Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

the prosecution or defense table, it is the lawyer’s job to master the first two and always be prepared for the third. On Thursday I intended to be one of the unknown unknowns. I had seen Andrea Freeman’s strategy from a mile away. She would not see mine until she had stepped into it like quicksand and it silenced her crescendo.
    Her first witness was Dr. Joachim Gutierrez, the assistant medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Mitchell Bondurant’s body. Using a morbid slide show that I had halfheartedly and unsuccessfully objected to, the doctor took the jury on a magical mystery tour of the victim’s body, cataloging every bruise, abrasion and broken tooth. Of course, he spent the most time describing and showing on the screens the damage created by the three impacts of the murder weapon. He pointed out which had been the first blow and why it was fatal. He called the second two strikes, delivered when the victim was facedown on the ground, overkill and testified that in his experience overkill was equated with an emotional context. The three brutal strikes revealed that the killer had personal animosity toward the victim. I could have objected to both the question and answer but they played nicely into a question I would later ask.
    “Doctor,” Freeman asked at one point, “you have three brutal strikes on the top of the head, all within a circle with a four-inch diameter. How is it that you can tell which one came first and which one was the fatal blow?”
    “It is a painstaking process yet a very simple one. The blows to the skull created two fracture patterns. The immediate and most damaging impact was in the contact area where each strike of the weapon created what is termed a depressed calvarial fracture, which is really just a fancy way of saying it created a depression in the skull or a dent.”
    “A dent?”
    “You see, all bone has a certain elasticity. With injuries like this—a forceful, traumatic impact—the skull bone depresses in the shape of the striking instrument and two things happen. You get parallel break lines on the surface—these are called terraced fractures—and on the interior, you get a deep depression fracture—the dent. On the inside of the skull this depression causes a fracture that we call a pyramid splinter. This splinter projects through the dura, which is the interior lining, and directly into the brain. Often, and as was found in this case, the splinter breaks and is propelled deep into the brain tissue like a bullet. It instantly causes the termination of brain function and death.”
    “Like a bullet, you said. So these three impacts on the victim’s head were so forceful that it was literally tantamount to him being shot three times in the head?”
    “Yes, that is correct. But it only took one of these splinters to kill him. The first one.”
    “Which brings me back to my initial question. How can you tell which impact was the first one?”
    “Can I demonstrate this?”
    The judge gave permission for Gutierrez to put a diagram of a skull on the video screens. It was an overhead view and it showed the three impact spots where the hammer had struck. These points were drawn in blue. Other fractures were drawn in red.
    “To determine the sequence of blows in a multiple-trauma situation we go to the secondary fractures. Those are the fractures in red. I called these parallel breaks terraced fractures because, as I said earlier, they are like steps moving away from the impact point. A fracture or crack like this can extend completely across the bone and here you see that with this victim these fracture lines stretch across the parietal-temporal region. But such fractures always end when they reach an already-existing fracture. The energy is simply absorbed by the existing fracture. Therefore, by studying the victim’s skull and tracing the terraced fractures it becomes possible to determine which of these fractures came first. And then of course you trace these back to the impact point and you can easily see the order of the blows.”
    On the drawing on the screen the numbers 1, 2 and 3 were in place, depicting the order of blows that rained down on Mitchell Bondurant’s head. The first blow—the fatal impact—had been to the very top of his head.
    Freeman moved on from there and spent most of the morning milking the testimony, finally reaching a point where she was belaboring the obvious in many areas with too many questions that were repetitive or