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Jurisprudence 2012 - Jennifer's Story (part 1)
Two things to note before we get started: first, you can follow along with the whole story (albeit in reverse order, go read the last entry first) here, which will include any newer entries at the top.
Second: this entry includes descriptions of prostitution, and other upsetting topics. Our defendant was not sitting in court because he was a nice man.
This is Jennifer's story.
Jennifer met Matt, the defendant, after doing solo online ads on Backpage, a website that caters to escorts (and by extension, prostitutes). She'd also worked for/dated Bob, another pimp. Once he had snared her, Matt crowed to a friend about snagging a blond girl.
Jennifer's testimony was, like the other prostitutes we heard from, occasionally inconsistent, particularly on small details. She would change her story literally minute-by-minute, and although I took notes after each day's testimony, I couldn't remember all of it. I'll probably get bits and pieces of this story wrong, although the arc of the story will probably be with me for a long time.
Jennifer had been working for Matt for a number of months, and wanted to get free of him. He had left for Tennessee for a funeral, and Jennifer was "pretty sure he knew" that she had broken free of him, based on phone conversations they had. She never told him, "I'm not working for you any more," or any variation on that theme at any point. But she thought he understood that that was her intention.
In the first incident, Jennifer thought that Matt was still in Tennessee. She had gone to the Auburn Supermall to meet up with a friend, Kenny, and buy a phone from him. It was a Blackberry, and she didn't yet have the unlock code for it. That evening, with Rose (a fellow prostitute), she went to the Red Roof Inn to meet with dates arranged via Backpage.
Both young women were extremely surprised when, entering an elevator up to their room, they spotted Matt outside, in the parking garage. This was an elevator shaft in the middle of an L-shaped building, far from the office. Rose escaped into the elevator, but Jennifer ended up talking to Matt briefly, then went back up to her room. Unbeknownst to Jennifer, Kenny was a good friend of Matt's, and (although this was never stated in court, it seemed clear) he had told Matt where to find her.
Some time later, perhaps a few hours, Matt called Jennifer up and said he was parked outside, and asked if she would come out and talk with him. She did, thinking this would be a good way to bring the relationship to a close. It didn't work quite like she hoped: he tried to convince her to come back and keep working for him, and wouldn't be dissuaded. Finally, she gave up, and got out of the car. Possibly there was a quick trip up to the room, but she and Rose decided to leave the scene rather than stick around to see what happened.
They got into Jennifer's car, but before they could leave, Matt came over and grabbed some key items from them: cell phones, wallets, car keys, room keys, money. He took stuff from Jennifer, but also from Rose (more on Rose later). Robbed of their ability to start the car and drive away, Jennifer and Rose got out and went for a walk: anything to get out of there. It was clear that Matt wasn't going to give their stuff back. They also tried calling Kenny, who showed up quickly, but took Matt's side in the argument.
There was a fair amount of confusion around the subject of phones. Matt had definitely taken one or more phones, but Jennifer had at least two phones on her at the time: her old one, which was working, and the new one from Kenny, which wasn't working. Matt probably took the new one, but that story was never clear, and anytime she made a committment one way or the other, she'd contradict herself a short while later.
Once they'd gotten away from the Red Roof Inn, they used Rose's phone to call Bob, Jennifer's old pimp and friend, to see if he could come help get their stuff back from Matt. They were out for an hour or two, and had also stopped into the office to see if they could get replacement room keys. No dice there: the room was in a client's name (room in exchange for services rendered). Finally, lacking other options, they went back. During this time, there were several calls to Bob trying to get him to show up. It would take him until 1 in the morning to arrive.
When Bob did finally arrive, he did so in the company of three of his finest friends, one of whom was armed with a pistol, and he was intent on showing Matt a thing or two. They faced off in the parking garage (outside the sight of any of the video cameras), and Matt received the beat-down of his life. Finest Friend #2, with the gun, kept him covered while Bob and the Finest Friends belabored him about the head and shoulders and retrieved the missing items belonging to the girls, helping themselves to any extra cash Matt may have had, as well as his sneakers in a humiliating final flourish.
Somewhere in all this mess, Nancy, Matt's girlfriend (and future wife) showed up, and attacked Jennifer and Rose with harpy-like vigor, challenging them both to fight, screaming, berating Matt, and generally making a scene. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Nancy was playing the part of Lady Macbeth to Matt's Macbeth, but that's only because Matt was far more culpable and intentional than poor, harrassed Macbeth ever was.
One of the video segments we watched was of Matt wandering away from the parking garage, looking a bit dazed, and apparently wearing no shoes (he had bright white shoes and bright white socks; the difference on video was too slight for me to see, but Jennifer assured us he was shoeless in that shot).
The conclusion of this particular episode was, after Jennifer and Rose had had all their possessions returned to them, and Matt was off fighting with Nancy somewhere, thus: Jennifer drove to the parking lot exit nearest to Matt's parked car, pulled out a huge stick, and proceeded to smash the bejeezus out of his windshield.
All of this, of course, was related in questions and answers, in video footage (some of it interpreted by Jennifer, using it to refresh her memory of the night), and endlessly frustrating slow-talk technophobia by the Elf, the defense attorney. He continued his habit of asking questions with far more clauses, diversions, tangents and lack of context than are ever required in any situation. Jennifer kept answering him despite plainly not understanding the question. Colbert (the prosecuting attorney) resolutely failed to object to these questions, although I suppose there are no legal grounds for objection when the opposing lawyer is being obtuse and difficult to understand.
We heard from Jennifer in the third week of the trial, and she ended up being on the stand for more than three days. On the third day, she was visibly beaten-down, and answered most of the questions with "I don't know," and "Sure," and "I guess so," no matter what the question was (frequently contradicting herself). Occasionally she would become active again, and in those moments, her answers made sense. It was clear she was done with the process at the end, and fortunately both lawyers recognized that, and stopped bugging her.
