Free Murder in the Courthouse by Nancy Grace

into copping a plea. That was easy money for sure. A defense lawyer could make $50,000 to $100,000 for a plea on a high-level dope case.
    The jury in the Adams case had already been selected. From what Hailey could tell from the newspapers, which had already profiled all the jurors exhaustively, the group was made up of jurors bused in from another county southwest of Chatham. In Hailey’s opinion, that had been a grave mistake for the defense.
    Demanding a change of venue, changing the location of the trial, was SOP, standard operating procedure, for the defense, whether it was smart or not. But be careful what you ask for, for you will surely get it and in this case . . . they did. The judge granted a jury selected from another county. Problem for the defense was that they didn’t get to select what county.
    Adams’s lawyers, by rolling the dice and rejecting Chatham County jurors, got Early County jurors instead. Early County was situated about a hundred miles away, at the far southern and westernmost region of the state, directly on the Georgia-Alabama state line. Reputed to be extremely conservative, they’d recently tried to order the electric chair, aka Old Sparky, for a repeat bank robber whose gun jammed when he pointed it at the bank teller’s nose. It never fired.
    The angry jury had to be offered a steak buffet at the local Golden Corral and talked down by the trial judge. When trying to placate the bloodthirsty jurors back in the deliberations room, the judge, wisely, blamed the lack of sentencing options on the U.S. Supreme Court, and then sent them to the all-you-could-eat steak and salad bar.
    Georgia’s death row stats backed up the reputation. There were more death row inmates there from Early County than any other county in the state. And the local residents were proud of it.
    But reputation alone means practically nothing when striking a jury. Hailey had tried enough cases to know that you could never, ever predict what a jury would do with 100 percent accuracy. There were and would always be wild cards . . . jurors that could hold up a verdict, hijack a jury and cause a mistrial, or, even worse, convince a right-minded jury to do the wrong thing.
    Hailey always divided jurors into two simple categories. The first category was the sheep. Sheep could be led along easily without much thinking on their own part, rarely took a stand on anything, eagerly looked forward to lunch and cigarette breaks, and were largely focused on getting home each afternoon. Sheep rarely lost sleep over their part of the picture.
    On the other hand, there were the alphas. Alpha jurors were entirely different and had to be selected with the utmost caution. Alphas were those uncommon jurors who not only thought for themselves, but led others to their way of thinking. They came in all shapes, colors, and sizes and could be anything from a single mom of five to a retired vet to the foreman of a shipping dock.
    Hailey could spot an alpha a mile away and generally tried her best, depending on their views on the justice system, to put them in the box . . . the jury box. The problem with alphas was that they could trick you during voir dire, or jury selection. Their charisma was obvious, but that charisma could be used for good or evil, and once that alpha was in the box, either side would be hard-pressed to get them thrown off the jury.
    Simply put, there were leaders and followers. Both could be good or bad.
    The courtroom was hushed, although it was slowly starting to fill up. Hailey noticed sheriffs, grim-faced, crossing the front of the courtroom wearing double black armbands, one on each arm. They silently signaled the death of a fellow officer, Alton Turner. Even if Turner hadn’t been much of a spitfire, never made a collar, and never sat on a barstool recounting stories of a cop’s life on the streets, he was nonetheless a brother. Somebody had to get the glory . . . and somebody had to push the