't like
those in other parts of the state. The grasp on civilization here was
tenuous. During trial preparation, Gil found out that the first local
attorney Judge Isom attempted to appoint to this case turned the
judge down because he was afraid it would interfere with bear hunting
season and he'd bought a bunch of dogs and spent months training them
to chase bears down. If an attorney prioritized a barbarism like
hunting bears with a pack of dogs over defending a human life it said
all sorts of disturbing things about the community's character. And
the longer those jurors were out the more Gil worried about that
character.
--------------------------------
Brad
sat alone in the room which would be his office for only a couple
more days. He'd given Paula vacation until the new year so no one was
answering the phone and he was ignoring it. There wasn't much he
could do to fill the time. Maggs came over on Saturday and they
cleaned out all his personal stuff and he'd even gone into each
computer and wiped them. When the traitor got the office there
wouldn't be anything on the computers he could use against Brad.
So,
basically all Brad could do was watch shows on his phone. He finished
an episode of Justified and looked up at the clock on the wall. It
was one forty-five and there was no sign that the jury was anywhere
near a verdict. When Sanger's attorney refused to put on a defense
Brad thought there was a good chance the jury would come in before
Christmas and thinking back on it he was fairly certain that was what
Pinsky was trying to make happen. That backfired because it was too
obvious; if Brad could figure it out then the jurors could too.
However, when the judge required them all to come back the Friday
after Christmas and Saturday too he'd been sure they would come back
with a quick verdict. They didn't. So, now it was Monday and
everybody was sitting around on pins and needles waiting.
His
thoughts wandered to his new law office. Maggs presented it to him as
his Christmas present and it was directly across from the courthouse
in the old Vincent Coal building. He'd been so wrapped up in this
trial and all the other stuff he had to do running the office himself
without a deputy prosecutor that he hadn't even looked for an office.
Maggs found him one on the second floor with a big space on the
building for a sign facing the courthouse. It had a room for his desk
and books, a conference room, and a waiting room out front with a
little desk where Maggs informed him she would be working as his
secretary. When she took him there Christmas morning it had been a
poignant moment that both reminded him why he loved Maggs so much and
drove home the fact that he was being forced out of a job he was
devoted to.
The
rest of Christmas had been touchy. His mother-in-law asked if he
would invite the Priest over for Christmas dinner, but Brad refused
using the fact that he always went to his parents’ get-together as
an excuse. Consequently, Abby cooked a meal and took it to the church
while Brad and Maggie went to his Dad’s house. There the men ate
and watched football. The women did whatever women do on big holidays
which Brad suspected involved making fun of the neanderthals in the
other room who were celebrating the birth of Jesus by yelling about
how much the Cowboys suck. Then he returned home with his wife where
Abigail Mahan was waiting to ignore them.
When
they got back, Abby went into her room, closed the door, and turned
on her television. Brad didn’t have a problem with that, but it
drove his wife nuts. She tried to get her mother to come out three
times and when Abby refused to come out for supper Maggie went into
silent mode. Brad spent the rest of his Christmas very carefully
doing absolutely nothing which could cause that tinderbox to burst
into flames. The next morning he rose early and went to the
courthouse before the two women started back at each other and they
seemed to have solved their problems while he was gone. So now he was
free to just feel the pressure of the trial without too much tension
at home.
He
turned back to his phone, but fired up YouTube this time and started
watching whatever videos popped up.
-----------------------
Everyone
stood as the jurors re-entered the courtroom. Jerome was on the front
row trying to read the jurors as they file back in. They all looked
somber and didn't make eye contact with either attorney. Jerome
couldn't make anything from their demeanor. Twenty minutes earlier,
the state trooper acting as one of the bailiffs came out to the
courthouse's tiny hallway and told the waiting reporters that the
jury was coming back in. Now, as the clock on the wall of the
courtroom said it was four-thirty-seven, the jurors were taking their
seats.
The
judge sent the deputy bailiff over to take the verdict form from the
forewoman. He gave it to the judge who read it and then asked the
forewoman if this was their unanimous sentence. When she replied
“Yes”, the judge handed the form to the clerk. He looked at the
paper and started to read.
“In
the first degree murder of Keith Tolliver, we sentence the defendant
Jefferson Sanger to life in prison.”
“In
the capital murder of Theodore Pahl, we sentence the defendant
Jefferson Sanger to . . .”
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