Morgue (29 page)

Of course, Cutler addressed the jury with a different take.

“The evidence will show that before [police] even had a cause of death, let alone a manner of death, they had murder on their minds,” Cutler said. “Fame and success come back to haunt you.”

Lana Clarkson, he told jurors, died while using the Colt revolver as “a sexual prop.”

Over the next seven months, the jury heard the evidence on both sides, including all the complicated forensic testimony about blood spray, toxicology, ballistics, depression, pharmaceuticals, gunshot residue, and anatomy. But witnesses also talked about more unscientific things such as fear, intimidation, entitlement, fame, insecurity, and the limits of dreams.

Coroner Dr. Sathyavagiswaran readily agreed that intraoral gunshot deaths are usually suicides and only rarely homicides.

“Would it be difficult to insert a gun forcefully into somebody's mouth without leaving evidence of blunt force trauma?” Cutler asked.

Sathyavagiswaran admitted it would “unless they're intimidated and they're afraid that somebody will shoot them, and [then] they will open their mouth.”

Suicide expert Dr. Richard Seiden, a former psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, testified that spur-of-the-moment suicides, as opposed to long-planned suicides, make up about 40 percent of all suicides.

The fatal decision mightn't take more than five minutes, he said. Depression isn't the key factor, but feelings of hopelessness about one's future or money, loss of a loved one, career disappointments, and chronic pain—all present in Clarkson's profile—were strong contributors.

Clarkson's mother took the stand to tell how her daughter was making plans for an upcoming commercial gig and bought new shoes. As promised, four women—some reluctantly—told of frightening experiences at the muzzle of Phil Spector's guns. Witnesses debated whether a missing fingernail was lost or hidden by the defense. And in the trial's most dramatic testimony, the chauffeur described his moments of horror after Clarkson died, leaving those incriminating words hanging in the air:
I think I killed somebody
.

But Cutler argued Clarkson was depressed over a recent breakup, racked with financial problems, and helplessly watching her acting career dissolve as she hit forty. Impaired by booze and powerful painkillers, she simply grabbed Spector's Colt and killed herself.

Clarkson's friends vigorously rejected the suicide theory. Lana was sometimes a drama queen, but she wasn't self-destructive. She was planning for the days and weeks ahead, they said.
Is that how a suicide behaves?

In the end, a complex portrait of two very different men emerged, and both were inside Phil Spector: One was an old-fashioned, funny, chivalrous gentleman whose dates included long-stemmed roses, romantic evenings, and a farewell kiss on the cheek. The other was a profane, abusive drunk who sometimes shoved a gun in the faces of his dates when they wouldn't stay with him.

It was a real-life Jekyll-and-Hyde story, and it was all on live TV. Ratings went wild.

When the jury finally retired to its deliberations, they took a quick straw vote. Four leaned toward guilty, five not guilty, and three were undecided. The next fifteen days were gut-wrenching as they reviewed the evidence, ticked down through testimony witness by witness, and debated among themselves.

In the end, two jurors simply were not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Spector shot Clarkson. The jury deadlocked at ten to two in favor of conviction.

The judge declared a mistrial.

The prosecution was undeterred. A week later, Deputy DA Jackson announced his intention to retry Spector, and a year later a new trial got under way.

This time Cutler had quit the defense and a new lawyer—Spector's fourth—took the lead. Over the next five months, we did it all again: the same evidence, the same witnesses, the same arguments with very little new. This time, the media wasn't as interested, Spector had toned down his wardrobe and hair, and the courtroom tension was significantly reduced. But it all came down to the interpretation of the evidence and the man.

Again, when the jury finally retired for its deliberations, the straw vote was split. But over the next thirty hours of debate, reasonable doubts diminished and the twelve reached their verdict: Phil Spector was guilty of second-degree murder

On May 29, 2009—more than six years after Lana Clarkson died—the judge sentenced sixty-nine-year-old Spector to nineteen years to life in prison. He'll be eighty-eight before he's eligible for parole in 2028.