We also heard some about her home life: she lived with her dad and brother in the Renton highlands, in a duplex. Her dad came in and testified, although he was only on the stand for about 20 minutes, during which time we learned that Jennifer would usually check in if she wasn't going to follow her normal schedule, and that during the period of the kidnapping (the subject of the next entry), she didn't check in as normal.
Coming up next, Jennifer makes the mistake of giving Matt a ride to his mom's house, and ends the day 34 hours later in protective police custody.
Posted at 12:57 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Jusrisprudence 2012 - Technical Testimony
Pivotal to this case (refresh your memory back here) is a variety of cell phone and video evidence. Pivotal to understanding that evidence is an understanding of how those technologies work.
We heard from a total of about six different technical witnesses. We had a representative each from Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T's wireless divisions, as well as a manager from the Red Roof Inn, Fred Meyer in Renton, and the Riverside Casino, all of which provided video evidence. We also heard from Westec, the company which provides video surveillance services to the Red Roof. These gents (and they were all men) enlightened us on a variety of technical topics, which I shall now relate to you in brief. Trust me, it took a lot longer to get through all this in court.
We heard first from the Red Roof Inn manager, so I'll start with the video details. The Red Roof Inn, which is located near the airport, has 16 video cameras, mostly overlooking the outside parking areas, with a few in the lobby or in the parking garage under the hotel. All these cameras feed into a central computer, which records the video on a hard drive. This video can be dumped to DVD as video files, which the Red Roof Inn manager did for the police. Colbert spent a good deal of time behind his computer, playing back video files to the jury.
The Westec guy went into extreme detail on their video system (used, as I said, by the Red Roof Inn), since some of that footage had some weird artifacts in it. In particular, he talked about how the computer at the Red Roof Inn was sub-par, and underpowered for the task, occasionally running out of memory. Their system apparently uses "buckets" of memory (which I would call buffers), and if the system runs out of buckets, footage is lost while the computer is busy emptying buckets to the hard drive. The practical effect is that the footage can jump unexpectedly, losing seconds or minutes of time with each jump. We saw numerous such jumps. The Red Roof Inn computer was clearly struggling to keep up with the load. There was one nearly 45 minute section of video where the scene and timestamp were completely frozen. It made it challenging, but not impossible, to see what was happening. The Elf was quick to cross-examine him about the possibility that someone (never the prosecution, of course, but, you know, someone) had edited the footage, and the Westec witness said he saw no evidence of tampering.
Of course, this was all tempered by the Elf's extreme technophobia. The man was likely mauled by a mainframe as a young man or something, and was petrified of anything technological. Any time he had to ask questions about cell phones, or computers, or video of any kind, they were patently nonsensical. I had the sense (and later confirmed) that I wasn't the only one completely annoyed by this. He didn't understand how radio worked, didn't understand how cell phones worked, either as radios, or as magic black boxes that send and receive information, didn't understand how video files worked, and (to my complete frustration) was petrified of the VCR in use, at one point calling over Colbert to operate it for him, since he didn't know how to make it go.
We also heard from the security manager at the Riverside Casino, where they use what must by now be a very crusty VCR-based video recording system. The state requires that they record entrances, since they're a casino, and retain the recordings for 7 days. They just barely comply, keeping a 7-day rotation of hugely re-recorded tapes, each of which is so full of ghosting, jitter, dust and god knows what else that they're practically unwatchable. Unlike the Red Roof Inn cameras, some of the Riverside Casino cameras are PTZ cameras -- Pan/Tilt/Zoom -- which means that they can pan around side-to-side, tilt upward and downward, and zoom in or out. Their range of motion is actually pretty surprising.
The Riverside Casino has three cameras which are of interest: one shoots up and down the walkway in front of the main door, and is a PTZ; one is perched atop the corner of the roof, and scans over most of the parking lot; and the final one is a fixed camera which covers the rear door, used mostly for deliveries. The PTZ cameras have what's called a "tour" setting, where they follow a pre-determined pattern, scanning over an area repeatedly until commanded to do something else from the security office. The security office has an override control, and can manually control each camera with a joystick system.
Of the three cameras at the Riverside Casino, the one we most wanted to see was the rooftop camera. It was perched to give a nearly perfect view of much of what happened there between Matt and Jennifer and the Other Guy (the Other Guy was never identified during the trial, but was commonly referred to as the Other Man, so that seems like as good a name for him as any). Unfortunately, that ideal rooftop camera was directed off to look at a golf cart in the opposite direction from the parking lot, and left there by a Riverside Casino worker Colbert described as a "complete knucklehead." The timing was perfect, though: at 6:45 pm, the camera was trained on a distant golf cart across the river, and all the exciting stuff started happening at 7:15. I wrote in my notes that I was convinced Mr. Knucklehead was a collaborator, but Colbert insisted after we were all done that the guy was just incredibly dense, and there's no possible way he was in collusion with anyone.
We ended up hearing from all three carrier's representatives, as I've said. We also heard from one or two police experts, who talked about data analysis, or interfacing with the carriers.
The three carriers more or less all had the same story, with minor differences in details, so I'll relate them all together.
First up was always some background: how long have you been working there, what do you do, etc. This established, we quickly (although often not as quickly as I would have liked) move on to the meat of the discussion. With all three, this meant talking about their billing statements. We heard perhaps two or three hours of testimony just on billing statements. Texts are reported this way. Call time is reported that way. Internet access is reported that other way. One of them had a very unclear system for reporting call time, that included a negotiation time, followed by a real call time once it connected. Another counted the time from the moment you press the Send key. This carrier showed voicemail messages this way. And so on. For hours.
