The video already had more than a million hits on YouTube.
“When did you first see this?” asked Vanessa Strong, an attractive black woman with blonde-streaked dreadlocks.
Halsey was still grinning. “Wrong question, fella. It’s not when, it’s if. Never saw this Keystone Cops routine until it came up on the Internet.”
“Are you sure?” Upchurch asked.
“Does the sun come up in the east?”
“Maybe,” Strong said, “you should think about that. Lying to federal agents, even if you’re not under oath, is a crime.”
“You know what I know? A gook with spiky hair has told you he showed me this. He’s lying.”
“Why would he do that?” Upchurch asked.
“Why would flies buzz around shit? Have you ever heard that people who work for you are either at your feet, kissing them, or at your throat, trying to strangle you? Maybe he’s got grievances because I have more hair than he does.”
Vanessa Strong said, “Maybe you should think about your answer again. Take your time.”
“Let me tell you something: all I’m thinking about is why you would waste your time treating me like this. Do you think that anybody is going to believe him? I’ve been around a long, long time. Nobody but nobody has ever said I lifted a pencil from the office and took it home.”
“Ang Tien took a lie detector test yesterday,” Upchurch said.
“Let me guess? He passed.”
“How would you like to help yourself,” Strong said, “and take a lie detector test?”
Halsey repeated words that he had often heard when he was interrogating people in this room. “How’d you like to take a good flying fuck for yourself?”
38.
It was two in the afternoon when Judge Conley suddenly emerged from the rear door of the courtroom. At the words “All rise,” everyone in the crowded courtroom stood until she said, “Be seated.”
Escorted by three guards, Juan Suarez quickly emerged from the holding cell. Raquel Rematti noticed that there wasn’t a trace of anxiety or confusion in his expression. He smiled at Raquel when he sat.
Since Raquel expected that the jurors had a question-they had only deliberated for a day-she was surprised when Conley announced, “We have a verdict.”
For Raquel, that was too sudden. Usually a fast verdict meant a conviction. She put her hand on Juan’s shoulder as the jury filed into the box.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Judge Conley said, “I understand you have a verdict?”
A 72-year-old woman with silver hair, a retired school teacher who had been picked as the foreperson, said in a voice remarkably similar to the judge’s, “We do.”
Not one of the jurors had glanced at Raquel or even in the direction of the defense table since entering the courtroom. They stared at the courtroom deputy as he took a slip of paper, the verdict form, from the hand of the foreperson. He carried the paper, folded, to the judge. Her face absolutely expressionless, she glanced at it for no more than a second and handed it back to the deputy.
Judge Conley then looked toward the spectators, many of them reporters. Conley, speaking directly into her microphone, conscious that her words were being broadcast around the world, said: “I want to make it clear that when the verdict is announced there will not be a sound, there will not be a reaction, from anyone in this courtroom.”
Raquel Rematti, despite the many times over more than twenty years that she had been in precisely this situation, just as a verdict was about to be announced, felt the blood throbbing in her temples.
And then the silver-haired lady spoke the word: Guilty.
39.
When Raquel Rematti emerged from the courthouse to the stone plaza, she found what she expected: dozens of cameras and boisterous reporters. It was chaos, like a demonstration veering out of control.
She stopped behind the microphones. It was another clear winter day. When the sound of the crowd subsided slightly, she said into the microphones clustered around her, “Today’s guilty verdict is the result of a deeply flawed prosecution and a trial in which the jurors were deprived of essential information. It is a shameful result. It is a prosecution that had its source in a blatant rush to judgment. It was directed not just at Juan Suarez but in effect at an entire community of men and women whose only offense is that they came to America, as all of our ancestors did, for a better life.”
Julie Harrison, a reporter from NBC who once had dinner with Raquel, asked, “Will there be an appeal?”
“Certainly. Throughout my career I have had confidence in our criminal justice system. Many jury convictions in high-profile cases are reversed.”
Harrison asked, “What issues can you raise?”
“Many,” Raquel said, “and they stem from the first hours after the tragic killing of Brad Richardson. First, with no concrete evidence-no eyewitnesses, no tell-tale traces of anything at the crime scene-they hunted down Juan Suarez. They did this solely on the say-so of Joan Richardson. The rich, powerful, profoundly troubled, and lying Joan Richardson. The prosecution never looked for another person. And, in fact, as you saw in the courtroom, the DA’s office succeeded in doing all it could to prevent the jury from hearing about all the other people who surrounded Brad Richardson at the time of his death.”
Another voice, deeper in the crowd, asked, “What else?”
“The government’s staggering misconduct, and the court’s willingness to condone it. We know that Juan Suarez did not steal anything, we know that two rogue detectives did, and we know that the jury was prevented in the courtroom from hearing anything about that.
“We also know that an honorable woman, a person of integrity, came forward to tell us extremely troubling information about how her forensic work was thwarted and then was silenced. I understand that even now she is the victim of retaliation, placed on involuntary leave without pay.
“This trial is Alabama justice in the 1930s, not a fair trial in the America of the twenty-first century.”
Raquel Rematti knew that her critical words, broadcast to the world, would end in disciplinary proceedings that could result in revoking her law license. Lawyers lived in a feudal regime: they weren’t supposed to say what they truly believed about prosecutors or judges, they were expected to keep in line with an unwritten set of standards controlling what it was permissible to say about the system. There were serious costs to violating the code of silence.
Raquel wasn’t concerned about these costs.
Another voice rang out: “Where is your client now?”
“He is being returned to the detention center in Riverhead where he has been held in deplorable conditions for months.”
“Can you say something about that? Why deplorable?”
“Not only has his treatment been harsh, he has been assaulted by prisoners acting, we believe, at the direction of a Mexican drug lord, Oscar Caliente, whose inexplicable contacts with Brad Richardson I was not allowed to explore. The prison staff did nothing to stop the deadly attack. And then they prepared a report that was not just a whitewash. It was a fabrication.”
“What was your client’s reaction to the verdict?”
No one in all her years of practice had ever asked that question. “Thank you, I want to address that. Prosecutors, judges, the public-and you in the media-never see criminal defendants as men and women, as people who have feelings, fears, hopes, thoughts, love for their children and others. Instead you see all of them as evil-doers.”