“Wait, where was I?” Hester asked.
This was a small reminder that Hester was not a young woman. She wasn’t above playing your favorite aunt or grandmother when she could. Sharp, fair, strict, a little forgetful, lovable. Most of the jury members knew Hester from her cable news show Crimstein on Crime. The prosecution always tried to select jury members who didn’t know who she was, but even if the juror claimed that they didn’t watch the show — not many did on a regular basis — almost all had seen her as a television analyst at some point or another. If a potential juror said that they didn’t know who Hester was, they were often lying, which made Hester want them because, for some reason, that meant they wanted to be on her jury and would probably be on her side. Over the years, the prosecution had picked up on that and so they stopped asking.
“Oh, that’s right. I was characterizing Mr. Hickory’s closing as ‘overwrought yet completely irrelevant.’ You probably want to know why.”
Her voice was soft. She always tried to start the closing that way to get the jury to lean in a little. It also gave her voice space to grow, space for her narrative to build.
“Mr. Hickory kept blabbing on about what we already knew, didn’t he? In terms of evidence, that is. We don’t dispute that the gun belonged to my client or any of that other stuff, so why waste our time with that?”
She gave a heartfelt shrug but didn’t wait for Hickory to try to answer.
“But everything else Mr. Hickory claimed... well, I won’t call them bald-faced lies because that would be rude. But the prosecutor’s office is a political one, and like the worst politicians — don’t we have too many of those nowadays? — Mr. Hickory slanted the story so that you only heard his biased and distorted narrative. Boy, I’m sick of that, aren’t you? I’m sick of that with politicians. I’m sick of that with the media. I’m sick of that on social media, not that I’m on social media, but my grandson Matthew is and sometimes he shows me what’s there, and I tell you, it’s Crazyville, am I right? Stay away.”
Brief laughter.
This was all a bit of rapport/showmanship on her part. Everyone dislikes politicians and the media in the same way they dislike attorneys, so this made Hester both self-deprecating and relatable. It was, however, an interesting dichotomy. If you ask someone what they think of lawyers, they will trash them. If you ask them what they think of their lawyer, they will speak glowingly.
“As you already know, most of what Mr. Hickory said doesn’t add up. That’s because life isn’t, as much as Mr. Hickory wants it to be, black and white. We all know this, don’t we? It is part of the human condition. We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can read our thoughts, but that we can read theirs. Are there black-and-whites in the world? Sure. We will get back to that in a moment. But mostly — and we all know this — life is lived in the grays.”
Without turning to the screen, Hester hit the remote and a slide appeared on the television screen the defense had brought in. Her television was intentionally bigger than the prosecution’s — seventy-two inches while Hickory’s was a mere fifty. Subliminally, it told the jury that she had nothing to hide.
“For some reason, Mr. Hickory chose not to show you this.”
The jury’s eyes were naturally drawn to the image behind her. Hester didn’t turn and look. She wanted to show them that she knew what it was; instead she watched their faces.
“I hate to state the obvious, but this is a closeup of a hand. More specifically, the right hand of Mr. Lars Corbett.”
The image was blurry. That was part technology — it was an extreme closeup — and part intentional. If it had worked in her favor to improve the lighting or pixels, she would have done so. A trial is two competing stories. It didn’t serve her interest to do anything but blow it up in this way, quality be damned.
“Do you see what’s clutched in his hand?”
Some of the jury squinted.
“A little hard to make out, I know,” Hester continued. “But we can see it’s black. It’s metal. Watch now.”
Hester pressed play. The hand began to rise. Since this was extreme closeup, the hand appeared to move fast. Again: intentional. She strolled over to the exhibit table and picked up a small gun. “This is a Remington RM380 pocket-size pistol. It’s black. It’s metal. Do you know why you buy a gun this size?”
She waited a beat, as though the jury would answer. They didn’t, of course.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s in the gun’s name. Pocket-size. So you can carry it. So you can conceal it and use it. And what else do we know? We know that Lars Corbett owns at least one Remington RM380.”
Hester pointed again to the blurry image.
“Is that the gun right there in Lars Corbett’s hand?”
Again she paused, shorter this time.
“Right, exactly, so we already have reasonable doubt, don’t we? That’s enough to end all of this. I could sit down right now and not say another word, and your vote not to convict is obvious. But let’s continue, shall we? Because I do have more. Much more.”
Hester motioned dismissively toward the defense table. “We heard testimony that Lars Corbett’s Remington RM380 was ‘found’” — Hester put the word in sarcastic air quotes — “in his basement, but really? Do we know that for certain? Corbett owned a lot of guns. You saw them during this trial. He had a fetish for all sorts of destructive weaponry — big scary assault rifles and machine guns and revolvers and Lord-knows-what. Here, let me show you.”
She clicked the remote. The prosecution had tried to keep this photograph found on Corbett’s Facebook page out of the case. It didn’t matter, Paul Hickory had valiantly argued, what a victim looked like or wore or how he decorated his home. During voir dire, Hickory had asked Judge Greiner, “If this was a rape case, would you let Ms. Crimstein show the jury a photograph of the young woman in racy clothing? I thought we were beyond that.” But Hester argued that there was probative value because a man who had made public his vast gun collection would conceivably be more likely to draw a weapon, or at least, Richard Levine’s “state of mind” — his believing he was in real danger from Corbett — could thus be better explained.
But there was a bigger reason why Hester wanted the jury to see this photograph.
“Do you really think this man” — she pointed to Corbett — “only bought guns legally? Do we really think it’s not possible he had several small handguns and that what we see in his hand” — now she enlarged the blurry black mass in Corbett’s hand — “is one of them?”
The jury was paying attention.
Hester didn’t want them looking at the black mass for too long, so she clicked her remote and moved the image back to the photograph of Corbett with the assault rifle. She slowly walked back to her table so that they could stare at the photograph a little longer. Lars Corbett sported a crewcut and smirk. But the backdrop was the key.
Behind Corbett was a red flag with a swastika in the middle.
The flag of Nazi Germany.
But Hester didn’t say anything about it yet. She tried to keep her voice even, unemotional, detached, reasonable.
“Now Mr. Hickory has claimed, with very little proof, that this isn’t a gun in Lars Corbett’s hand but an iPhone.” In truth, Paul Hickory had very solid evidence that it was an iPhone. He had blown away this he-saw-a-gun theory pretty conclusively during the trial. He had introduced other photographs of the hand and used several videos and eyewitness testimony to support his claim that it was indeed an iPhone, that Lars Corbett was raising it in order to film the encounter, that we could all see, after the bullet went through Corbett’s head, his phone drop to the pavement.