Free Skeleton Justice by Michael Baden, Linda Kenney Baden Page B

examine the evidence that night, sir?”
    “No.”
    “When did you get the evidence?”
    “Let me look at my notes.” As the page flipped, the doctor grabbed for the small plastic cup of water nearby.
    Manny pretended not to notice how he gulped it down. She was making him squirm.
    “The day after the bombing. I received the specimen at my office in Manhattan at one-forty-three in the afternoon.”
    “The apple had been refrigerated during the period of time since its collection, had it, Doctor?” Manny asked.
    He hesitated.
    Come on, give it up, Mr Know-It-All expert witness. I already know the answer, or I wouldn’t have asked the question .
    “No.”
    Manny could tell he thought he knew where she was headed, but Lisnek looked impatient. She smiled at him in passing and returned to stand in front of the witness. “You know, Dr. Olivo, my Italian immigrant grandma grew up during the Depression and she hated to waste food. When I was a little girl, it would drive her crazy when I took a few bites out of an apple and then couldn’t finish it. You know what she’d do? She’d wrap it up in plastic and put it on the counter and try to get me to eat it the next day. I never would. You know why?”
    Lisnek jumped up. “Objection. We’ll be here all day if we have to listen to Ms. Manfreda’s reminiscences about her family heritage, Your Honor.”
    But Judge Freeman was grinning. “Tell us why you wouldn’t eat it, counselor.”
    “Because by the next day, a bitten apple wrapped in plastic in a warm kitchen was all brown and mushy. Decay had set in. Yes, decay had completely broken down the exposed surface of the apple.” Manny whipped around to take possession of something from Kenneth, keeping her back to everyone in the well of the courtroom. Murmurs began to rumble from the spectator pews. Manny turned to Olivo with the flare of a Miss Universe contestant whipping around a bathing-suit pareu on the turn toward the judges to show off her wares.
    She held up an apple—a discolored, drying, decayed, smelly brownish red apple. “Let me represent to you that this is a Delicious apple, sir.”
    “Objection! Objection,” bellowed Lisnek.
    She ignored him. Judge Freeman was laughing too hard to rule on the objection.
    “How can you say with scientific certainty that the bite marks in that apple were those of my client when the apple had been rotting away for over twelve hours under improper storage conditions?”
    “Overruled,” came the belated decision from the bench, allowing Manny to officially proceed. She looked over at Lisnek. He really needed to get shirts with collars that weren’t so tight. His head looked like it was about to pop off his neck.
    Olivo sputtered and offered some qualified justification, buttressed with technical jargon. “Scientific certainty only means it is more likely than not.”
    Ah, the dirty little secret of experts reared its head. Their opinion was nothing more than a game of chance.
    “Are you telling this courtroom that your opinion, one that would incarcerate my eighteen-year-old client without bail, disrupt his schooling, prevent his graduation, and—”
    “Objection,” Lisnek again bellowed, his voice echoing through the courtroom doors and reverberating into the hall.
    The recovered Judge Freeman turned to her. “Okay, enough with the sob story, Ms. Manfreda. Get on with the question.”
    “—is based on a mere possibility about a degraded apple?”
    Manny continued to hammer him, rebutting his claims about the reliability of bite-mark evidence with quotes from articles on forensic odontology, and the language in recent court decisions where bite-mark testimony had wrongfully imprisoned innocent people.
    Before she concluded her inquisition, she made a few final thrusts.
    “Did you bring the apple with you today?”
    “No.”
    “Did the prosecutor tell you to leave it in the city?”
    “No.”
    Manny smelled something wrong, and it wasn’t just her one