Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [193]
I was confident that the prosecution had done a good job of scrutinizing the many holes in his story, but there remained a lingering fear in the back of my mind that somehow the jury would believe his version of our marriage and the one that Jennie had offered over my own. I knew that the truth was on my side, but for the first time I wondered if that was enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I AM FREE
Yea, that great pit which hath been digged for the destruction of men shall be filled by those who digged it.
—BOOK OF MORMON
Throughout the entire trial, Warren Jeffs remained stone-faced and mute, refusing his right to testify in his own defense. Sometimes he stared intently at the witnesses, but mostly he scribbled furiously on the pad in front of him, using silence as his only statement. In the court proceedings before the trial even began, Warren stood with a yellow legal pad and had tried to speak directly to the judge. But at the time his competency was in question and he was instructed that all communications must be made through his attorneys. He was now in a system where he had to abide by the laws of the land. At that moment, he was immediately surrounded by his lawyers and gave up on his effort to read whatever he had written.
Later a photo of the note that he was trying to read surfaced in a newspaper, revealing possible words that may have indicated Warren’s admission that he was not the prophet. It was gratifying to see that the man who’d once assumed absolute power over a people, and over me, was being humbled by the very laws he chose to ignore.
The closing arguments that Friday morning couldn’t have come soon enough. Getting to this final stage had been a journey of more than a year, and I was ready to move on. It would now be in the jury’s hands to decide Warren’s fate. Brock Belnap had taken something of a backseat during the questioning, cognizant of his strengths and humble enough to allow Ryan Shaum and Craig Barlow to carry that portion of the trial. Now Brock stood up to deliver the prosecution’s closing remarks, facing the jury with a strong, sincere, and detailed statement. Rather than taking cheap shots at Warren, he simply redefined the law: “Did this man, Warren Steed Jeffs, solicit, request, command, encourage, or intentionally aid another to commit sexual intercourse with another person without the victim’s—Miss Wall’s—consent? That’s all you have to decide.” He paused for a moment to take a breath. “This is not a religious case,” he explained. “You just need to decide if what the law states is what happened here.
“The evidence has shown that the only reason that Elissa Wall went into that bedroom and had sexual intercourse with Allen Steed is because that man there told her she was supposed to,” Brock told jurors, pointing a finger at Warren Jeffs. “If Warren Jeffs had not performed that wedding ceremony, would Allen Steed ever had had sexual intercourse with Elissa Wall? If Warren Jeffs had never arranged the marriage or declared her his wife, would she have had sexual intercourse with him? He placed her in a position where she had no choice.”
While Brock’s statement was powerful and convincing, I wondered how the jurors were receiving it. The panel never once revealed any hint of how they were leaning, and there was no way to tell what they would ultimately decide.
Any ounce of respect I had tried to muster for Wally Bugden disintegrated minutes into his nearly two-hour closing arguments. He portrayed the state as out to