Today was the first step in bringing to justice the pair the media had dubbed the Bratz Bandits, courtesy of their full lips, small noses, and trashy attire. For some reason, the media loved to give bank robbers nick-names. The Waddling Bandit, the Grandmother Robber, the Toboggan Bandit, the Runny Nose Robber, the Grocery Cart Bandit—the list went on and on.
For a few weeks after their crime, grainy surveillance video of the pair had been in heavy rotation not just in Portland, but nationwide. The contrast between two nineteen-year-old girls—one blonde and one brunette, and both wearing sunglasses, short skirts, and high heels—and the big black guns they waved around had seemed more comic than anything else. On the surveillance tape, they had giggled their way through the robbery.
Even after they had been arrested—and of course they had been, the robbery had had about five seconds of planning behind it—the two of them had remained in the public eye, as family and friends stepped forward to plead their innocence or peddle tales of their unsavory past.
The week before, Allison had heard Bethany’s parents on The Hand of Fate, the radio talk show. The mother had told listeners that the two young women were not bandits, but rather, “little girls that made a bad choice.”
Bethany’s mother had seemed surprised when Jim Fate laughed.
The father, who was divorced from the mother, had seemed a little more in touch with reality, and Allison had made a mental note to consider putting him on the stand. “God gives us free will and it’s up to us what we do with it,” he had told Jim Fate. “Any adult has to make decisions and live with them—good, bad or indifferent.”
The girls weren’t the innocents they were now painting themselves. They had dropped out of college and started stripping and using drugs. With a male friend who worked as a bank teller, they began to plan a robbery. Incredibly, on the day of the crime they made a wrong turn and robbed the wrong bank. Things got more confusing when the teller panicked and threw the money at the girls. They giggled and scooped it up in pillowcases and even stuffed some down their surgically enhanced cleavage. But they had never stopped waving their guns (which they had borrowed from another girl at the strip club), at the terrified patrons lying trembling on the floor.
They had done it for the money, of course, but now it seemed they welcomed the fame that came with it even more. On their MySpace pages, the girls now listed more than a thousand “friends” each. Allison had even heard a rumor that Bethany—the blonde half of the pair and the girl who was on trial today—would soon release a hip-hop CD.
The challenge for Allison was getting a jury to see that what might seem like a victimless crime—and which had only netted eleven thousand dollars—deserved lengthy jail time.
The courtroom deputy read out fifty names, and the congestion eased a little bit as the first potential jurors took seats in the black swivel chairs in the jury box and in the much-less comfortable rows of benches that had been reserved for them.
Now the judge turned to the screening questions. A high-profile case like this necessitated a huge jury pool. One reason was that many of them might already have formed opinions on the case and therefore could not be unbiased. “Has anyone heard anything about this case?” Judge Fitzpatrick asked. “If you have responses please hold up your hand and we’ll pass a microphone to you so you can state your name and answer the question.”
Half the hands in the jury box went up. The law clerk handed the microphone to the first person in the first row. “My name is Melissa Delphine and I remember reading about it in the paper.”
“Did you form any opinions, Miss Delphine?” In Judge Fitzpatrick’s courtroom, the women, no matter how old or how married, were always “Miss.”
“Mild ones.”
“Could you put them aside?”
“I think so.”
“Then forget what you read in the paper. It might have been incomplete. It might have been wrong. It might even have been about completely different people.” No one expected jurors to have lived in a vacuum, but Judge Fitzpatrick would dismiss those who said their minds were made up. It would be an easy out, if anyone was looking for an out.