She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [179]
As the judge calmed the chaos, Rosales continued.
“We the jury find the defendant guilty of injury to the elderly,” she read.
Amy and Christopher hugged and cried. In the excited courtroom, the judge ordered that the jury be taken to their room. She didn’t want them to witness the highly emotional display. With the guilty ruling on capital murder, Celeste would automatically be given a life sentence and wouldn’t be eligible for parole for forty years. The jury, however, had another duty before them for the following day: to decide her punishment on the second charge.
As soon as they’d disappeared behind the back courtroom door, DeGuerin jumped up, arguing that the injury to the elderly charge was double jeopardy. If an appeals court overturned the capital murder charge, he didn’t want to have to fight the injury to the elderly charge as well. Judge Kocurek overruled him, saying it was too late to bring up that argument. That decided, DeGuerin asked that the Arizona fraud case not be put before the jury during sentencing. With that, Wetzel and all the defense attorneys converged on the judge’s bench. About that time, Cobb, who’d heard the verdict on his car radio, arrived and hurried to the bench to join the fray.
Finally, DeGuerin returned to the defense table, where he sat, arms crossed, face flushed, glaring at the judge and the prosecutors, beside his client, who sobbed.
The following morning the principals in the case all collected in the courtroom for what would be the final day of the trial. Beginning business, Kocurek ruled that the Arizona conviction would be put before the jurors. The jury was then led in and seated to hear testimony and arguments before sentencing. The options for the injury to the elderly sentence covered a wide span, from probation to life in prison. As the first item put before them, Judge Kocurek read the Arizona fraud conviction, letting the jurors know this wasn’t the first time Celeste had committed a crime.
Then prosecutors called their first witness, Kelly Beard Brand, Steve III’s daughter. “Steven Beard was my grandfather,” she said. On the stand, she tearfully recounted how he’d loved his family, especially her daughter, Allison, his greatgrandchild. He was already dead when her second child, Claire, was born. She would never know her great-grandfather.
On the stand next, Paul Beard, the career navy man, stared at Celeste with hatred as he described how she’d segregated them from their father during the final years of Steve’s life. He sobbed, explaining how his father’s death had devastated the family. The hole his father’s murder had wrenched into his life was so great, he said, that it could never be repaired. When he retired from the service later that summer, he didn’t plan to attend the ceremonies. Without his father, who’d urged him to join the navy, everything had lost importance.
A lion throughout the trial, DeGuerin didn’t question the children or object. Instead he sat behind the defense table visibly angry. “We offer all the evidence in the trial for the jurors’ consideration in sentencing,” he said when it was his turn to put on a rebuttal. Perhaps it would have been too risky to put on witnesses. Anyone who testified on Celeste’s behalf could have been cross-examined by the prosecutors. Throughout the trial, those called to defend Celeste had ended up hurting her by adding to the sordid details of her life.
Testimony was concluded, and once again the attorneys began closing arguments. Cobb thanked the jurors, then argued for a life sentence. “A poet once wrote about people who die before their time,” he said. “What they expect from us is that we gently remove the stain of injustice from their death.” The jurors, he said, could do that for Steven Beard, give him justice