Sycamore Row, Page 66

Page 66

 

  “And some unreasonable ones,” Harry Rex said.

  “I agree with Portia, but we’re a long way from the final twelve. Let’s save the bickering for later. ”

  After the recess, the lawyers were allowed to move their chairs around to the other sides of their tables so they could stare at the panel while the panel stared right back. Judge Atlee assumed the bench without the ritual of “Please rise for the court” and began with a concise statement of the case. He said he expected the trial to last three or four days and that he certainly planned to be finished by Friday afternoon. He introduced the lawyers, all of them, but not the paralegals. Jake was alone, facing an army.

  Judge Atlee explained that he would cover a few areas that had to be discussed, then he would allow the attorneys to question and probe. He began with health—anyone sick, facing treatment, or unable to sit and listen for long periods of time? One lady stood and said her husband was in the hospital in Tupelo and she needed to be there. “You are excused,” Judge Atlee said with great compassion, and she hustled out of the courtroom. Number twenty-nine, gone. Number forty had a herniated disk that had flared up over the weekend and he claimed to be in considerable pain. He was taking painkillers that made him quite drowsy. “You are excused,” Judge Atlee said.

  He seemed perfectly willing to excuse anyone with a legitimate concern, but this proved not to be the case. When he asked about conflicts with work, a gentleman wearing a coat and a tie stood and said he simply could not be away from the office. He was a district manager for a company that made steel buildings, and was clearly an executive taken with his own importance. He even hinted he might lose his job. Judge Atlee’s lecture on civic responsibility lasted five minutes and scorched the gentleman. He ended with “If you lose your job, Mr. Crawford, let me know. I’ll subpoena your boss, put him on the stand here, and, well, he’ll have a bad day. ”

  Mr. Crawford sat down, thoroughly chastised and humiliated. There were no more efforts to skip jury duty on account of work. Judge Atlee then moved to the next issue on his checklist—prior jury service. Several said they had served before, three in state court and two in federal. Nothing about those experiences would alter their ability to deliberate in the case at hand.

  Nine people claimed to know Jake Brigance. Four were former clients and they were excused. Two ladies attended the same church but felt as though that fact would not influence their judgment. They were not excused. A distant relative was. Carla’s schoolteacher friend said she knew Jake well and was too close for any objectivity. She was excused. The last was a high school pal from Karaway who admitted he hadn’t seen Jake in ten years. He was left on the panel, to be dealt with later.

  Each lawyer was introduced again, with the same questions. No one knew Wade Lanier, Lester Chilcott, Zack Zeitler, or Joe Bradley Hunt, but then they were out-of-town lawyers.

  Judge Atlee said, “Now, moving along, the last will and testament in question was written by a man named Seth Hubbard, now deceased, of course. Did any of you know him personally?” Two hands were timidly lifted. A man stood and said he had grown up in the Palmyra area of the county and had known Seth when they were quite a bit younger.

  “How old are you, sir?” Judge Atlee asked.

  “Sixty-nine. ”

  “You know you can claim an exemption from service if you’re above the age of sixty-five, right?”

  “Yes sir, but I don’t have to, do I?”

  “Oh no. If you want to serve, that’s admirable. Thank you. ”

  A woman stood and said she had once worked at a lumber yard owned by Seth Hubbard, but it would not be a problem. Judge Atlee gave the names of Seth’s two wives and asked if anyone knew them. A woman said her older sister had been friends with the first wife, but that had been a long time ago. Herschel Hubbard and Ramona Hubbard Dafoe were asked to stand. They smiled awkwardly at the judge and the jurors, then sat down. Methodically, Judge Atlee asked the panel if anyone knew them. A few hands went up, all belonging to old classmates from Clanton High. Judge Atlee asked each one a series of questions. All claimed to know little about the case and to be unaffected by what little knowledge they possessed.

  Tedium set in as Judge Atlee went through page after page of questions. By noon, twelve of the fifty had been dismissed, all of them white. Of the thirty-eight remaining, eleven were black, not a single one of whom had lifted a hand.

  During the lunch recess, the lawyers met in tense groups and debated who was acceptable and who had to be cut. They ignored their cold sandwiches while they argued over body language and facial expressions. In Jake’s office, the mood was lighter because the panel was darker. In the main conference room over at the Sullivan firm, the mood was heavier because the blacks were sandbagging. Of the eleven remaining, not one admitted to knowing Lettie Lang. Impossible in such a small county! There was obviously a conspiracy of some nature at work. Their expert consultant, Myron Pankey, had watched several of them closely during the questioning and had no doubt that they were trying their best to get on the jury. But Myron was from Cleveland and knew little about southern blacks.

  Wade Lanier, though, was unimpressed. He’d tried more cases in Mississippi than the rest of the lawyers combined, and he was not concerned about the remaining thirty-eight members of the pool. In almost every trial, he hired consultants to dig into the backgrounds of the jurors, but once he saw them in the flesh he knew he could read them. And though he did not say so, he liked what he had seen that morning.

