Dury Juty: Day 4
A mind-numbing descent into the American judicial system.
Trigger Warning: The following contains depictions of extreme violence.
Today is Friday and the day already feels much more calm. Everything is moving easier and more simply in general. There is no traffic on the 110, I find an easy parking spot, the courthouse itself is almost deserted — the only negative being that my newly-christened ritual bathroom is closed. In the stairwell I pass a lawyer in gym clothes having a workout while listening to a live-stream of a case on speakerphone.
When I get to the 11th floor, the hallway is still and hushed. There is another lawyer, one I haven't seen, talking to a family about a man who had been caught with a gun. Their conversation gets louder, with details once again broadcasted for everyone to eavesdrop on. “I'm gonna do my best. I'm ready. I like him and I'm going to do everything that I can.” Concluding his motivational speech, the lawyer exits while the mother weeps and is comforted by her children. Down the hall, two little kids are sprawled out in boredom across the hard benches.
The trial continues with the police detective. He details how the defendant was on the run for nearly a year before he was caught in Inland Empire, just east of LA. Both lawyers have another round of questions before the DA rests his case. In all, the litigation has taken about two and a half days with five total witnesses. I can’t imagine how nerve-wracking it must be, concluding your presentation of evidence and witnesses, hoping you've done enough to convince the jury.
The defense lawyer takes her turn and wastes no time getting to the point, calling up the defendant himself as her first witness. In every courtroom drama I can recall watching, there is always some jaded old lawyer saying to never put the defendant on the stand. Too much risk, and even with the idea of “innocent until proven guilty,” there is already a baked-in skepticism at this point in a trial. Any sort of misstep, false memory, or self-contradiction by the defendant carries almost a tenfold potential blowback.
The defendant stands to the left of the judge, listens as the oath is read aloud and is sworn in. It's the closest physical proximity I've had to him the whole trial. Each day he’s already been seated in the room when we arrive, and remains in the room until we’ve all left. I have never seen him in the courthouse, on the elevator, or outside. There must be a whole separate hallway and elevator system to discreetly move criminals in and out of spaces like this. I assume he's in prison and has to come here every day, but in the room he's not handcuffed. There is only the normal bailiff, no additional security. He has sat somberly for days staring straight ahead, only briefly shifting his gaze to burn a hole into the large walnut table in front of him.
He's dressed in a crisp white Oxford shirt, gray slacks and pristine white sneakers — his sharp glasses rounding out a collegiate disposition. Again I find myself trying to square the man on the surveillance video so casually executing his friend in broad daylight with this meek, subdued person on the stand now. I'm reminded of how these situations are set up to be emotionally manipulative. The business attire to project a level of education and civility, the glasses to extrapolate intelligence. All of these small, psychological cues created to subtly shift how we view this man. As if hiding him behind perceived layers of social responsibility will minimize the ruthless facts of this case.
The defense starts with the earlier incident, the night before the shooting, and walks through the defendant’s memory of events. The overall timeline matches up to what we’ve already heard, but there are marked differences in the specifics. The defendant was living in a back house behind where the victim lived, and had seen her on the porch that evening with a group of men he didn’t know. He describes how he later told her it “wasn't a good look” to be seen alone with so many men, and that she should stay indoors when they were hanging out. When he’s pressed further about what he meant by that, he said “She didn't want to come across looking like a ho.”
Later that same night, he walked down to the grocery store to get some food for himself, his girlfriend and her two kids. When he returned home, the victim's brother stepped off the porch into the driveway and started yelling at him, clearly enraged by the defendant’s earlier words to his sister. Punches were thrown and the groceries were scattered about the driveway. The crowd on the porch watched the spectacle in amusement. The fistfight ended but the victim’s brother walked back to the porch, grabbed a golf club, and began chasing the defendant around cars on the street. He tossed the club aside and picked up a two-by-four in the yard, slamming it into the defendant’s back and splitting the board in two.
The defendant eventually escaped back into his house, grabbed a gun, and sat in the bedroom equal parts humiliated and furious. An hour or so later, he heard voices yelling for him to come outside. He peered through the metal grate of his front door, and could make out the vicim’s brother and porch crew standing ready with guns out. They taunted him for twenty minutes, tore into his masculinity and fired a few warning shots into the air before finally giving up. The defendant spent the rest of the night pacing back and forth in fear, anticipating their return.
Throughout his questioning, the defendant is soft-spoken. Even when the DA gets up in his face with affected antagonism, he doesn’t stray from his defeated murmurs. Again, I find myself wanting to believe him and almost feeling sorry for him. I can sympathize with the fact that he was bullied and shamed publicly — we live in a world where pride and respect are some of the only currencies that carry much weight. He confirms that he was really close with both the victim and her boyfriend. They had known each other for years and hung out regularly. What happened? What was it about this altercation the night before that broke him to the point of shooting his own friend in the face?