As part of his sentence, the judge ordered Spector to pay Clarkson's burial expenses, so his lawyer handed Clarkson's mother a check for $17,000 before the diminutive music mogul and convicted murderer was taken to prison.

Spector's lawyers appealed the conviction. Among their many issues was the irrelevance and prejudicial nature of testimony from five women about gun-wielding experiences with Spector in the past. The defense argued those long-ago encounters proved nothing about what happened in the death of Lana Clarkson.

In one last strange twist in a twisted case, the California Supreme Court rejected the argument, citing a thirty-year-old federal case—
US vs. Martha Woods
. Prior bad acts and simple logic, the justices said, can help a jury determine the guilt (or innocence) of a defendant. Just as the children who died or got sick in Martha Woods's care over a twenty-five-year period were relevant to her prosecution for killing Paul Woods, those five women's stories were relevant to determining Spector's guilt.

Death and justice ripple across generations in strange ways.

*   *   *

Phil Spector wasn't the only one on trial in his nationally televised case.

So were expert witnesses.

Deputy DA Alan Jackson waved off all of Spector's experts, including me, as “pay to say” mercenaries who accepted more than $400,000 to spout whatever Spector told them to spout. (Oddly, he didn't mention how much the state paid its experts.)

“How does a homicide become a suicide?” Jackson asked the jurors at the second trial. “You write a big, fat check. If you can't change the science, you buy the scientist.”

That's what happens in a trial: One side calls experts to explain something highly technical or hard to understand, and the other side calls them liars, charlatans, idiots, and hired guns. Both sides need expert witnesses, and both sides undermine them. During the Spector trial (and others), I was called innumerable names, none good, inside and outside of the courtroom. Why? Simply because my forensic opinion ran counter to the perceptions of onlookers who had already made up their minds.

This grumbling isn't new. As early as 1848, respected American jurist John Pitt Taylor wrote that juries should be skeptical about “skilled witnesses” (as well as slaves, women, and foreigners).

Expert witnesses exist on every subject known to man, from the proper width of stair treads to brain function on the molecular level, but they are both inevitable and necessary. In our increasingly complex and specialized world—made exponentially more complicated by the digital age—Renaissance men (and women) are as scarce as buggy-whip makers and honest politicians. It is likely impossible to conduct a trial of any complexity in this day and age without an expert. Juries and judges simply no longer possess the depth and breadth of knowledge to make life-or-death decisions without an expert's explanations.

The key in any trial is to convey information in a meaningful and useful way. An expert not only must possess the requisite knowledge on the subject, he must be able to explain it. Denzel Washington's lawyer character in the film
Philadelphia
comes to mind. “Explain this to me like I'm a six-year-old” is a very potent line.

This magical element of connection isn't common at all. The most knowledgeable expert in the world is utterly useless if he cannot convey his knowledge in a user-friendly, comprehensible way. The best experts are teachers, too. As with anything else, this ability is enhanced the more it is practiced. Thus, the best experts are those that testify often.

Expert witnesses seldom ride in with all the answers that everyone else was too stupid to glean. They aren't always right. Justice doesn't teeter on their knowledge. They are experts, not the final word on everything.

What an expert witness says must be evaluated by every juror for credibility and given its proper weight.

Many fine experts, medical and otherwise, will never testify because they're uncomfortable in an adversarial legal setting. Why submit themselves to the excessive scrutiny, the confusing legal lingo, the conflict with superiors or colleagues, or the name-calling from opposing lawyers, media, and (now) every armchair detective watching Court TV?

Justice loses when good experts avoid trials for these and other reasons.

Expert witnesses aren't liars. They are telling the truth as they see it, and we all know that the truth can be interpreted many ways. The Spector case proves nothing if not how a single set of facts can be construed in different ways.

