Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [52]
Only a moment’s hesitation by a single juror kept the case alive. Immediately after the verdicts were announced in the 1993 murder trial of McCrimmon and Minnitt, the judge did the customary polling of the jury. In answering whether he agreed with the verdict, one juror wavered, saying, “God, I can’t say ‘yes’ and I can’t say ‘no.’” After further questioning by the judge, the juror went along with the verdict, but three years later, in 1996, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the juror had been coerced, and ordered a new trial for the two defendants. (The appeals court, however, separately upheld Soto-Fong’s conviction and death sentence.) For their second trial, which did not take place until 1997, McCrimmon and Minnitt were assigned new lawyers. McCrimmon drew Richard Lougee.
RICK LOUGEE AND KEN PEASLEY could pass for fraternal twins. Both men are fifty-seven, of medium height and weight, with gray hair and a gray beard. Peasley has a slicked-back pompadour, Lougee the tousled look of an aging hippie. Though made from similar raw material, the two men come out of different worlds. Like Peasley, Lougee took a circuitous route to Tucson. He was born into a middle-class family in Connecticut, educated at Franklin and Marshall College, and started law school at Duke in 1969. At that point, he was drafted into the Army, where he served as a stateside chaplain’s assistant; after he was discharged, in 1971, he went to Tucson to study Romantic poetry at the University of Arizona. But he didn’t have the patience for academic life, so he returned to law school, graduated in 1977, and began a career as a defense attorney. He lived in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Key West until he remembered how much he had liked Tucson as a graduate student and returned there, with his second wife, in 1988. He spent six years with the public defender’s office and opened a private practice with a friend the following year. “Because we were just starting out and didn’t have any clients of our own, we applied to the county for what were called ‘contract’ murder cases,” Lougee told me. “The first one I got was Chris McCrimmon.”
Lougee and I were talking in the small adobe house, across the street from the university, where he lives with his wife, who works for him as a paralegal, and their twelve-year-old son. By the late nineties, Lougee had been a defense lawyer for more than two decades, and he had few illusions about the system, or about his own clients. “I normally don’t ask my clients whether they’re guilty,” he told me. “Personally, I don’t care. But the first thing Chris said to me was ‘Dawg, I didn’t do it.’ Frankly, it didn’t make much of an impression. I’ve tried hundreds of cases. I’ve heard it all from clients before.”
Late one night, shortly before McCrimmon’s retrial in 1997, Lougee started reading the transcript of Woods’s first tape-recorded interview with the police, the one on September 8, 1992. Lougee noticed that, during the course of that long, rambling conversation, Woods made a brief reference to an earlier discussion with Godoy. “I said to myself, ‘Holy shit, Joe had talked to him before,’” Lougee said. “I see how Peasley has been finessing this issue. He’s been arguing to the juries that Woods must be telling the truth because there is no other way that Woods could have known this information. Now I see that’s not true. It becomes clear to me that Woods didn’t come up with those names—Godoy did.”
At the last minute, in 1997, the judge severed McCrimmon and Minnitt’s joint trial into separate cases. Minnitt went first, and Lougee walked into the courtroom to listen to some of the testimony, because the same witnesses would also be testifying in the McCrimmon retrial. Peasley asked Godoy about his initial interview with Woods: “When you first sat down and talked with Mr. Woods on September 8 of 1992…had you come up with the name Chris McCrimmon?”
“No, sir,” Godoy said.
“Had you come up with the name Andre Minnitt?”
“No, sir.”
Godoy further testified that he had never heard of Martin Soto-Fong before