Without a Doubt - [83]

That night I went down to his office. “Bill,” I asked, “have you noticed a discrepancy in our grading?”

“Yeah.” He looked glum. “Let’s talk.”

I pulled the problem juror-his 5, my 0.

“What about this one?”

He glanced over the summary. His face fell even further. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that we’ve got a chance.”

I knew exactly what Bill was feeling. He was in denial. I think we both were. The prospect of a bitterly fought trial we knew we could never win was just too much to bear.

You can’t acknowledge that a situation is hopeless. It destroys your will to fight. And so Bill and I reached a tacit arrangement in which we ended up supporting each other’s delusions about the candidates filling out those questionnaires.

Yeah, maybe this one isn’t so bad. Maybe we can get her to listen, even though she considers the defendant a “hunk” and named her firstborn Orenthal. Yeah, yeah. It might happen.

Something might happen. There might be a miracle.

Meanwhile, Bill and I racked our brains trying to come up with ways to keep the jury pool from being contaminated by the avalanche of misinformation issuing from the press daily. Normally, it’s the judge’s job to protect the jury pool from such pollution, but Lance didn’t seem to have a clue. We begged Ito to put off jury selection until after we finished arguments on admissibility of DNA, something that stood to be a long and complicated public brawl. Why pick a jury and then send them home, where they could listen to the defense belittle the science of DNA testing? But Lance didn’t see the problem.

Ito set voir dire for October 12. At the very least, we pleaded with him, bring the jurors into the courtroom one at a time. If you don’t, we told him, you’re going to have jurors discussing gossip and half-truths right in front of the whole pool. Once again, motion denied. It would be a cattle call, everyone sitting together, every juror questioned right out there in the open.

On the Wednesday morning we were to start voir dire I had arrived early and shut myself in my office to practice my questions. When finally I looked at my watch, it was half an hour to show time. Odd, I thought, I haven’t heard from Bill. Patti Jo knocked on my door. She looked worried.

“Bill’s sick,” she told me. “He can’t make it in today.”

“You’re kidding, right? Tell me it’s a joke. We’re supposed to start voir dire in about twenty-seven minutes!”

It was no joke. Bill had been looking haggard and drawn lately. I knew he hadn’t been sleeping well. The stress was taking its toll on him. Come to think of it, it had kept him home on the first day of hardship questioning, too. Now this! If Ito didn’t grant me a continuance, I was screwed.

When I got to court, with my heart in my throat, I asked to postpone the proceedings. Shapiro objected but, to my utter amazement, Lance backed me up. He pointed out to Shapiro that if “Mr. Cochran [were] similarly afflicted… I would exercise the same discretion and allow you to trail it a day.”

Lance caught me totally off guard.

I was so grateful and relieved that I couldn’t even manage a gracious reply. Maybe Ito wasn’t such a bad guy. Just in a little over his head.

Bill returned the following morning. Nothing to get alarmed about, he told us. Just a touch of the flu. He looked pale, but reasonably fit. Ready to kick ass.

The rail is the three-foot-high wooden divider that separates the lawyers and parties to the action from the spectators. But its importance far transcends that of a physical barrier. The rail is an unofficial line of demarcation separating the players from the watchers.

Don Vinson wanted to sit with us at counsel’s table. I was opposed to that. The last thing we needed, in my opinion, was our jury-most of whom perceived their fortunes as blighted by accidents or crimes of social injustice-associating us with this well-fed, monogrammed, cuff-linked fat cat.

Vinson’s gall seemed all the more amazing in light of his record of broken promises. He’d assured us that he would come up with a way to give us a computerized profile of each juror. But when we’d sent him the questionnaires, he couldn’t deliver. The format, he said, didn’t lend itself to that kind of analysis. And Vinson apparently didn’t have time to read through them all himself, so he sent a kid fresh out of college to help us.

“How many jury trials have you observed?” I’d asked the kid.

“None,” he replied.

Bill and I looked at one another.

“Let him do his thing,” Bill whispered to me.

So we listened as this boy read dutifully through his notes. His efforts were well intentioned, but there was nothing there that two seasoned prosecutors could not have intuited on their own.

I thanked him for his efforts and sent him home.

As for Vinson, we didn’t hear from him again until a few days before jury selection. He’d called to say that he wanted to present the results of his “findings.” This time I demanded that he come to our office. We met in the room we used for press conferences. Vinson spread out a set of elaborate pie charts and graphs on the table in front of us.