Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [144]
“The odds were definitely against her,” Dr. Cooper added. “It’s unbelievable that a woman that size would attack a full-grown man—the chances of her survival are minuscule.”
“Yes, it’s, and I’m using your words, it is unbelievable, isn’t it?” Sequeira grinned.
“I would say miraculous. It’s not unbelievable, because it happened,” Dr. Cooper maintained.
Chapter Twenty-eight
SUSAN’S SOLILOQUY
On Wednesday, May 17, Susan called her most compelling witness to the stand.
“Mrs. Polk, your next witness?” Brady directed.
The gallery brimmed with journalists and trial watchers looking on in complete silence as Susan announced with a nervous giggle, “Yes, I’m going to testify, so the defense calls myself.”
Raising her right hand, Susan swore to tell the “whole truth.”
Over the prosecutor’s objections, Judge Brady ruled that Susan’s testimony would be a straight narrative; a Q & A with both questions and answers coming from Susan would be too confusing.
“This is not carte blanche,” the judge warned Susan before inviting jurors into the courtroom to begin hearing the testimony. “This is not an opportunity for a speech. This is a privilege, not a right. You may not like it, but the reality is now that the defendant—you—do not dictate how we proceed in this courtroom.”
“I object,” Susan said, telling Brady that it was her legal right as a pro per defendant to voice objections. “It may appear impertinent or argumentative or unruly to some members of the audience, but it’s not. This is not a playground. This is a battle for truth. This is not a movie. This is not a script.”
Jurors filed in that morning to find Susan outfitted in prison issue greens and seated in the witness box. “I’m not going to go into every detail,” she assured them. “Everyone wants to get on with their lives.”
Despite this disclaimer, Susan began her testimony with a two-hour slide show depicting her life. She narrated the show herself, with the help of on-again, off-again case assistant, Valerie Harris, on the overheard projector. Throughout the slide show, Susan’s demeanor seesawed between weepy and mournful to thoughtful and contemplative as she identified photos of herself as a young girl, as a twenty-five-year-old bride, and as wife and mother, posing with her husband, children, and the family dogs. She broke into sobs when an image of her son, Adam, popped up on the screen.
“I think he said what he said to survive, and that’s what he had to do,” Susan told jurors of the twenty-three-year-old who called her “evil” on the stand. “I think you saw a different Adam. The real Adam, the one I knew, sent me poems [in jail], came to see me, and was extraordinarily loving.”
Jurors were riveted by Susan’s narrative, which she delivered in a soft, folksy manner, her hands folded in her lap, along with a copy of her diary marked with yellow Post-Its. Throughout her testimony, she would refer to the diary that documented the actions of her husband and others who had come out against her.
As she spoke, Sequeira sat quietly in his seat, listening to her testify for much of the morning without voicing a single objection. Instead, he allowed Susan to talk about her relationship with Felix and her realization at the age of forty that she wanted out of the marriage. The twelve-member panel had already heard much of what Susan would testify to through other witnesses and in her opening statement. Still, she insisted the jury needed to hear “her story.”
Susan said the onset of Felix’s alleged abuse came soon after they were married, and she retold for jurors her story of premarital doubts about their relationship, saying that she later felt “ashamed” of her decision to marry “my therapist.” Despite her reservations and subsequent abuse, she never spoke up because she “thought telling someone would precipitate getting me killed…. I kept thinking I could fix it. His refrain was that nobody would ever believe me if I told them anything.”
Susan told jurors the first time she left Felix