“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?”
—
WHEN 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.