In The Plan - 9. Chapter 9

9

Stuart Lee was confident. This was such an easy case to defend. There was no way anyone was going to prove anything Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. The witnesses' memories were fuzzy and what they remembered was often at odds with each other. He had a gem of a client - who could dislike a clean-scrubbed, young, police officer? And he had an expert with a national reputation who'd assembled an entirely believable reconstruction of the accident. Even if it didn't convince every member of the jury, it would distract at least one of them, so they couldn't decide unanimously what was the truth. Case dismissed.

He'd listened to Damon Jenkins make his opening statement, trying not to gloat. It wasn't a bad presentation. Jenkins had a long history of being competent if somewhat rushed, and he came off as a likable guy. But he was always pedestrian. He didn't have Lee's polish and wouldn't use his actual charm. He was too workmanlike.

Still, Lee wasn't planning to use his sophistication here. It wouldn't fit. He planned to quietly tell the jury, "Let's not make a chore of this."

Low key. Slightly rumpled. Occasionally missing a word.

The jury was evenly split, men to women, young to old. Two of the women were older housewives, over fifty, but the younger four worked - two professionally, in management. Three of the women seemed to be under thirty-five, and the two who weren't managers still worked in offices. In contrast, one of the men - almost seventy - was a retired tradesman - a plumber or electrician. He'd have to check his notes. The two in their forties were in corporate management, in the city. The one in his early thirties was the inevitable suburban teacher, this one in special ed. The last pair were in their late twenties, a construction worker and a real estate agent. None of the jurors were uneducated. Even the construction worker and the housewives had taken some community college courses. Lee preferred it that way - he didn't have to pull back. He hated using relatively simple words like "embellishment" and then realizing three of the people he was talking to hadn't understood.

Lee had appeared before this judge before but didn't know him very well. The guy was in his sixties, well-schooled, well-spoken, but not a particular whiz. Reportedly, he was very active is his church, so by extension - and reputation - always fair. So Lee wasn't worried.

Still, as he sat in the courtroom, he considered how to diffuse Jenkins's plans. He wasn't going to address Doug Hodges on his one weak point - the differences between what he'd said right after the accident and what he'd said over a year later. Before, he'd been in shock, pain, and was heavily drugged. Afterwards, his mind was clear - or clearer. How much was still unsure. This was different from many cases, where lawyers focused on what people said immediately after their accidents. One year later, their memories weren't nearly as clear. So this was an interesting twist. Still, the discrepancies in Hodges' statements were minor and the pitfalls of attacking what seemed like such a well-liked and likable guy too large. Lee had only thrown the inconsistencies into the mix to distract the prosecution.

Instead, he'd present a series of counter-witnesses. The guy who was painting, Issac Yoguez, had seen both the driver and passenger ejected from the car while it was still in the air. Lee's expert had built on that.

Even stronger were his two police officers in their best uniforms. Officers Espinoza and Chen were both military veterans, too, like Coghlan, and Espinoza was nearly a paramedic. They'd testify that they had to crawl under the liquor store van a "full two feet" even to touch Brad Coghlan. And that wasn't the easiest thing for the somewhat roundish Espinoza to do - he later reported scrapes on his back. But Lee wasn't about to call attention to the officer's being out-of-shape. He favored flattery. Still, there were times he could mercilessly discredit a witnesses.

He could do that gently with Uzoma and Muraro - with a simple demonstration. He'd suggest that each juror look into the eyes of the person sitting next to them for two seconds, and then try to remember what color shirt that person was wearing. Most people couldn't - they'd been looking in the wrong place, no matter how close by the right one was. And that would be the case with Uzoma and Muraro.

Both had been fearing for their lives. Uzoma had a car swerving past him. Even an inch of a wrong turn could send them fatally crashing. So why would Uzoma care about the face of an equally terrified passenger?

Muraro was as easy. A speeding sports car was hurtling directly at him. The car came from nowhere, suddenly, in the wrong lane, while Muraro had probably been looking upward, waiting for the traffic light to change. In the half-second before he thought he was going to die, why would he possibly memorize the hair color or notice the age of the oncoming driver?

And that simply led to other questions. As Lee told the jury: "Everyone who witnessed this incident saw something different. Like everyone who sees something, we each focus on different aspects, depending on what we're looking for and how we react. For example:

"One witness, Randall Uzoma, says he saw the car actually flip over. Now we know it didn't do that. You'll see from the police photographs."

"Another witness, Kiri Shahid, says she saw the hood fly off. But she didn't see anything else because she ducked out of the way, trying to protect her six-year-old son."

