The Lincoln Lawyer

jury,” she ordered, cutting off my protest.
    The bailiff opened the jury room door and the twelve jurors and two alternates started filing into the jury box. I leaned over to Roulet, who had just sat down, and whispered.
    “You owe me five hundred dollars.”

TWENTY-EIGHT
    T ed Minton’s opening statement was a by-the-numbers model of prosecutorial overkill. Rather than tell the jurors what evidence he would present and what it would prove, the prosecutor tried to tell them what it all meant. He was going for a big picture and this was almost always a mistake. The big picture involves inferences and suggestions. It extrapolates givens to the level of suspicions. Any experienced prosecutor with a dozen or more felony trials under his belt will tell you to keep it small. You want them to convict, not necessarily to understand.
    “What this case is about is a predator,” he told them. “Louis Ross Roulet is a man who on the night of March sixth was stalking prey. And if it were not for the sheer determination of a woman to survive, we would be here prosecuting a murder case.”
    I noticed early on that Minton had picked up a scorekeeper. This is what I call a juror who incessantly takes notes during trial. An opening statement is not an offer of evidence and Judge Fullbright had so admonished the jury, but the woman in the first seat in the front row had been writing since the start of Minton’s statement. This was good. I like scorekeepers because they document just what the lawyers say will be presented and proved at trial and at the end they go back to check. They keep score.
    I looked at the jury chart I had filled in the week before and saw that the scorekeeper was Linda Truluck, a homemaker from Reseda. She was one of only three women on the jury. Minton had tried hard to keep the female content to a minimum because, I believe, he feared that once it was established in trial that Regina Campo had been offering sexual services for money, he might lose the females’ sympathy and ultimately their votes on a verdict. I believed he was probably correct in that assumption and I worked just as diligently to get women on the panel. We both ended up using all of our twenty challenges and it was probably the main reason it took three days to seat a jury. In the end I got three women on the panel and only needed one to head off a conviction.
    “Now, you are going to hear testimony from the victim herself about her lifestyle being one that we would not condone,” Minton told the jurors. “The bottom line is she was selling sex to the men she invited to her home. But I want you to remember that what the victim in this case did for a living is not what this trial is about. Anyone can be a victim of a violent crime. Anyone. No matter what someone does for a living, the law does not allow for them to be beaten, to be threatened at knifepoint or to be put in fear of their lives. It doesn’t matter what they do to make money. They enjoy the same protections that we all do.”
    It was pretty clear to me that Minton didn’t even want to use the word
prostitution
or
prostitute
for fear it would hurt his case. I wrote the word down on the legal pad I would take with me to the lectern when I made my statement. I planned to make up for the prosecutor’s omissions.
    Minton gave an overview of the evidence. He spoke about the knife with the defendant’s initials on the blade. He talked about the blood found on his left hand. And he warned the jurors not to be fooled by the defense’s efforts to confuse or muddle the evidence.
    “This is a very clear-cut and straightforward case,” he said as he was winding up. “You have a man who attacked a woman in her home. His plan was to rape and then kill her. It is only by the grace of God that she will be here to tell you the story.”
    With that he thanked them for their attention and took his seat at the prosecution table. Judge Fullbright looked at her watch and then looked at me. It was 11:40 and she was probably weighing whether to go to a break or let me proceed with my opener. One of the judge’s chief jobs during trial is jury management. The judge’s duty is to make sure the jury is comfortable and engaged. Lots of breaks, short and long, is often the answer.
    I had known Connie Fullbright for at least twelve years, since long before she was a judge. She had been both a prosecutor and defense lawyer. She knew both sides. Aside from being overly quick with contempt