4th of July

Chapter 84

JURY SELECTION TOOK ALMOST three days. After day one, because I couldn’t take the ringing phone and the media swarm outside my wee little house any longer, Martha and I packed up and moved into Yuki’s two-bedroom apartment in the Crest Royal, a mini high-rise with great security.

The media swarm got bigger and more vociferous daily. The press fed the public’s frenzy by detailing the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of every person picked for the jury, charging us with racial profiling, of course. In fact, it made me queasy to watch both sides choose or dismiss potential jurors based on discernible or imagined prejudice against me. When we excused four black and Latino men and women in a row, I put it to Yuki during our next break.

“Weren’t you just telling me the other day about how it felt to be discriminated against because of your race?”

“This isn’t about race, Lindsay. The people we excused all had negative feelings about the police. Sometimes people aren’t aware of their own bias until we ask them. Sometimes, in a hugely public case like this, people lie so that they can have their fifteen minutes of fame.

“We’re working the voir dire process as it’s our right to do. Please trust us. If we don’t play hardball, we’re done before we start.”

Later that same day, the opposition used three peremptory challenges to excuse two middle-aged white civil servants—women who might have viewed me kindly, as if I were a daughter—as well as a fireman named McGoey who presumably wouldn’t have held even a gallon of margaritas against me.

In the end, neither side was happy but both sides accepted the twelve men and women and three alternates. At two in the afternoon of the third day, Mason Broyles got up to make his opening statement.

In my worst dreams, I couldn’t have imagined how that poor excuse for a human being would present the Cabots’ case against me.