"Issac Yoguez says he saw this car coming directly at him, and you can imagine how fast he ran. But he's still sure he saw the car spin in a clockwise direction. In reality, it spun 180 degrees counter-clockwise."

"Jonah Terani saw the entire undercarriage of the car. Apparently, the car just went straight up in the air, and he watched the hood fly off. But the car never got that high off the ground - maybe two feet - it landed solidly on all four tires, and the hood's perfectly in place in every photo."

"A big deal is made out of where Brad Coghlan's body landed. Witnesses clearly place Brad under the van, but if you took a tape measure, his body was technically closer to the driver's door. And Doug Hodges' body was on the passenger side. But common sense tells you that Brad was the passenger. Why else would a man with a sensible background like Doug Hodges ever permit a friend he knew was that drunk to drive? Especially when Hodges had promised at least six people in the bar - and you'll hear from all of them - that he was going to drive Brad home, and one actually saw him standing at the driver's door?"

As final proof, Lee had his expert witness, fresh off a national, televised trial that had given him additional credibility and a bit of media attention. He wasn't the most important witness in that trial - it had been a month long, with several hundred witnesses called. But no one could deny that the man was there and that some part of his testimony may have helped lead to the conviction. Plus, his new reputation sat on top of a twenty-year career of teaching criminal justice and testifying at trials. No one was unshakable, and Lee himself didn't entirely understand the variety of trajectories the two flying bodies presented. But he wasn't there to explain. He was there to present a man who could - clearly - and this expert would deliver.

That left the defendant - the young cop, Brad Coghlan. Well, not so young. He was already thirty-five and something of a playboy, in a limited, suburban way. He was long-engaged, but not a family man yet, so that was no asset. Still, not only was he a full-time police officer, but he and his best friend ran a seven-day-a week business - a busy deli. So when could Brad think about getting married? Besides, his girlfriend - the patient Heather - was a few years younger and had an interesting job of her own that she wasn't ready to interrupt - even for maternity leave. So Coghlan was covered.

There was one gap in his defense, but it seemed Jenkins hadn't realized that, or it would have shown up in the list of witnesses he called. When Lee's investigators did their reports, they discovered Ahmed Patel had stated two different things. First, that immediately after the accident, he'd rushed outside and seen Brad Coghlan's legs still extending into his car on the driver's side, with his feet almost on the pedals. He'd unofficially told Lee's investigator that story twice in a row, walking through his movements on the day of the accident without varying. Then, that same day, only later, Sergeant Dominic Guerra had officially interviewed the Patels for the police report and decided to only take a statement from Jyoti Patel. She said she'd never gone outside the store because she was busy with a customer, so she could simply report what she'd seen of the accident out her front window - and that view was partially blocked by the liquor van. After Sergeant Guerra had taken only Jyoti Patel's statement, Lee's investigator went back to the store to see what was up. This was that same evening. And this time, Ahmed Patel had insisted that he'd been in the store all along - and deep inside the store, not just in the entryway as he'd previously explained. So he'd never seen the accident and had never gone outside to investigate.

Lee knew something was going on there, just as his investigator had sensed when he discovered the police had chosen only to take Jyoti Patel's statement. But there was a good chance Jenkins never knew it because he didn't have as many investigators or ones who were as thorough as Lee's. As to why Ahmed Patel had changed his story and his wife had gone along with him, Lee could only guess. Maybe they simply didn't want to get involved - or didn't want to take time off from work to appear in court - and Guerra's questions made them realize that might clearly happen. It made no sense that they - or anyone - would purposely move Coghlan's body.

Well, it made some sense that a well-meaning bystander might have done that - arriving, smelling gas, and impulsively moving Coghlan to safety away from his car. But people knew not to move accident victims, and why would anyone roll Coghlan under the liquor store van? That would have been difficult and wouldn't have been logically safer. There was a billionth of a chance that - between the time Ahmed Patel first saw Coghlan and the moments later when first Officer Chen and then Officer Espinoza arrived - Coghlan somehow came partly to and in his haze and pain crawled under the van for presumed safety. Then he curled in semi-fetal position. But there was no way anyone could prove that. Just as there was no way anyone could prove that Chen and Espinoza were lying to protect the reputation of a fellow cop. Jenkins could try to imply that, using the officers' testimony, but it would just be inference.

Lee knew he could spin theories any which way, and maybe even Jenkins realized that. But they both knew that without a statement from Ahmed Patel to the police, they'd get no further support. To Lee, that was the most important thing - that "if the idea never came into the courtroom, he never had to defend against it." So it was only to his advantage to keep his mouth shut.