Part of the reason this took hours was the Elf. His endless self-deprecating statements about how he was "a complete dummy when it comes to technology," grew increasingly wearying. His cross-examination was always a bit of a trial in and of itself. He needed all the billing explanation again, because he didn't understand it the first time, or thought we didn't, or was stage-whispering with Matt, or whatever. So we would hear it all again. Huge print-outs of single pages from the bills would come out on the easel (all provided by the prosecution). The monitor would be wheeled forward, and some other page put under the enlarging camera -- invariably either so small that it was impossible to read, or sufficiently enlarged to be readable, but some vital part of the data was cut off. The enlarging camera also (wait for it) provided by the prosecution. To be fair, it's possible the monitor and enlarging camera were actually provided by the court, but the impression was pretty clear that Colbert was familiar with them, and the Elf shied from them like a dog who's been kicked too many times.
We also learned about how cell towers work, and are reported on bills. Each tower has some kind of identifying number, which serves to locate not only the physical location of the tower, but also which antenna was receiving the signal. There are usually three antennas on each tower, covering a bit over 120° each, so that the whole compass is covered, with a little bit of overlap. Each antenna is definitely good out to a certain distance, which is highly variable based on terrain and a few other factors.
None of this was news to me (huge nerd that I am), but I'm sure it was new information to some of the jurors. The Elf was completely baffled that the techs (including the police data analyst) wouldn't commit to a range for each antenna -- there are so many factors involved that it's an impossible question to answer: tower location and height; weather (rain/snow or not); surrounding terrain (hills or not); surrounding buildings; cell phone position: inside a car; blocked by a body (ie, a person's body between the phone and the tower) or not; inside a building or not. There are more than that, those are just the big obvious ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The bottom line is that, with some analysis, tower and antenna information can provide some rudimentary location data, usually expressed as a wedge-shaped section of a circle around the tower, or sometimes overlapping wedges. These locations can be closely correlated with time and date, and if you wanted to, and the data was there, you could use them to show rough movement. Some phones and carriers provide GPS-based data, which is accurate down to a few meters' radius -- something to think about next time you're planning your crime spree. Maybe leave the smartphone behind. None of the phones in this case were providing GPS data, though.
There is naturally more technical testimony, but this covers what I was hoping to get to for this instalment. Up next, you can look forward to the most interesting/horrifying part: Jennifer's story of abduction, rape and abuse.
Posted at 22:09 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Jurisprudence 2012 - Alice's Tale
(Catch up on the story so far here.)
WARNING: This installment contains very graphic descriptions of beatings and violence. Not recommended for the faint of heart.
The first witness we heard from, at length, was Alice. Like all of these young women, Alice is a person for whom the linear narrative is not terribly familiar. Her life happens in episodes, and these episodes may or may not be related in a coherent fashion. Sometimes one will spark a recollection of another, and as often as not, the order of events is so chaotic as to be nearly unintelligible. Alice was not the worst of them, either: that's Rose, who comes later in the story.
Alice's involvement followed a pattern which would grow to be familiar. Her family was not particularly functional, and she was left to raise herself. I can't recall now if Alice's parents were addicted to drugs or not (I know Jennifer's parents were). In any case, she started out her life as a prostitute online, in late high school. She was introduced to the concept by a friend, after complaining that her job at KFC (or some similar place) didn't pay enough. "Why not try prostitution?" was apparently sufficient argument, once she learned how much money a prostitute could make in a night: $400-1000. That's a lot better than $9/hour, at least from a financial standpoint. The first experiences weren't great, but she got used to it quickly.
So, she started posting ads online, and meeting dates. I didn't take notes on where this was happening, but I assume she was renting hotel rooms for these activities. I think she was living with a friend during this time. At some point, Matt contacted Alice, and she started willingly working for him. This didn't make any sense to me, as she said it wasn't a romantic relationship at all, he apparently just stepped up, said "give me all your money," and she said alright. She also described a fairly heavy-handed beating policy, which seemed to be Matt's primary method of communication with her.
At some point, Matt said he was going to California, and either suggested or insisted that she should go with him. This was a trip with one other person, who I think was a male friend of Matt's. They all piled in a car, and headed south. They stopped in Portland and a few other places on the way, so she could work and make money. I started to write that she was making money to fund the trip, but I'm not actually sure that's accurate. By my reckoning, Matt was taking in anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a day. I have no idea where it was all going, although he seemed to have spent it all somehow.
When they reached California, they spent a few days going to different cities, mostly in the Bay Area, and Alice would be set out on the local strip to walk and make money. At some point Matt bought a new Cadillac; by new, of course, I mean "used and on the verge of breakdown," because that's apparently his preferred vehicle type. I think the California car cost him $800. Alice grew increasingly unhappy during this time, and was rewarded for her trouble with more beatings.
At some point, Matt's girlfriend, Nancy showed up. She had been in jail at the start of the trip, and came down to join in the party (and the beatings) in California. This caused some consternation for Alice (now my memory's playing tricks on me), because she thought she was Matt's girlfriend. I say my memory's playing tricks on me because I distinctly wrote in my notes that Alice didn't have a romantic relationship with Matt, although I now think that must have meant it didn't start romantically. She definitely was unhappy at Nancy's appearance because she thought she had a romantic relationship with Matt, so I'll trust my recollection in this case.
With Nancy's arrival, Matt's treatment of Alice became much worse, in any case. There was no longer any pretense of an intimate relationship between Matt and Alice. It was just, "Get out and work," and any disobedience resulted in a beating.
After some time, they turned around and headed back to Seattle. Alice described repeated beatings, although this time it was apparently because she wasn't taking her turn driving (her offers to drive were ignored). Nancy and Matt fought incessantly, at one point the car spinning 360° due to a particularly intense (and presumably physical) argument.
At this point, I lose the line of the story, and it skips ahead. Alice made a split from Matt a few times, after the second time getting him to promise to stop seeing Nancy, and stop making her walk to find dates; online only. He agreed to these conditions (I wish I could recall how she effected the split), and she came back to work for him again. Apparently he stuck to his agreement.
Matt's relationship with Alice terminated in a big blow-out.
