The Brass Verdict (30 page)

“Yeah … a few.”

“What do they say?”

He had to think a long moment to remember his own bumper stickers.

“Uh, I got the NRA sticker on there, and then I got another that says, If you can read this, then back off. Something like that. Maybe it doesn’t say it that nice.”

There was laughter from his fellow members of the venire, and number eight smiled proudly.

“How long have you been a member of the National Rifle Association?” I asked. “On the juror information sheet you didn’t list that.”

“Well, I’m not really. Not a member, I mean. I just have the sticker on there.”

Deception. He was either lying about being a member and leaving it off his info sheet, or he wasn’t a member and was using his bumper sticker to hold himself out as something he was not, or as part of an organization he believed in but didn’t want to officially join. Either way it was deceptive and it confirmed everything I was feeling. Favreau was right. He had to go. I told the judge I was finished my questioning and sat back down.

When the judge asked if the prosecution and defense accepted the panel as composed, Golantz attempted to challenge the artist for cause. I opposed this and the judge sided with me. Golantz had no choice but to use his last preemptory to remove her. I then used my second-to-last challenge to remove the tree trimmer. The man looked angry as he made the long walk out of the courtroom.

Two more names were called from the venire and a real-estate agent and one more retiree took seats eight and eleven in the box. Their answers to the questions from the judge put them right down the middle of the road. I coded them black and heard nothing that raised a flag. Halfway through the judge’s voir dire I got another text from Favreau.

Favreau: Both of them +/– if you ask me. Both lemmings.

In general, having lemmings on the panel was good. Jurors with no indication of forceful personality and with middle-of-the-road convictions could oftentimes be manipulated during deliberations. They look for someone to follow. The more lemmings you have, the more important it is to have a juror with a strong personality and one who you believe is predisposed to be for the defense. You want somebody in the deliberations room who will pull the lemmings with him.

Golantz, in my view, had made a basic tactical error. He had exhausted his preemptory challenges before the defense and, far worse, had left an attorney on the panel. Juror three had made it through and my gut instinct was that Golantz had been saving his last preemptory for him. But the artist got that and now Golantz was stuck with a lawyer on the panel.

Juror number three didn’t practice criminal law but he’d had to study it to get his ticket and from time to time must have flirted with the idea of practicing it. They didn’t make movies and TV shows about real-estate lawyers. Criminal law had the pull and juror three would not be immune to this. In my view, that made him an excellent juror for the defense. He was lit up all red on my chart and was my number-one choice for the panel. He would go into the trial and the deliberations that come after it knowing the law and the absolute underdog status of the defense. It not only made him sympathetic to my side but it made him the obvious candidate as foreman — the juror elected by the panel to make communications with the judge and to speak for the entire panel. When the jury got back in there to begin deliberations, the person they would all turn to first would be the lawyer. If he was red, then he was going to pull and push many of his fellow jurors toward a not-guilty. And at minimum, his ego as an attorney would insist that his verdict was correct, and he would hold out for it. He alone could be the one who hung the jury and kept my client from a conviction.

It was a lot to bank on, considering juror number three had answered questions from the judge and the lawyers for less than thirty minutes. But that was what jury selection came down to. Quick, instinctual decisions based on experience and observation.

The bottom line was that I was going to let the two lemmings ride on the panel. I had one preemptory left and I was going to use it on juror seven or juror ten. The engineer or the retiree.

I asked the judge for a few moments to confer with my client. I then turned to Elliot and slid my chart over in front of him.

“This is it, Walter. We’re down to our last bullet. What do you think? I think we need to get rid of seven and ten but we can get rid of only one.”

Elliot had been very involved. Since the first twelve were seated the morning before, he had expressed strong and intuitive opinions about each juror I wanted to strike. But he had never picked a jury before. I had. I put up with his comments but ultimately made my own choices. This last choice, however, was a toss-up. Either of the jurors could be damaging to the defense. Either could turn out to be a lemming. It was a tough call and I was tempted to let my client’s instincts be the deciding factor.

Elliot tapped a finger on the block for juror ten on my grid. The retired technical writer for a toy manufacturer.

“Him,” he said. “Get rid of him.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

I looked at the grid. There was a lot of blue on block ten, but there was an equal amount on block seven. The engineer.

I had a hunch that the technical writer was like the tree trimmer. He wanted badly to be on the jury but probably for a wholly different set of reasons. I thought maybe his plan was to use his experience as research for a book or maybe a movie script. He had spent his career writing instruction manuals for toys. In retirement, he had acknowledged during voir dire, he was trying to write fiction. There would be nothing like a front-row seat on a murder trial to help stimulate the imagination and creative process. That was fine for him but not for Elliot. I didn’t want anybody who relished the idea of sitting in judgment — for any reason — on my jury.

Juror seven was blue for another reason. He was listed as an aerospace engineer. The industry he worked in had a large presence in Southern California and consequently I had questioned several engineers during voir dire over the years. In general, engineers were conservative politically and religiously, two very blue attributes, and they worked for companies that relied on huge government contracts and grants. A vote for the defense was a vote against the government, and that was a hard leap for them to make.

Last, and perhaps most important, engineers exist in a world of logic and absolutes. These are things you often cannot apply to a crime or crime scene or even to the criminal justice system as a whole.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think the engineer should go.”

“No, I like him. I’ve liked him since the beginning. He’s given me good eye contact. I want him to stay.”

I turned from Elliot and looked over at the box. My eyes traveled from juror seven to juror ten and then back again. I was hoping for some sign, some tell that would reveal the right choice.

“Mr. Haller,” Judge Stanton said. “Do you wish to use your last challenge or accept the jury as it is now composed? I remind you, it is getting late in the day and we still have to choose our alternate jurors.”

