Free A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett Page A

into custody); similarly, a number of other items of sexual paraphernalia appeared to have been entirely passed over in the initial searches. The victim’s caller-ID system, which might have contained crucial phone evidence, sat unchecked until a flood of later worry-calls (including those by Pessel) had displaced records from the night Cuffee died. It was clear that the crime-scene investigators liked stuff with blood on it; they got less excited about everything else.
    The same went for the prosecution. The lead attorney followed the general directive that the jury was to be shown as much blood as possible. The photos were good, depicting the spray on the wall, the pooling in the small of the victim’s back, but the veritable items, bedaubed with the veritable fluids, were still better. The lead prosecutor kept his assistant (younger, droopy-lidded, sporting a bristly mustache and close-cropped buzz) busy snapping on latex gloves to open the bundles of evidence, each item with its rust-colored streaks and speckles. Every envelope, bag, or piece of Saran wrap bore a unique evidence label, not the same as that of the evidence it contained; this caused long waits while, for instance, a witness extracted a stiffened condom from three bits of packing material, and each of these, for some reason, along with the condom itself, had to be read into the record and demarcated with a multiple-digit alphanumeric code. Mix-ups were not infrequent.
    The forensics expert, asked to link samples to the labeled locations on the floor plan of the apartment, twice pointed—erroneously, but with great confidence—to the same spot.
    Much posturing took place around each of the relic-like items, as the sergeant-at-arms and the witnesses, too, were obliged to don gloves and handle each piece, creating additional delays and cultivating an environment of medico-forensic gravity. Not to be outmaneuvered, the defense attorney one day slyly requested the judge’s permission to examine several items on the evidence dolly. Then, nonchalantly, in his pearl-gray suit, he wandered over and picked through the pile of gore with his bare hands, as if to say, “Enough already with the fuss.” One had to watch closely to see him subtly apply a rub-on antiseptic wash to his hands after returning to his place.
    Some of the defense attorney’s efforts to undermine the state’s case were more overt, and less successful. Questioning the relevance of a sample of Cuffee’s blood recovered from the lip of the letter slot in his door (and presumably dripped there by the defendant as he exited), the defense challenged the prosecution’s expert forensics witness: “But you have no way of knowing how old that blood is, right? I mean, Cuffee might have cut his finger on that slot two weeks earlier, right?”
    Hmm. Well, yes, but there was the small matter of the pint of blood on the adjacent wall. . . .
    Just checking.
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    D efendants in murder trials seldom take the stand. They are under no obligation to do so, and a jury is instructed to make no inferences from their choices. For one thing, testifying generally means exposing any criminal record they might have, information that is otherwise rigorously withheld from the jury.
    From the start of the trial, this careful court practice—separating the admissible “facts” of the case from inadmissible information about the “characters” involved—struck me as more than quixotic; it was downright perverse. Again and again I found myself sitting in court looking across at Milcray. Only he knew what had happened in apartment one, 103 Corlears Street. Without doubt, the actual truth existed in his mind and probably nowhere else in the spacious universe, with the possible exception of the mind of God. What we all wanted to know resided in an electrochemical array in Milcray’s brain, in the gray matter where his memory flickered in live