She had been working happily enough (during this time, I think he was regularly beating her, and threatened to kill her family, although she ignored the threats, saying she was only afraid of the beatings; this despite the fact that he had taken a picture of her ID, which included her home address on it; so "happily enough" is relative). On the night of the blow-out, she'd set up a double-date with herself and another girl. She was in the bathroom with a date, and the other girl was in the main part of the hotel room. At some point, a pizza was delivered to the room, and some amount of money, possibly $300, went missing. Matt barged in -- the way she told it, he must have had psychic money-sensing powers, bursting in mere moments after the money was discovered to be missing -- and demanded to know about the missing cash.
Alice didn't know anything about it. She made it sound like it was either the other girl or the pizza delivery guy who disappeared the money, although this part of the story was never particularly well described. In any case, Matt was upset, which probably means he was being violent. Alice had had enough, and she called a friend to come pick her up. She was leaving.
This was all happening at one of the hotels on Denny Way, probably the Best Western Loyal Inn. Alice left, and went to the Hurricane (a 24 hour dive cafe) to wait for her friend to show up. Her friend showed up, and in the mean time, Matt had called her back: he'd left some stuff in the room, and she had the key. He couldn't get a key, because he wasn't registered for the room. Alice's friend (possibly named Keith -- good enough for this account, in any case) said she shouldn't help him out, but Alice was moved by Matt's request, and agreed to meet him to let him into the room, or give him the key (I forget which).
So, against Keith's better judgement, she went back to meet Matt, presumably only to receive more abuse. She fled back to Keith's car, and as she was closing the door, closely pursued by Matt, Keith was pulling away. Matt caught up with them, and pulled Alice out by her hair, ripping out a chunk of hair that took the scalp with it. Alice sat on the stand and parted her hair in a particular spot to show us the area -- about 1 square inch -- where hair doesn't grow any more, quickly and self-consciously smoothing her hair back over the spot as soon as we'd all seen it. This is an image I'll probably never forget. Alice's face registering defiance and shame in equal measures, her hands working through her hair to cover the scar.
Matt was successful in getting her out of Keith's car. No one ever said what happened to Keith, but I assume he realized he was in well over his head and took off. Matt bodily threw Alice into the back of Jennifer's car, and they went for a ride. Jennifer drove and hurled abuse at Alice (probably as much out of fear that such a thing should happen to her as any actual desire to inflict harm on Alice) while Matt punched, slapped, choked, pulled hair, and verbally abused Alice until her face was nothing so much as one giant bruise. This drive lasted several hours. Matt's message seemed to be nothing so much as "Don't cross me."
They got back to the hotel, Alice gave Matt the key, and somehow escaped (perhaps when he went up to get his Playstation 3 and other valuables he'd left in the room). She ran for it. She didn't have anywhere to go, she didn't have anyone to run to, but she ran. Down Denny Way. She said she wandered like that for a few hours, and I forget what happened to her after that, but it was the last time she saw Matt until she entered the courtroom. We found out after the trial that Alice now lives out of state, and flew in on her own dime to testify against Matt.
This story wouldn't be complete without at least a cursory glance at Alice herself. This was a young woman of perhaps 22 years, with medium brown, straight hair. She had a chubby, expressive face, and was noticeably overweight, although not grotesquely so. She was very engaged when she spoke, and frequently widened her eyes and lifted her eyebrows as if to cement a point, although these facial punctuation marks rarely intersected sensibly with what she was saying. She referred to Matt as "the Defendant" almost exclusively, calling him by name only once or twice. The Elf asked her if she'd been coached to do that, and she said she hadn't. She didn't strike me as being particularly intelligent, although I didn't have a whole lot to go on. Of the witnesses closely related to this case (which is to say, those who were not the police officers, hotel managers or other legitimate professionals), none except Matt himself impressed me as being very intelligent or self-aware.
Up next, we get bored to death (I'll skip through it so you don't have to have quite such a genuine courtroom experience).
Posted at 22:03 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Jurisprudence 2012 - Opening Arguments
(If you need to catch up: Preview and Dramatis Personae.)
Opening arguments commenced on, as you might expect, the first day of the trial. We were all settled into our chairs -- our seating order would be identical for the next five weeks, with one minor exception near the end -- and Colbert started out, detailing the story we were about to spend the next five weeks listening to.
The stories really only have one central point, which is Matt, the defendant. Then, the substories can really be broken into three parts: that of Alice, the earliest prostitute we heard from, that of Jennifer, who was the subject of the kidnapping charge, and that of Rose, who was a minor player in the drama, except for the fact that she was, actually, a minor, which makes things much worse for Matt.
The story of Alice began a year or two ago, when she started working for Matt. She started working for him willingly, and the story skips to a trip she and he took to California on a whim, about a year ago. This trip did not go very well. She thought she was Matt's girlfriend (tangentially, all three women would prove to have very dysfunctional notions of what it means to be in a relationship with someone, and there are heavy-handed doses of domestic violence mentality scattered throughout the tale). Then Matt's real girlfriend, Nancy, showed up part way through the trip -- when they'd started out, she was in jail -- and things went downhill fast. Alice was put out to walk the street everywhere they landed, and told to make money, or else. The or else part came down soon enough, and she was beaten repeatedly on the return trip.
Next up, Colbert told us about Jennifer, who was lured in to Matt's clutches through Alice, and would shortly thereafter find herself shoved into the trunk of Matt's car, where Matt repeatedly threatened to kill her, taking her down to a casino next to a river, and eventually driving her around in that trunk for over 24 hours, only to turn her out and get her turning tricks with as much speed as possible.
As it happens, these opening statements didn't necessarily bear a 100% relationship to the truth which was eventually stated in the trial, but this is what we were told at first.
The Elf's turn came up after lunch, and was surprisingly short, if not sweet. He somewhat sternly admonished us as to the nature of evidence, and what is and what is not evidence. Interestingly, his opening statement didn't have much to say about the case itself, particularly anything we might be thinking about as regards Matt's involvement in any of what was to come.