My phone was buzzing while the judge addressed me.

“Uh, one more moment, Your Honor.”

I turned back toward Elliot and leaned into him as if to whisper something. But what I really was doing was pulling my phone.

“Are you sure, Walter?” I whispered. “The guy’s an engineer. That could be trouble for us.”

“Look, I make my living reading people and rolling the dice,” Elliot whispered back. “I want that man on my jury.”

I nodded and looked down between my legs where I was holding the phone. It was a text from Favreau.

Favreau: Kick 10. I see deception. 7 fits prosecution profile but I see good eye contact and open face. He’s interested in your story. He likes your client.

Eye contact. That settled it. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and stood up. Elliot grabbed me by the sleeve of my jacket. I bent down to hear his urgent whisper.

“What are you doing?”

I shook off his grasp because I didn’t like his public display of attempting control over me. I straightened back up and looked up at the judge.

“Your Honor, the defense would like to thank and excuse juror ten at this time.”

While the judge dismissed the technical writer and called a new candidate to the tenth chair in the box, I sat down and turned to Elliot.

“Walter, don’t ever grab me like that in front of the jury. It makes you look like an asshole and I’m already going to have a tough enough time convincing them you’re not a killer.”

I turned so that my back was to him as I watched the latest and most likely the last juror take the open seat in the box.

PART FOUR

—Fillet of Soul

Walking in a Dead Man’s Shoes

Attorney Takes Over for Murdered Colleague First Case; The Trial of the Decade

BY JACK McEVOY,
Times Staff Writer

It wasn’t the 31 cases dropped in his lap that were the difficulty. It was the big one with the big client and highest stakes attached to it. Defense Attorney Michael Haller stepped into the shoes of the murdered Jerry Vincent two weeks ago and now finds himself at the center of this year’s so-called Trial of the Decade.

Today testimony is scheduled to begin in the trial of Walter Elliot, the 54-year-old chairman of Archway Studios, charged with murdering his wife and her alleged lover six months ago in Malibu. Haller stepped into the case after Vincent, 45, was found shot to death in his car in downtown Los Angeles.

Vincent had made legal provisions that allowed Haller to step into his practice in the event of his death. Haller, who had been at the end of a year-long sabbatical from practicing law, went to sleep one night with zero cases and woke up the next day with 31 new clients to handle.

“I was excited about coming back to work but I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” said Haller, the 42-year-old son of the late Michael Haller Sr., one of Los Angeles’s storied defense attorneys in the 50’s and 60’s. “Jerry Vincent was a friend and colleague and, of course, I would gladly go back to having no cases if he could be alive today.”

The investigation of Vincent’s murder is ongoing. There have been no arrests, and detectives say there are no suspects. He was shot twice in the head while sitting in his car in the garage next to the building where he kept his office, in the 200 block of Broadway.

Following Vincent’s death, the fallen attorney’s entire law practice was turned over to Haller. His job was to cooperate with investigators within the bounds of attorney-client protections, inventory the cases and make contact with all active clients. There was an immediate surprise. One of Vincent’s clients was due in court the day after the murder.

“My staff and I were just beginning to put all the cases together when we saw that Jerry — and now, of course, I — had a sentencing with a client,” Haller said. “I had to drop all of that, race over to the Criminal Courts Building, and be there for the client.”

That was one down and 30 other active cases to go. Every client on that list had to be quickly contacted, informed of Vincent’s death, and given the option of hiring a new lawyer or continuing with Haller handling the case.

A handful of clients decided to seek other representation but the vast majority of cases remain with Haller. By far the biggest of these is the “Murder in Malibu” case. It has drawn wide public attention. Portions of the trial are scheduled to be broadcast live nationally on Court TV. Dominick Dunne, the premier chronicler of courts and crime for
Vanity Fair,
is among members of the media who have requested seats in the courtroom.

The case came to Haller with one big condition. Elliot would agree to keep Haller as his attorney only if Haller agreed not to delay the trial.

“Walter is innocent and has insisted on his innocence since day one,” Haller told the
Times
in his first interview since taking on the case. “There were early delays in the case and he has waited six months for his day in court and the opportunity to clear his name. He wasn’t interested in another delay in justice and I agreed with him. If you’re innocent, why wait? We’ve been working almost around the clock to be ready and I think we are.”

It wasn’t easy to be ready. Whoever killed Vincent also stole his briefcase from his car. It contained Vincent’s laptop computer and his calendar.

“It was not too difficult to rebuild the calendar but the laptop was a big loss,” Haller said. “It was really the central storage point for case information and strategy. The hard files we found in the office were incomplete. We needed the laptop and at first I thought we were dead in the water.”

But then Haller found something the killer had not taken. Vincent backed his computer up on a digital flash drive attached to his key chain. Wading through the megabytes of data, Haller began to find bits and pieces of strategy for the Elliot trial. Jury selection took place last week and when the testimony begins today, he said he will be fully prepared.

“I don’t think Mr. Elliot is going to have any drop-off in his defense whatsoever,” Haller said. “We’re locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Elliot did not return calls for comment for this story and has avoided speaking to the media, except for one press conference after his arrest, in which he vehemently denied involvement in the murders and mourned the loss of his wife.

Prosecutors and investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Elliot killed his wife, Mitzi, 39, and Johan Rilz, 35, in a fit of rage after finding them together at a weekend home owned by the Elliots on the beach in Malibu. Elliot called deputies to the scene and was arrested following the crime scene investigation. Though the murder weapon has never been found, forensic tests determined that Elliot had recently fired a weapon. Investigators said he also gave inconsistent statements while initially interviewed at the crime scene and afterwards. Other evidence against the movie mogul is expected to be revealed at trial.