  Lanier still had two great secrets up his sleeve—the handwritten will of Irene Pickering, and the testimony of Julina Kidd. To his knowledge, Jake had no idea what was coming. If Lanier managed to successfully detonate these two bombs in open court, he might just walk away with a unanimous verdict. After considerable negotiating, Fritz Pickering had agreed to testify for $7,500. Julina Kidd had jumped at the offer of only $5,000. Neither Fritz nor Julina had spoken to anyone on the other side, so Lanier was confident his ambushes would work.

  So far, his firm had either spent or committed to spending just over $85,000 in litigation expenses, moneys the clients were ultimately responsible for. The cost of the case was rarely discussed, though it was always in their thoughts. While the clients were troubled by rising expenses, Wade Lanier understood the economic realities of big-time litigation. Two years earlier, his firm had spent $200,000 on a product liability case, and lost.

  You roll the dice and sometimes you lose. Wade Lanier, though, was not contemplating a loss in the Seth Hubbard case.

  Nevin Dark settled into a booth at the Coffee Shop with three of his new friends and ordered iced tea from Dell. All four wore white lapel buttons with the word “Juror” in bold blue letters, as if they were now officially off-limits and beyond approach. Dell had seen the same buttons a hundred times, and knew she should listen hard but ask no questions and offer no opinions.

  The thirty-eight remaining jurors had been warned by Judge Atlee not to discuss the case. Since none of the four at Nevin’s table had ever met, they chatted about themselves for a few minutes while looking over the menus. Fran Decker was a retired schoolteacher from Lake Village, ten miles south of Clanton. Charles Ozier sold farm tractors for a company out of Tupelo and lived near the lake. Debbie Lacker lived in downtown Palmyra, population 350, but had never met Seth Hubbard. Since they couldn’t talk about the case, they talked about the judge, the courtroom, and the lawyers. Dell listened hard but gleaned nothing from their lunch conversation, at least nothing she could report to Jake in the event he stopped by later for the gossip.

  At 1:15, they paid their separate checks and returned to the courtroom. At 1:30, when all thirty-eight were accounted for, Judge Atlee appeared from the rear and said, “Good afternoon. ” He went on to explain that he would now continue with the selection of the jury, and he planned to do so in a manner that was somewhat unusual. Each juror would be asked to step into his chambers to be quizzed by the la
wyers in private.

  Jake had made this request because he assumed the jurors, as a group, knew more about the case than they were willing to admit. By grilling them in private, he was confident he could elicit more thorough responses. Wade Lanier did not object.

  Judge Atlee said, “Mr. Nevin Dark, would you join us in my chambers, please?”

  A bailiff showed him the way, and Nevin nervously walked past the bench, through a door, down a short hallway, and into a rather small room where everyone was waiting. A court reporter sat ready to transcribe every word. Judge Atlee occupied one end of the table and the lawyers crowded around the rest of it.

  “Please remember that you’re under oath, Mr. Dark,” Judge Atlee said.

  “Of course. ”

  Jake Brigance flashed him an earnest smile and said, “Some of these questions might be kind of personal, Mr. Dark, and if you don’t want to answer them, that’s fine. Do you understand?”

  “I do. ”

  “Do you currently have a last will and testament?”

  “I do. ”

  “Who prepared it?”

  “Barney Suggs, a lawyer in Karaway. ”

  “And your wife?”

  “Yes, we signed them at the same time, in Mr. Suggs’s office, about three years ago. ”

  Without asking the specifics of their wills, Jake nibbled around the edges of the will-making process. What prompted them to prepare their wills? Do their children know what’s in the wills? How often have they changed their wills? Did they name each other as executor of their wills? Have they ever inherited anything from another will? Did he, Nevin Dark, believe a person should have the right to leave his property to anyone? To a non–family member? To charity? To a friend or employee? To cut out family members who may have fallen out of favor? Had either Mr. Dark or his wife ever considered changing their wills to exclude a person currently named as a beneficiary?

  And so on. When Jake finished, Wade Lanier asked a series of questions about drugs and painkillers. Nevin Dark said he’d used them only sparingly, but his wife was a breast cancer survivor and at one time had relied on some strong medications for pain. He could not remember their names. Lanier showed genuine concern for this woman he’d never met, and poked and prodded enough to convey the message that strong painkillers taken by very sick people often cause a lapse in rational thinking. The seed was skillfully planted.

  Judge Atlee was watching the clock, and after ten minutes he called time. Nevin returned to the courtroom, where everyone stared at him. Juror Number Two, Tracy McMillen, was waiting in a chair by the bench, and was quickly led to the back room, where she faced the same questioning.

  Boredom hit hard and many of the spectators left. Some of the jurors napped while others read and reread newspapers and magazines. Bailiffs yawned and gazed from the large plate-glass windows overlooking the courthouse lawn. One prospective juror replaced the next in a steady parade to Judge Atlee’s chambers. Most disappeared for the full ten minutes, but a few were finished in less time. When Juror Number Eleven emerged from her interrogation, she passed the benches and headed for the door, excused from service for reasons those sitting in the courtroom would never know.