And with that, with surprisingly little ceremony, the testimony started. The state presented first, and Colbert called in his first witness. This was a police officer who is apparently one of two experts nationwide on the practices of prostitution and pimping. Luckily for everyone involved, he's based out of Kent. I would have figured that every major city would have a guy like this, but apparently not. We're just blessed with a real expert around here.
The method of extracting information from a witness, in case you're not familiar with it (and if you've watched courtroom dramas, you're probably not) is pretty straightforward. For a friendly witness (we didn't have any hostile witnesses in this trial), the attorney who called him or her is allowed to ask general questions. "What did you do at this time and place," that sort of thing. He is not allowed to lead the witness, which would be a question like, "Were you driving a green Cadillac at this time and place?" The witness is not allowed to volunteer information outside the scope of the original question, or ask questions of the attorney (although "I didn't understand," or "Could you please rephrase the question?" are allowed). In addition, there are apparently ridiculously complicated rules about hearsay, which boil down to, "You can't tell us what other people said; you can only relate direct observations." Ask a lawyer.
Then, on cross-examination (which the opposing attorney is entitled to after any direct examination), the opposing attorney may ask the witness leading questions, and generally has greater license to make mischief. Nothing like actual license to make mischief, of course, but I think it's seen as a trade-off for having to deal with a witness who may be interested in thwarting you. Suffice to say that our policeman turned pimp expert wasn't particularly batting for either team, so the confrontational style wasn't demonstrated quite yet. That comes later.
Our expert related, through a series of questions, more or less the following information: first, some terminology. The place where prostitutes walk is called the track or the blade (including the much more pedestrian the street, but I suppose no one needed to be told that). The free-spending gentlemen who pick them up are called dates or tricks, and are no longer frequently called johns. No one said it, but I think the term john is now somewhat dated, and might be what an older person would say to make themselves seem with it.
Prostitutes now get their dates primarily through two methods: online, or walking. Online, there are two major choices, which are backpage.com and tnaboard.com (no links; you wanna check 'em out, type it in yourself). Craigslist used to be a major player, but they took down their "escort" section a few years ago after a major scandal. Backpage is where you post ads, as you might post an ad on Craigslist. Tnaboard.com is more of a forum-style place, where you don't have to pay, and can have conversations and profiles, and clients can leave you reviews. There are a few other place, but those are the big ones.
Walking is much what you'd expect. The girl walks along a major arterial such as Aurora Ave N, International Blvd, and similar roads: traffic moving below 50 MPH, lots of places to pull off, usually light industrial or stripmalls. Prospective client comes up, brief chat ensues, during which time the girl tries to feel out if the fellow in the car is a cop or not (policemen do not have to tell the truth to the question, "Are you a cop?"). If the client passes muster (and I got the impression they pretty much always do), the girl gets in the car, and they head off to either a hotel, or a secluded parking lot, depending on what the date wants.
For online dates, the girl will post their phone number, along with creatively misspelled text and larger-than-life photos -- if you've ever tried to buy something on Ebay or Craigslist, you have an impression of the concept, if not the exact execution. The date calls the girl, they have a similar conversation, trying to suss out if the guy is a cop, and then arrange a time and place to meet. For these dates, the girl usually rents a room in a hotel, and not the fleabags I had always associated with hookers on Aurora. Most of the hotels we heard about were the same moderately-priced but decent places I use when I travel: Best Western, La Quinta, Ramada, etc. This hotel room would be the location for the date.
Either this guy or another of the police officers described a "big hug" the girl would give you, which would give them a chance to see if you're armed, as they moved the hug to different places where you might have a gun strapped to your body. It sounded somewhat comical in the telling, although as with everything else in this case, it's deadly serious.
The rules of the Game (aka the Life) are like something out of a particularly vicious fairy tale: if you look another pimp in the eye, or talk to another pimp, he's allowed to steal you away like a wicked fairy. You're not allowed to talk to another man than your pimp, unless it's specifically in service of setting up or transacting a date. You're not allowed to talk to other women unless you're recruiting them for your pimp. All the money, and I mean all the money goes to the pimp at the end of the night. If you need some food, or clothes, or anything else, you ask your pimp for it, and he pays for it. If you're caught holding back money for yourself, this is justifiable cause for a beating or other similar punishment. Likewise, if you're caught talking to another man who's not a client, beating or similar. Likewise for breaking any of the other rules.
Pimps have more or less three tools they use to keep their prostitutes in line: charm, threats, and violence. You can imagine the order they go in, and how quickly the relationship usually progresses. First contact will usually be very pleasant, and it's not uncommon for the girls to believe the pimp is falling in love with them, in a relationship, committed to them, and so on. Flattery and charm are the name of the game at that point, with a healthy dose of manipulation thrown in. When the charm starts wearing off, the threats come out. Should these fail, the threats are quickly fulfilled. I won't go deeply into this, because it is depressingly familiar. The same techniques are used in pretty much every domestic violence situation everywhere. Flattery, cajoling, abuse, violence, apology, repeat. The woman thinks she's in love, and if only she could change these awful things about herself, he'll come back/change/quit being an asshole. It doesn't work, of course.
He had some interesting terms, of which I only remember one, for the types of pimp. The one I remember is gorilla pimp, which is what you call a pimp who relies on violence to keep his girls in line. Matt would prove to fall under this category frequently, which is probably why I remember it.
Up next, we hear our first testimony which relates directly rather than generically to the trial.
Posted at 23:04 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
Jurisprudence 2012 - Dramatis Personae
Before launching into the full-on narrative, I thought I'd sketch out some of the players. I introduced a few of them in the last article, but this will hopefully give you a better view of who we're interacting with. A reminder in case you haven't read the previous episode: all names have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent.
