Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [53]
Peasley drove the point home: “The first time you heard any of those three names would have been in the conversation with Keith Woods on September 8, 1992?”
“Yes,” Godoy replied.
“I knew that Godoy had committed perjury in that trial,” Lougee said.
Minnitt’s second trial ended in a hung jury, and he remained incarcerated on his conviction in the Mariano’s Pizza case. McCrimmon’s retrial—Lougee’s case—began within a few days of Minnitt’s. When Lougee prepared, in August of 1997, he made a chart laying out evidence that Godoy had lied in the previous trial. During the retrial, faced with proof that he had elicited false testimony from Godoy, Peasley responded by attacking Lougee for raising the issue.
“Peasley was leaning on the counsel table, hissing at me. His saliva was on me,” Lougee recalled. “His finger was six inches away from my face.” Repeatedly, in a series of heated conferences with the judge, Peasley expressed shock that Lougee could question his integrity, and dared the defense lawyer to lodge a formal complaint against him.
“He is accusing me of suborning perjury, and if he is going to make those accusations,” Peasley said to the judge outside the hearing of the jury, “he should have filed a—”
“Hold it,” the judge interjected.
Peasley later challenged Lougee directly in the courtroom: “If Mr. Lougee thought this was perjury, he should have filed a complaint. He hasn’t done that.”
Nevertheless, Lougee proceeded to demonstrate to the jury that, in fact, Keith Woods had not spontaneously volunteered the names of the suspects in the El Grande case. After just forty-two minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted McCrimmon of the murders. “When the jury came back, Chris picks me up in his arms and says, ‘See, dawg, I told you! I told you!’” Lougee recalled. Later that day, Lougee began drafting his complaint about Peasley to the Arizona state bar. “I didn’t celebrate,” he told me. “I went and filed a bar complaint”—on September 5, 1997. Lougee added, “It has cost me dearly.”
But Peasley remained a power in the county attorney’s office. In April of 1998, Barbara LaWall, who succeeded Steve Neely as county attorney, appointed Peasley as head of the criminal division, making him the top prosecutor in her office. (In April of 1999, Minnitt went on trial for a third time for the El Grande Market murders, without Peasley as the prosecutor, and was again convicted and sentenced to death.) Even with his new administrative duties, Peasley continued trying and winning cases, and in 1999 he received a national honor—the Association of Government Attorneys in Capital Litigation’s Trial Advocacy Award. Lougee, on the other hand, found that his professional life was getting harder. “From the day I brought the complaint, I basically stopped getting plea offers for my clients from that office,” Lougee said. (Pima County officials deny that they retaliated against Lougee’s clients. “I think Rick Lougee suffers from considerable paranoia from time to time,” LaWall told me.) Judges, prosecutors, and even defense lawyers rallied to testify for Peasley. Lougee had few supporters; among them was Richard Parrish, a Tucson lawyer and friend, who says, “This guy discovered extreme wrongdoing in a capital case by the most respected prosecutor in Tucson and brought it before judges and before the bar, and was excoriated at every instance for doing such a thing to such a great man.”
Still, the bar complaint did move forward, and Peasley had to get a lawyer: he chose his old friend James Stuehringer, who had unsuccessfully represented Martin Soto-Fong in the first El Grande trial, in 1993, and who had his own reasons to be grateful to Peasley. In early 1998, Stuehringer’s son Craig was arrested in Cincinnati for possessing a hidden gun while dealing drugs, a crime that carried a mandatory three-year prison term, and Peasley intervened on the young man’s behalf. Peasley urged the Ohio judge to allow Craig to do community service rather than serve a prison sentence. (In the end, the judge reduced the charges