“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 theyare.”
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.”
—
ODETTE ANDImeet 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.”
“Butthisone…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 trynotto 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 tonotlook 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 Ruthisblack. 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.”