Judge Johnson: The judge is necessarily a kind of cypher. If she lets her personality out, she risks letting her impartiality out as well. If she does that, one side or the other calls "Mistrial!" and the whole thing is rendered useless, do it again, and black marks for her. So most of my impression of Judge Johnson was of a very proper woman in her 50s, somewhat severe, in a black robe. I would be hard-pressed to say for sure what her ancestry was, but it looked to be mixed -- I wouldn't normally mention it, but race came up several times during the trial, so I feel it's fair in this case. She had portraits of Martin Luther King Jr (not unexpected in a King County Superior Court room) and Malcom X (less expected) hanging opposite the jury box.
During the course of the trial, she didn't really say anything unless it was directly pertinent to the action in the courtroom. Occasionally there would be a glimpse of emotion behind the proper words, and the two I ever perceived were amusement and annoyance. Her face was set in a sort of permanent contemplative frown, which came from furiously taking notes while trying to maintain a neutral, indifferent, composed demeanor. I was impressed both at her control of the courtroom and her restraint in the face of provocation.
Mr. Colbert: The prosecuting attorney appeared to be in his late 20s to mid 30s -- it was hard to tell. He had close-cropped black hair, was always well-shaved, and wore rimless rectangular glasses and well-fitting if conservative blue or grey suits. He always had a white shirt and subdued tie. Although I didn't pay any attention to them, I wouldn't be surprised to find that his shoes were always recently polished. The one time we saw him out of a suit, he was wearing a sweater that immediately put me in mind of Mr. Rogers, a sort of loose-fitting but still trim powder blue affair.
In demeanor, Colbert was mostly quite professional. Almost everything he said was completely professional, and even when he was laying into witnesses later on, his tone was acceptably pleasant and unfailingly polite -- it's weird to hear someone politely suggest some of the things he was suggesting (Matt, our defendant, was not accused of delivering flowers and rainbows, after all). The "mostly" part comes from his reactions to the Elf, when he was seen to roll his eyes dramatically, hide a smile behind his hand, or other such minor gestures that the court reporter couldn't enter into the written record.
Mr. The Elf: The defense attorney is going to stretch my descriptive abilities, but here goes. Imagine a man in his 70s. He is short, completely bald, and not particularly overweight, except that someone appears to have stuffed a large pillow down the front of his shirt. His face is faintly punctuated by a sparse white beard that extends from his cheekbones into his collar, and you can almost see where the artist drew in each individual hair, like a character from the Simpsons. When he opens his mouth, there's one front tooth that commands attention, and its companions shuffle backward into his mouth, having clearly nominated the leader by taking a hasty, ragged series of steps back when the lips called for volunteers from the company. Pity the front tooth, slow on the uptake.
His voice, when he speaks, puts me in mind of Diane Rheim, whose bizarre radio career is put on display every weeknight at midnight here in Seattle. It's a slightly ragged voice, which has seen better days, but is still clear. His manner of speaking is bizarre: loud, but very slow, to the point of caricature. When he says the word "evidence," (which we hear a lot), it's three very distinct syllables, very nearly three separate words: "eh-vuh-dence." Most other multi-syllabic words receive a similar treatment. He said at one point that he's been a lawyer for 43 years, and his speaking style must be heavily influenced by that experience. His questions (the vast majority of what the jury hears from the attorneys are questions to witnesses) were convoluted to such an extent that witnesses, clever and simple alike, routinely had to ask for clarification. I was usually able to get the sense of his question, and only once or twice did I completely lose it, but then my whole job was to pay attention to what he was saying. I wasn't ever surprised when a witness would cock their head to the side, and say, "I'm sorry... I didn't... Could you rephrase the question?" They always had this quizzical, puzzled expression on their face, as if they'd been unexpectedly smacked in the face with a halibut.
The Elf's wardrobe deserves a special mention. His suits, while nicely matching, appear to be a grab-bag of out-of-date fashions. There is at least one wide-lapeled tweed number that's straight out of an episde of Laugh In. He has a rotating collection of what I can only call atrocious ties. One is a hand-painted, almost photo-realistic collage of vegetables: alternating green stalks and orange bodies of carrots and other unidentifiable root vegetables, shocking in its veracity. Another is an overlapping pattern of paisley which must have geuinely originated in the 60s, alternating blues and greens with the occasional jarring point of red and orange in a dense pattern sure to make any tripping college student stop and stare for an hour or two. There are others, but they fade into insignificance when compared to these shining examples. When reading, he'd usually install an enormous pair of glasses on his face, huge lenses magnifying his protuberant eyes ludicrously.
The Elf was comedically afraid of technology. This was something which grated on me as the trial wore on (and clearly grated on Colbert and several of my fellow jurors as well). We had evidence that was on (very low-quality) video tape. We had evidence which was AVI files on a DVD. There were CDs. Cellphone records figured hugely into the evidence. There was a handgun, although the Elf was clearly more comfortable with guns than with what he thought of as "high tech." All of these things produced an honestly baffled reaction from him, which worked to his detriment. He made self-deprecating jokes about being low-tech, but didn't follow that up with any kind of Columbo-like unmasking of his actual clever death-blow dealt based on technological evidence.
If not for the fact that he was defending a man accused of a veritable raft of nasty crimes, he would have seemed to be a complete caricature.
As long as I'm going there, I should say that both attorneys were white.
Matt, the defendant: a man in his 20s, black, with closely cropped hair, clean-shaven. We discovered early in the trial that he was actually 21 (I would have guessed he was in his late 20s initially). He wasn't unattractive, inasmuch as I'm any judge. For the majority of the trial, our view of him was as the person sitting to the Elf's left at the defendant's table. I'll save his personality for later, as it didn't become apparent to us until at least half way through. He was almost always attired in a plaid button-down shirt of some variety, and disappearingly-normal pants. Of course, he was mostly seated, so I didn't get much opportunity to see his lower half.
His manner during the trial was almost scholarly. He was constantly taking notes, occasionally passing one to the Elf. He was very engaged in the whole process, as he was to prove later. This was no constantly-confused and -surprised Larry, as from my previous trial. Matt was clearly intelligent and on top of things.
