Small Great Things (37 page)

Will a woman from this area see Ruth and think she's being railroaded? Or will she see the socioeconomic difference between them and be resentful?

It's a hard call. In Ruth's unique case, the best juror may not be one with the same color skin.

I put a question mark at the top of the survey—this is one I'll have to consider further. Driving slowly out of the neighborhood, I wait until I see children playing outside and then pull over to the curb and call Howard's cell. “So?” I ask when he picks up. “How's it going?”

“Um,” he says. “I'm sort of stuck.”

“Where?”

“East Shore.”

“What's the problem?”

“It's a gated community. There's a low fence and I could look over it, but I'd have to get out of the car,” Howard says.

“Then get out of the car.”

“I can't. See, back when I was in college, I kind of made a rule for myself—don't get out of the car unless there's a happy, living black person in sight.” He exhales. “I've been waiting for forty-five minutes, but the only people in this part of New Haven are white.”

That's not necessarily a bad thing for Ruth. “Can't you just go peek over the wall? Make sure she doesn't have a Trump sign on her lawn?”

“Kennedy—there are neighborhood watch signs all over the place. What do you think is going to happen if they see a black man trying to peek over a wall?”

“Oh,” I say, embarrassed. “I get it.” I look out the window to where three kids are jumping into piles of leaves; I think of the little black boy I saw streaking away from Presidential Gardens. Ed told me last week that he defended a twelve-year-old involved in a gang shooting with two seventeen-year-olds, and that the prosecution was gunning to have all three tried as adults. “Give me an hour and then meet me at 560 Theodore Street in East End. And, Howard? When you arrive, it's safe to get out of the car,” I say. “I live there.”

I
LIGHTLY DROP
the bag of Chinese food onto the desk of my home office. “I have goodies,” I say, taking out the lo mein and laying claim to it.

“So do I,” Howard says, and he points to a stack of papers he's printed out.

It's 10:00
P.M.,
and we've set up camp at my home. I left Howard there all afternoon to do online research while Odette and I swapped stacks of surveys. For hours, I've battled traffic, sussed out more jurors by neighborhood, and scanned the plaintiff and defendant lists at the courthouse to see if any of the potential jurors have been criminally prosecuted or have relatives that were criminally prosecuted.

“I found three guys who were charged with domestics, a woman whose mother got convicted of arson, and a lovely little old lady whose grandson's meth lab was busted last year,” Howard announces.

The screen reflects, glowing green around Howard's face as he scans the page. “Okay,” he says, opening a plastic container of soup and drinking from the side without a spoon. “God, I'm starving. So here's the thing: you can get some good dirt on Facebook, but it depends on privacy settings.”

“Did you try LinkedIn?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It's a gold mine.”

He beckons me to the floor, where he's spread out the surveys and has paper-clipped printouts to each one. “This guy? We love him,” Howard says. “He's a social justice educator at Yale. And even better—his mother is a nurse.” I hold up my hand, he high-fives. “This is my second favorite.”

He passes me the survey. Candace White. She's forty-eight years old, African American, a librarian, mother of three. She looks like someone who could be friends with Ruth, not just rule in favor of the defense.

Her favorite TV show is
Wallace Mercy
.

I may not want Reverend Mercy messed up in Ruth's case, but the people who watch him are definitely going to have sympathy for my client.

Howard is still listing his finds. “I've got three ACLU memberships. And this girl ran a whole tribute to Eric Garner on her blog. A series called
I Can't Breathe Either.
”

“Nice.”

“On the other end of the spectrum,” Howard says, “this lovely gentleman is the deacon of his church and also supports Rand Paul and advocates the repeal of all civil rights laws.”

I take the survey from his hand and put a red
X
through the name at the top.

“Two people who posted about reducing funding for welfare,” Howard says. “I'm not sure what you want to do about that.”

“Put them in the middle pile,” I reply.

“This girl updated her status three hours ago:
Jesus Christ some chink just sideswiped my car.
”

I place her survey on top of the Rand Paul advocate's, as well as someone whose profile pic on Twitter is Glenn Beck. There are two candidates Howard has nixed because they liked Facebook pages for Skullhead and Day of the Sword. “Is that some
Game of Thrones
thing?” I ask, baffled.

“They're white power bands,” Howard says, and I am pretty sure he blushes. “I found a group called Vaginal Jesus too. But none of our potential jurors listen to them.”

“Thank God for small mercies. What's the big pile in the middle?”

“Indeterminate,” Howard explains. “I have a few pictures of people making gun gang signs, a handful of stoners, one idiot who took a video of himself shooting up heroin, and thirty selfies of people who are rocked-off-their-gourd drunk.”

“Doesn't it just warm the cockles of your heart to know that we entrust the legal system to these folks?”

I'm joking, but Howard looks at me soberly. “To tell you the truth, today's been a little shocking. I mean, I had no idea how people live their lives, and what they do when they think no one's looking—” He glances at a photo of a woman brandishing a red Solo cup. “Or even when they
are.
”

I spear a Peking ravioli with my chopstick. “When you start to see the seedy underbelly of America,” I say, “it makes you want to live in Canada.”

“Oh, and there's this,” Howard says, pointing to the computer screen. “Do with it what you will.” He reaches across me for a Peking ravioli.

I frown at the Twitter handle:
@WhiteMight
. “Which juror is it?”

“It's not a juror,” he says. “And I'm pretty sure Miles Standup is a fake name.” He clicks twice on the profile picture: a newborn infant.

“Why have I seen that photo before…?”

“Because it's the same picture of Davis Bauer that people were holding up outside the courthouse before the arraignment. I checked the news footage. I think that's Turk Bauer's account.”