Are there hired guns in forensic pathology (the only area I can confidently talk about)? Yes, but not many. They are usually inept, inexperienced, and quickly exposed in court. More common are the true believers, who see themselves as junior policemen who must nab all the bad guys. They identify more with cops and prosecutors and they tend, maybe unconsciously, to find clues suggesting guilt. This isn't about money, but it sure isn't blind justice.

If the expert always testifies for one side or the other, he or she is labeled a whore for that side. Some try to blunt this criticism by testifying for both sides, but that merely causes them to be labeled a whore for anybody who'll pay. It's a no-win situation.

The public never knows how many times an expert witness has turned down a lawyer's overtures or been rejected because his opinion doesn't help. Personally, I have walked away from many cases and been politely excused by many more when my forensic conclusions simply didn't support the lawyers' strategy.

As long as an expert can convince the judge and jury that he approaches the subject with an open mind, the number of times he testifies, or even how often he testifies for either side of a particular issue, really becomes irrelevant.

As a medical examiner and a forensic consultant all of my adult life, I've testified for the prosecution and defense, for plaintiffs and defendants, in criminal trials and civil trials, in big cases and small. My conclusions aren't swayed by money.
Not for the police or against the police, nor for a family or against a family. I must be impartial and tell the truth.

Finally, if you're on trial for your life and you desperately must clarify an intricate bit of evidence to your jury, do you not seek the most credible, knowledgeable person you can afford to make it crystal clear? Maybe you can't afford the expert who wrote the book, but you are still entitled to bring someone who can explain what you cannot.

Ultimately, there is no way out. Experts are usually learned professionals who are willing to dive into the legal crucible and should be paid for their time. A jury must weigh whether they are qualified, whether their fees are unreasonable, and whether their conclusions are credible.

In the end, we simply cannot determine the facts “beyond a reasonable doubt” if we don't let capable, skilled professionals use their special knowledge to explain difficult, technical issues to juries. Juries can embrace it or ignore it, but they must hear it.

What happens if they never hear it?

The death of Ernestine Perea in Wheatland, Wyoming, was one example. Now let me tell you a about a little town called West Memphis.

 

‹ NINE ›

The Ghosts of West Memphis

Nothing moves us humans like unfairness, the sense that justice hasn't been done. We are quickest to rise up when we feel something grievously wrong has happened, whether an ordinary slight against one or a global neglect of millions. Good cops, judges, lawyers, and medical examiners feel it even more intensely because it's their job to right wrongs, even when everyone else shrugs it off and says, “That's just the way it is.” However, wanting to make things right isn't the same as being right. Expect courage of us, not perfection. The best we can hope for is being right most of the time, plus the time and wisdom to repair what we did wrong. It's not just fixing what happened in the past, but it's also about fixing our future.

WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS. WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 1993.

On a warm springtime afternoon, with summer vacation barely a month away, in a small town where there were still a few wild places, boys will be boys.

Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers were best friends. They were in the same second-grade class at Weaver Elementary, joined the same Cub Scout troop, and like most eight-year-old boys lucky enough to find each other, they rode their bikes endlessly together, as far as their parents and the city limits allowed. Sometimes farther.

But it was all good. Nothing ever happened in West Memphis, Arkansas, a farming community where blues legends like B. B. King and Howlin' Wolf had once lived, worked, and made music. Folks here felt safely distant from the incessant violence and daily depravities of Memphis, one of America's most dangerous cities, just across the river in Tennessee. Just a small town like a thousand others, barely clinging to a river and the interstate as if they were life itself. And in some ways, they were.

Little boys don't waste daylight. As they often did after school, Stevie, Michael, and Chris found each other, as if some magnet drew these three friends together. They lit out—Stevie and Michael on their bicycles, and Chris on his skateboard—for a swampy, brush-clogged woodland known by locals as Robin Hood Hills, where they could catch turtles, race their bikes through the trees on narrow footpaths, or play in the soupy ditches. Across the drainage canal, accessible only by a sewage-pipe bridge or a rope that swung from one bank to the other, was a darker woodland known as Devil's Den, frequently haunted by transients, druggies, and teen partiers.