The Courtroom: In TV dramas, the courtroom is almost universally this kind of majestic wood-paneled chamber, dark and forbidding, with the judge elevated high above everyone else, pounding a gavel and shouting for order. Our courtroom was considerably more mundane. The back wall, which the judge sat in front of, is indeed wood-paneled, but it was a light-toned wood, with odd green stripes between panels. The remaining three walls are white. When you walk in the door, the first thing you face is the audience seats, a set of almost ecclesiastical-looking pews facing the judge. Turn to your right, and you're facing the jury box against the right-hand wall. The defense table is parallel to the bar, facing the judge, and the prosecutor's table is beyond it to the left, perpendicular to the bar, so that the prosecutor sits facing the jury. Both tables are heavily built, but have a certain cheapness to them that seems a bit out of place.
The bar separates the court staff from everyone else -- it's almost literally a bar in the normal, drinking-establishment sense of the word. It's a horizontal wooden surface, about a foot deep, and the width of the judge's box. In our case, it was broken by a couple of microphones and a triangular speakerphone. Behind the bar, from left to right, are the bailiff, the court clerk, and the court reporter. Behind these three, and slightly elevated, are the judge, and the witness stand.
It struck me (as these things do) that the setup was actually defensive: an aggravated defendant bent on getting to the judge or witness would have to come over or around his table, and climb over the bar or detour around it. Either direction, there's someone in the way, and the two King County Jail officers sitting heavily by the door would doubtless spring into rapid action in such an event. The obvious exit is past the officers. It happens there's also an exit through the judge's chambers behind the courtroom, but it took me weeks to realize that. There are prominent cameras on massive, welded supports on three of the four walls. The cameras point at the judge, the audience and defendant's table, and the plaintiff's table. I finally spotted one which might have covered the jury, an unobtrusive smoked dome of plastic in the ceiling over the audience. I found myself wondering who was watching 6 cameras in each courtroom, or if they were only for recording the action.
The Bailiff: the bailiff deserves special mention. This is the only court staff the jury ever interacts with. If not for her, you might suspect the entire court is composed of cold, uncaring people -- not that they are, but the rules of conduct say that the jury can't interact with pretty much anyone involved in the trial, in order to avoid an appearance of bias. Our bailiff was pleasant, and clearly a warm, caring person. She was occasionally oddly constrained in her answers to questions, although it was only odd when you didn't think of it from a judicial perspective: there are some questions she has to bring to the judge for legal reasons, and on these, she'd immediately clam up. We got used to her, and when she had to leave the court for a week mid-trial, it was almost jarring to deal with the temporary bailiffs who came in to cover for her.
The Court Staff: As I said before, we basically had no interactions with the court staff, but we spent a lot of time sitting in that jury box, and some of that was dead time, while one of the attorneys was checking his notes (almost always the Elf), or preparing some exhibit. During that dead time, I'd find my eye wandering to check out the other people in the courtroom. To properly imagine the court reporter, you have to imagine a man with shoulder-length white hair, a drooping mustache, and the thing which is clearly missing from the scene: a saxophone. I only realized it as I was thinking over his description for this article, but he clearly needed to be playing a saxophone in a smoky nightclub. The only words I ever heard him speak were on perhaps three occasions when he said he couldn't hear someone. His face had a sort of dead appearance when he was recording, and now I can perfectly picture it coming alive as he peals sweet licks from his tenor sax.
To picture the clerk, you need only imagine a poorly cast American remake of a fine foreign fantasty film. He is the rogueish ex-thief, or wizard, who has too much of a Western star in him to make a good fantasy character, but far too much fantasy to ever actually star in a Western except as an incidental character who goes down in a shootout two minutes after being introduced. He has long salt-and-pepper (mostly salt) hair tied back in a ponytail, and a similar beard with a pronounced mustache, framing a squarish smiling face. I saw several other people with similar tonsorial choices, and found myself wondering if it was some kind of fad at the courthouse to have court staff who had long white hair and facial hair.
With that, I think you've had enough teasing. Coming up next, we hear opening arguments and launch into testimony.
Posted at 12:24 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
If you're one of my half-dozen readers who knows me personally, then you'll be aware that I've been in jury duty. Since February 6th. That jury service finally concluded last night, and this is your preview to what will eventually be the whole story.
On an important note: this story will necessarily include some fairly gruesome descriptions (not so much this entry, but later entries) of awful things done to people. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you may want to skip them. The defendant was not sitting in court because he was a pleasant man.
For this installment, I'm just going to go over the setup, some of the players, and an outline of the charges. As I did the last time I was on a jury, I will be changing the names of everyone involved, including my fellow jurors if and when they come up. In this case, I'm actually concerned that one of the defendant's friends could find these stories and figure out how to get to me. All will become clear, but I expect the story to unfold over the course of the next month or two in this particular forum.
It all began late last year. I got a jury summons for December 26th. Although I was all set to jump into action, as the date got closer, I realized that I'd be literally flying home from California the night before jury service, and that trying to be at the courthouse at 8 am would put me in a particularly bad mood. So I went to the handy juror website, entered my number, and deferred it to the (as I thought at the time) clever date of February 6th. This was just after a show opened at Annex, so my schedule would be relatively clear, and I figured even if I got on a jury, it would be a 3-week trial, max. That'd have me finishing up just as the show finished, so I could wrap it all up, close the show, and get on with my life.
So, I turned up at the courthouse on the 6th, and commenced what I figured would be my requisite two days of sitting around before being dismissed. I did indeed sit around, but before terribly long, I was called for Judge Johnson (remember, names are all changed), and picked up my juror number -- 74, as I recall. They picked around 200 jurors initially, and it quickly became clear why: they expected the trial to go until March 16th! Five solid weeks of trial, and (as I didn't realize at the time) deliberation after that. Interesting side note: we finished on March 15th. Not bad, judicial prediction system!
