The woman is flustered. There will be a trial? “I thought we were gonna vote on whether he got the death penalty today.” She’s excused.
Soon voir dire has lasted almost two weeks, with nearly two hundred people questioned. Clive is losing his voice and apologizes to the jury for it. Killingsworth keeps talking about the New Orleans murders. Gray is sick of the whole thing. “When this is all over,” Gray says to a juror, frustrated, “I am going to come in here and I am going to look at you, if you are on the jury, and I am going to say, ma’am, stand up. Does Mr. Langley live or die? And you’re going to have to say life or death. I’m not going to let you—I’m not going to let you write something on a piece of paper that says, well, I vote the death penalty. I am going to make you stand up and tell me, look me dead in the eye and look that man dead in the eye, and look the State dead in the eye, and tell me, does he live or die. Can you do that?”
She’s shaken. “I don’t know.”
“OK.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s tough.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nobody said it ain’t tough. My question to you is, can you make the decision?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Judge Gray and the lawyers must find sixteen people—twelve jurors and four alternates—to try this case. The people face being asked to make an unimaginable decision. There is no other situation in which we ask a civilian to decide if someone will live or die. The closest analog is military, maybe: a drafted enlisted soldier, somebody who didn’t intend to end up in the position of having someone at the other end of his or her gun and deciding whether to shoot.
In law school, the concept of the jury is taught through the metaphor of a black box. Into the box, evidence and the law go. Out of the box, a verdict comes.
But a black box doesn’t have feelings.
“Being exposed to the things I was exposed to,” begins one prospective juror—she was on a death penalty jury once before, and now, bad luck, she’s been called again—“it was very traumatic. I would say I haven’t gotten over it.” There is a name for the way the decisions of war haunt people: PTSD. People who have served on death penalty juries speak of depression, of trouble with alcohol, of being haunted. Not everyone does, but—some do. The men and women chosen for this jury will live sequestered in a hotel together, cut off from their families, isolated each night with the images they have seen that day. The images will take root inside them. Each day, they will see Ricky in the courtroom. Each day, they will be pressed closer to having to choose whether Ricky lives or dies. In the future, will they be haunted by Jeremy’s face, by knowing that with a not-guilty verdict they have said he will have no justice? Or will they be haunted by the image of the man they have sentenced to die?
On May 2, 2003, the men and women who will have to face this evidence are finally selected. Nine women, three men. Seven are black, five white. Three have family members who are schizophrenic; three have family members who are bipolar. (“It sounds like an epidemic,” a juror says, shocked that the secrets in her family don’t make her so alone after all.) Two are nurses. A heavyset, white schoolteacher named Stephen Kujawa is appointed foreman. “I teach eighth graders,” he’d said when Killingsworth asked him if he’d be able to speak his mind during jury deliberations. “I’m not going to be shy of anything.” Gray sends the jurors home to say goodbye to their families. Then they’ll be bused to Lake Charles. The trial will begin.
Thirty-Three
“Murder is not simple, but the elements are.” At roughly 10:00 a.m. on Monday, May 6, 2003—eleven years after Ricky Langley killed Jeremy Guillory, nine years after he was sentenced to death for that murder, and two years after a new trial was ordered—prosecutor Cynthia Killingworth stands at the front of the jury and begins to tell them the story of the murder.
Killingsworth is second counsel on this case. With her hair cut into a sensibly short shag, and the fatigue in her face, she looks something like an older and more moneyed version of Lorilei Guillory. First counsel is the assistant district attorney, Wayne Frey, prematurely balding, with a chin that echoes the roundness of his glasses and whose state bar photographs betray questionable taste in ties. Third counsel for the prosecution, Sharon Wilson, is the lone black lawyer in the room. Killingsworth and Frey specialize in the death penalty cases for this parish, and if anyone notices how right their names are for this job—Frey so easily pronounced “fry” in a state that once had the electric chair—there is no reference to this Dickensian rightness in the record. The prosecution’s strategy is fury: Killingsworth is a mother, and she’ll linger on the details of what Ricky did. She’ll say the sock he put in Jeremy’s mouth was dirty. Call Ricky evil. Frey is a crusader, a law-and-order man.
On the defense side are Clive, tall and jittery and intense as always, as first counsel, and Phyllis Mann, whose plainspokenness matches her plain brown hair and the plainness of her suits, as second counsel. Against the prosecution’s barrage, the defense’s strategy is earnestness: to speak always as though from the heart. Both Clive and Mann are skilled at that.
Ricky has been formally charged with first-degree murder. Louisiana law requires that two elements be proved: first, specific intent, meaning that Jeremy intended to kill Ricky. And second, to make the murder first-degree, an aggravating circumstance. A murder is considered aggravated if the person killed was under twelve. Jeremy was six. That’s met. So the trial will focus on the first element, specific intent.
In response, Ricky pleads two things: one, not guilty, and two, not guilty by reason of mental insanity or defect. What he and Clive once promised Lorilei they wouldn’t plead for. So Gray, before anything has begun, has instructed the jury that because of Ricky’s insanity plea there are actually two burdens of proof in the case. Yes, the prosecution must prove Ricky guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if it wants to prevail. But the defense now has a burden, too. If it wants to succeed on the insanity plea, it must prove that Ricky didn’t know right from wrong at the time of the murder.