What makes this trial unique is that there is no question there was a murder or who the murderer was. Even the defendant himself admits to it. This talk about the night before, the fight, and the details of the following day are being used to serve the DA and the defense lawyer in their own particular ways. For the DA, the night before shows the motivation — humiliation must have overcome the defendant, igniting a fire within him and the only way to quench those feelings was to get revenge. His real issue was with the brother, the DA argues, but he knew that shooting his sister would be an even greater suffering for him to bear. Even more Machiavellian. In the defense’s case, the brawl helps to frame the narrative that the defendant was scared for his life. He was trapped in hostile territory, panicky and on edge.
But the beer bottle. On the surveillance footage, we see a car pull up across the street with (as we now know) the victim driving and her boyfriend in the passenger seat. The car is parked for eight to nine minutes before the defendant claims that the victim rolled down her window and shouted over to him “pussy ass police bitch.” We can't see this happen due to the graininess of the video. In the photos from the LAPD, both windows appear fully closed, though of course they could have been rolled up in between the yelling and the beer bottle being thrown.
The video plays again. Out of the top right corner in the video, we can make out a bright yellowish-white glass object skid across the road and shatter into the side of the car. The timecode jumps forward and the defendant is walking into the street, followed closely by a few other men. He is seen sauntering towards the back of the car, later claiming he was walking back to his house. It's here that the car door flings open and a pixelated foot dangles out briefly, before we see the defendant whip out a silver pistol and fire into the car. The door slams shut. There is a short pause before the defendant runs back to the car, reopens the door, bobs his head up and down to look inside, then fires multiple rounds into the vehicle. He drops the gun to his side and walks away. My head aches — I’ve seen this footage too many times to count.
The defense lawyer harps on the knife. She claims that the defendant had simply been walking back to his house, leaving the scene, when the car door opened. It was then that he saw a metal object and pulled out his gun to fire on instinct, believing that he was protecting himself. He thought she had a gun and so he fired first to save himself.
This was it, finally, the defense's case laid bare, and questions immediately started to flood my mind. If he was so scared, why throw a beer bottle at a car with tinted windows when you don't know who's inside? Why walk towards the car, after the fact, if you feared for your life? And why the casual saunter away, not knowing if someone else could jump out and attack you?
They make us watch the video footage over and over again. The repeated viewing is mind-numbing, and eventually it feels like I’m streaming a video game or Netflix. I wonder if the growing dissociation is a mental protection, a way for my brain to attempt to process being forced to watch real trauma over and over again (the video, the police chest cam, the autopsy photos, the 911 call).
The DA is allowed to ask more questions. He draws attention to the years of friendship between the defendant and the victim — how they had never had any issues before, how the victim had never owned a gun or even ever talked about getting one. “So why,” the DA asks him, “would you suddenly think she was going to kill you?” The defendant repeats that he saw a gun and had to protect himself. He was terrified from the night before and believed that anything could happen.
To close out his line of questioning, the DA takes a Manila envelope from the LAPD detective. He pulls out a black switchblade, and in his trademark daytime-TV-lawyer-fashion, asks the defendant to identify what he sees from five feet away. “A knife.” He steps back to a distance of ten feet and repeats the question. “A knife.” The lawyer continues at fifteen, then twenty feet, each time proving that the defendant can recognize the knife. The coup de grâce is the DA's reveal: the knife he is holding is the very same knife that was found in the vehicle. His performance draws to a close. Surprisingly, the defense lawyer also concludes her case, after only bringing the one witness to the stand. That’s it. No more witnesses, no more evidence.
The judge excuses us for lunch. She explains that the next phase of the trial will take about an hour, and when we return she’ll read us instructions and requirements. Since the remaining time won't be long enough for each side to present their closing arguments, we'll be able to leave early for the weekend.
I get downstairs and half of the cafeteria is already closed. The same familiar EDM music booms through the overhead speakers. I buy my ritual sandwich and chips, and set off to the open section of the room. I put my headphones in and try to come down.
At 1:40pm, back up in the courtroom, the judge reads to us from a thick packet full of papers. She explains the different types of murder, first and second degree, manslaughter, self-defense. She details intent to factor in, the presence or absence of alcohol and drugs at the time of the incident.
My eyes drift around the room and I notice a neon red puff of hair peeking off the judge's desk. Is that a troll doll? Beside it, a small ballerina-like fairy is standing on top of a stack of books. On the stenographer's counter, I glimpse tiny figurines that resemble characters from a Miyazaki film. This strange amalgamation of childhood wonder and amusement merging with failed dreams, generational traumas, and forgotten parts of society that keep this building in use full-time. I wonder if these toys and trinkets are talismans or subconscious attempts to ward off the darkness that consumes the everyday here. Perhaps they serve as some hopeful relic for the lives of children coming up behind them.
The judge finishes going over the packet and says that we'll each be given our own copies in the deliberation room next week. On Monday, the lawyers will present closing arguments and then we will go in and decide a final verdict together as a jury.
Walking down to the marble lobby, I notice that the purple “fuck yourself” has been painted over in the stairway. I make my way back out into the street, headed home to a weekend where I can hopefully shut my brain off for a few days.
Damn. This sounds like such an intense thing to have experienced.