Instead of sending me up to the courtroom, I was instead handed a questionnaire. It was a bunch of questions I answered "no" to, along the lines of "Have you ever been the victim of an armed crime?" or "Have you or anyone you know ever been the victim of sexual assault?" Comparatively speaking, this was very generic stuff, and didn't say much about the case. I believe that was Tuesday, the 7th.
I was excused for Wednesday, and told to come back Thursday. I didn't realize why, but they were selecting the remaining hundred or so jurors for the pool.
On Thursday, I came back as instructed, and did a bunch more sitting around. It's a key feature of jury duty that you spend a bunch of time cooling your heels (or, as I read in one of the Raymond Chandler stories I've been going through recently, "practicing your foot-dangling"). Finally, I was called up to the courtroom itself. With about fifty other people, I trooped into an elevator (not all the same elevator, of course; we're not hyper-flexible professional clowns or anything), where we were lined up in the elevator foyer. The bailiff got us lined up in order, with the initial twelve people separated out, as they would be in the jury box itself. I was perhaps 20th in the "not in the jury box" line. I assume that all the people who disappeared between #1 and #74 were culled either by the questionnaire, or by having a big obvious reason for not being able to do a 5 week trial.
Once we were all in the courtroom, the judge ran through some preliminary information: here are the charges in the case, here are a raft of names, do you know any of them? Some of the people raised their hands, and there may have been one or two people who actually knew the person involved, as opposed to simply recognizing a relatively common name.
The charges numbered 8 total, and I couldn't remember exactly what they were through most of the trial, but knew they were all more or less in line with "being a pimp." As it happens, they were three counts of promoting prostitution, two counts of rape, one of robbery, one of kidnapping, and one of unlawful firearm possession. I'll get into them in more detail later.
We went through the "I can't afford it" folks with comparative dispatch, and moved on to Voir Dire, which is the process whereby the attorneys get to know the potential jurors, and can assess their fitness to be on the jury. Questions came out about prostitution. What did we know? What had we experienced? What about movies like Pretty Woman? I'm sure there were other questions, but those are what I recall.
There were a few stand-outs in the selection process I wanted to mention, although I have to do some set-up first. The defendant, who I'll call Matt, is black, and 21 years old (although he looks older, and I would have guessed he was in his mid to late twenties, at first). He was dressed in a button-down plaid shirt and khaki pants, and sitting next to his defense attorney, who reminded me of nothing more than an aged leprechaun, with a bald head and a thin white beard over crooked teeth that smiled easily. I ended up calling him The Elf in my notes, and that's as good a name as any for these pages. The prosecuting attorney, when we got a good look at him, reminded me of Stephen Colbert, although I realized as we went on that my first impression was largely made on superficial points: rimless glasses, dark hair, nice suit, general build. I referred to him as Colbert in my notes, and I'll keep that for here.
The first stand-out juror really stood out. He was in the jury box, sitting in seat #4 or 5. I have no idea what his name was, but I ended up thinking of him as Piggy. We were all asked these various questions, as I was saying, and when it got to be Piggy's turn, he revealed that he had been in the military, he was now a security guard somewhere, etc. This is a man who was probably in his late 30s or early forties, significantly overweight, with little porcine eyes behind square, metal-framed glasses, and a bristly little mustache punctuating a swellingly fat face. He positively dripped "ex-military." Asked about potential problems he might have being objective in the trial, he described when he was an MP somewhere, and was jumped, making it clear without saying so that he was jumped by a group of black men, and that that might cloud his judgement regarding Matt. Then, he leaned forward a bit (I think he was talking to the Elf), and said, "May I speak frankly?" I could sense him translating "Permission to speak freely, sir?" into civilian-ese in his head. The Elf nodded, said, "Go ahead," and Piggy leaned forward, pointing at Matt from his shoulder to the tip of his slightly quivering finger.
"I dunno what he did, but I can tell you one thing. I know his type, and he's guilty! I dunno what he's guilty of, but I know he's guilty of something!" Everything in his manner screamed, "That black kid there is guilty because he's BLACK!" At that point, Judge Johnson held up her hand (interesting side-note: Judge Johnson looks like she has significant black ancestry, and there were very nicely sketched portraits of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X hanging opposite the jury box; probably not the most conducive environment to pull out your petty racism, Piggy), and said, "That's enough! I'm going to excuse this juror for cause. Any objections?" Both attorneys shook their heads no. There was a palpable reduction in tension as Piggy made his waddling, porcine way out of the jury box, and rollingly stomped out of the courtroom, his mustache bristling with impotent anger. As I commented to some friends after relating this incident, there are lots of ways to get yourself off a jury without making everyone around you think you're a racist asshole.
The other interesting juror was #124 (or so). He diverted nearly
any question asked of him into a haranguing lecture on the abomination of
the for-profit prison system, and how he would be unwilling to commit
anyone to such immoral torture imprisonment. His manner
bespoke exactly the kind of
screeching trustafarian, libertarian (because no government
interference in our lives would be COOOL, man), entitled rich-kid nature
that I came to despise at Evergreen, lo these many years ago (my fellow
juror Hal refreshes my memory: #124 claimed he was actually in favor of
more and bigger government; my impression of him as having the smug
self-satisfaction I'm referring to stands, though). He
wasn't excused that day, but when we were called back next, he was told
he could go, to exultant fist-pumping on his part, and a collective
sigh of relief (expressed as nervous laughter from some) on everyone
else's part.
That was more or less the end of that day. We were excused for Friday, which is the normal day off for trials (which is to say, I think everyone's working hard on Fridays, they're just not doing jury trial work).
Watch this space for further updates. I won't be going into this kind of day-to-day detail for much of the trial. At 24 (or so) days, that would be far too much writing, and it would read like a very dry transcript. I think I'm going to aim for a more episodic style this time around.
Posted at 10:30 permanent link category: /jurisprudence
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