“The Internet is a beautiful thing.” I look at Howard with pride. “Well done.”

He looks at me, hopeful, over the white lip of the paper carton. “So we're finished for the night?”

“Oh, Howard.” I laugh. “We've only just begun.”

O
DETTE AND
I
meet the next morning at a diner to cross-check the survey numbers of the potential jurors that we each want to decline. In the rare occasion when our numbers match (the twenty-five-year-old who just got out of a psychiatric hospital; the man who was arrested last week) we agree to let them go.

I don't know Odette very well. She is tough, no-nonsense. At legal conferences, when everyone else is getting drunk and doing karaoke, she is the one sitting in the corner drinking club soda with lime and filing away memories she can use to exploit us later. I've always thought of her as an uptight piece of work. But now I'm wondering: when she goes shopping, is she, like Ruth, asked to show her receipts before exiting the store? Does she mutely hand them over? Or does she ever snap and say she is the one who puts shoplifters on trial?

So, in an attempt to offer an olive branch, I smile at her. “It's going to be quite a trial, huh?”

She stuffs her folder of surveys into her briefcase. “They're all big trials.”

“But
this
one…I mean…” I stumble, trying to find the words.

Odette meets my gaze. Her eyes are like chips of flint. “My interest in this case is the same as your interest in this case. I am prosecuting it because everyone else in my office is overworked and maxed out, and it landed on my desk. And I do not care if your client is black, white, or polka-dotted. Murder is remarkably monochromatic.” With that she stands up. “I'll see you tomorrow,” Odette says, and she walks away.

“Nice chatting with you too,” I mutter.

At that moment, Howard blusters in. His glasses are askew and his shirt is untucked in the back and he looks like he's already had about ten cups of coffee. “I was doing some background research,” he begins, sitting down in the chair Odette just vacated.

“When? In the shower?” I know exactly when we stopped working last night, which leaves little room for free time.

“So, there was a study done by SUNY Stony Brook in 1991 and 1992 by Nayda Terkildsen, about how white voters assess black politicians who are running for office, and how prejudice affects that, and how that changes for people who actively try
not
to act prejudiced—”

“First,” I say, “we are not using a defense based on race, we are using one based on science. Second, Ruth is not running for office.”

“Yeah, but there are crossover implications in the study that I think could tell us a lot about the potential jurors,” Howard says. “Just hear me out, okay? So Terkildsen took a random sample of about three hundred and fifty white people from the jury pool in Jefferson County, Kentucky. She made up three sets of packets about a fake candidate for governor that had the same biography, the same résumé and political platform. The only difference was that in some of the head shots, the candidate was a white man. In others, it was Photoshopped to be a light-skinned black man or a dark-skinned black man. The voters were asked to identify if they were racially biased, and if they tended to be aware of that racial bias.”

I motion with my hands to hurry him up.

“The white politician got the most positive responses,” Howard says.

“Big surprise.”

“Yeah, but that's not the interesting part. As prejudice increased, the rating of the light-skinned black man dropped quicker than the rating of the dark-skinned black man. But when prejudiced voters were divided into those who were aware of their racism and those who generally weren't, things changed. The people who didn't care if they looked prejudiced were harder on the dark-skinned black man than on the light-skinned black man. The voters who were worried about what people would think of them if they were racist, however, rated the dark-skinned black way higher than the light-skinned black. You get it, right? If a white person is trying extra hard to
not
look racist, they're going to overcompensate for their prejudice by suppressing their real feelings about the darker-skinned person.”

I stare at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because Ruth
is
black. Light-skinned, but still black. And you can't necessarily trust the white people in that jury pool if they tell you they aren't prejudiced. They may be a lot more implicitly racist than they show on the outside, and that makes them wild cards for the jury.”

I look down at the table. Odette is wrong. Murder is not monochromatic. We know that from the school-to-prison pipeline. There are so, so many reasons the cycle is hard to break—and one of them is that white jurors come into a trial with bias. They are far more likely to make concessions for a defendant who looks like them than for one who doesn't.

“All right,” I say to Howard. “What's your plan?”

W
HEN
I
CRAWL
into bed that night, Micah is already asleep. But then he reaches out and wraps his arm around me. “No,” I say. “I am too tired to do anything right now.”

“Even thank me?” he says.

I turn to face him. “Why?”

“Because,” he says. “I found you a neonatologist.”

Immediately I sit up. “And?”

“And we're going to see him this weekend. He's a guy I knew from med school.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That my crazy lawyer wife is going all Lysistrata on me until I can get her an expert in the field.”

I laugh, then frame Micah's face with my hands and kiss him, long and slow. “Go figure,” I say. “I've gotten my second wind.”

In one quick move he grabs me and rolls, so that I am pinned beneath him. His smile gleams in the light of the moon. “If you'll do that for a neonatologist,” he murmurs, “what would you give me if I found you something
really
impressive, like a parasitologist? Or a leprologist?”

“You spoil me,” I say, and I pull him down to me.

I
MEET
R
UTH
at the back entrance of the courthouse, just in case Wallace Mercy has decided that jury selection is worth his time and energy. She is wearing a plum suit that I went with her to buy at T.J.Maxx last week, and a crisp white shirt. Her hair is pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck. She looks every inch the professional, and I would have assumed she is at court because she is an attorney if not for the fact that her knees are shaking so uncontrollably they are knocking together.

I take her arm. “Relax. Honestly, this isn't worth getting nervous over.”

She looks at me. “It's just suddenly…very real.”

I introduce her to Howard, and as they shake hands I see something almost imperceptible pass between them—an acknowledgment that it is surprising for both of them to be in this courthouse, for different reasons. Howard and I flank Ruth as we walk into the courtroom and take our seats at the defense table.