Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
The following day dawned, and I was starting to figure out which bus I needed to catch to be at the courthouse on time. My daily stair-climb performed, I dropped into the jury room, where we socialized for a while. The court sessions seemed to start between 5 and 15 minutes late pretty regularly, so we usually had a fair amount of time to chat.
The big witness the state presented this day was Danielle, the alleged victim of the crime currently under question. There may have been a witness before Danielle, but the even was unmemorable.
Danielle turned out to be a 28 year old woman who arrived at the courtroom in a heather grey ARMY sweatshirt and sweatpants, and clearly 8 months pregnant. As we learned, this would be her fifth child. We got some preliminaries out of the way, and then it was down to the story.
Danielle's story was pretty much the same one the prosecution had outlined in the opening statements. There were a few little detail differences, but none of them were substantial, amounting to things like confusion about exact times, or exact words spoken: things I wouldn't expect to remember.
What was interesting to me was the prosecutor's final question: "And how did this event make you feel, Danielle?" This after she'd described all the things that had happened: meeting up with Larry, chatting, driving unexpectedly to the abandoned house in the alley, the attack, the asthma attack she faked to get him away, and his leaving with her purse. She immediately teared up, and described how she now always looked over her shoulder, and couldn't get close to a man, and how much it had affected her life. The defense attorney of course objected to the question, but was quickly overruled by the judge.
The striking thing about this last little bit, and everyone on the jury noticed it, was that Danielle had only gone about four months between the attack she described and becoming pregnant. It couldn't have been that hard to get close to a man again, apparently.
When the defense attorney stepped up to cross-examine Danielle, he was almost visibly licking his chops. He barraged her with questions, and she answered pretty well, but several times he succeeded in confusing her (he was confusing us too, which seems like a bad move in a jury trial), and she finally got upset at the treatment. The major points of contention were how she and Larry had first met at 3 AM, whether they'd met at this convenience store ("The African Store" everyone kept calling it, although it was just a convenience store run by Ethiopeans, who had a small section of African products), whether they'd traded numbers, and so on. He certainly produced some inconsistency in her answers.
I can't say that I honestly recall any witnesses between Danielle and the end of the state's case. There may have been another police officer or two, but they were unmemorable at this distance of a few weeks from the event. As I said before, all the police testimony boiled down into nearly identical stories from slightly different angles.
The practical upshot of this testimony was that I was left with the impression of someone who hadn't told the whole story. She seemed sincere enough, but there were a few little gaps that left me wondering what she was omitting. She didn't come across as particularly smart -- the state attorney had described her as "street smart," (apparently in Danielle's own words), but that didn't really come across. She actually seemed to be a remarkably naive, unintelligent woman, for whom those weaknesses finally settled catastrophically in the form of this attack.
At the end of all this testimony, and as the state rested its case, I had a hard time imagining how Larry was going to get out of this one. I mean, really, it would have to boil down to his word against hers, except that all the evidence available supported her story. I hadn't come to a decision, but I was also curious to see how the defense would try to recover from all this.
This seems like a good place to stop. Up next, the defense's shocking case!
Posted at 12:01 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater