Free A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett

up from Tucson to testify about the voice-mail option), the almost exact correlation in the timing of the calls was mere coincidence, since there was no reason for the message-leaver and the message-seeker to contact the service at the same moment. On balance, the evidence favored Milcray’s account.
    One other aspect of the telephone logs offered a very imperfect confirmation of a detail in Milcray’s story. A record of incoming calls to Cuffee’s phone on the night he died showed three attempts to contact him within the span of a minute at about 12:55 a.m.; all three calls originated from the same Manhattan number. Only the last one went through; there was no way to say if it was picked up by an answering machine or by a person. The actual location of the source phone could not be identified, leaving open the possibility that these log entries were a record of Milcray’s alleged effort to contact “Veronique” from a pay phone several blocks north of her apartment (though Milcray never said anything about making three tries).
    If those were not Milcray’s calls, then he was lying again, since the records showed no other incoming calls to Cuffee’s phone at any time in roughly the preceding hour.
    However, given that the emergency call to 911 (reporting Milcray on Christopher Street seeking medical attention) came at about 1:10, the 12:55 calls to Cuffee’s apartment could only have been Milcray’s pay-phone inquiry if we assumed a hugely compressed time frame for all the events he described: we would need to believe that Milcray found his way to the apartment, chatted, undressed, fought, killed, and escaped, all in less than fifteen minutes.
    Later, this would cause much gnashing of teeth in the jury room, and would lead, in fact, to a rather goofy effort to dramatize the whole of Milcray’s narration in order to time it. The project had the feel of an acting exercise run at double speed, and even then it was tight.
    Although the phone record could thus hardly stand as unqualified proof of a detail in Milcray’s story (weren’t the three calls in rapid succession more likely those placed by an impatient Matthew Pessel, waiting at the bar, trying to get Cuffee to pick up?), the defense attorney cleverly turned the very ambiguities of the evidence into an indictment of the prosecution. After all, the actual site of the phone from which the 12:55 calls came was never determined. Why could they not be traced? Because, as it happened, the originating number had been out of service for more than a year, and hence had dropped from the phone company’s records. But why had there been no effort at the time of the original investigation to determine the provenance of the calls? This, the defense could legitimately claim, represented sloppy detective work at best, or perhaps an unwillingness to look for what might turn out to be exculpatory evidence.
    Conspiracy paranoia? Not necessarily, particularly in the context of the highly selective evidentiary work done by police at the scene of the crime. On a series of cross-examinations, the defense repeatedly asked those who had searched the apartment if they had found any women’s clothing. Again and again the answer was no. But a close look at the crime-scene photos suggested otherwise: a gauzy bit of white cloth over the back of a chair, a bright red garment bunched between the victim’s legs, what looked very much like a pair of high heels under the coffee table, something else on the futon. None of these items had been collected, and none of the witnesses who investigated the crime scene could say what they were. Given that Milcray’s story demanded that there be, at the very least, a large pair of panties in the room, it was surprising that closer attention had not been paid to these various articles. In addition, it was the assistant medical examiner, not the police, who turned up the whips (which were never taken