The Fence - Dick Lehr [140]
Citing reasons of fairness, the judge announced he was going to split the case into several jury trials: the first would be against the four officers, the second against the city, and a third, if necessary, to assess damages. “We cannot try the individual defendants along with the city,” the judge said. “We cannot do it because evidence properly admitted against the city is so prejudicial to the individual defendants.”
The judge then further refined the first trial in response to Willie Davis’s concern that evidence against the three accused in the beating would spill over in a detrimental way against Kenny. The solution, the judge said, was to have Mike’s lawyers first introduce evidence against Burgio, Williams, and Daley and then offer evidence against Kenny. Davis and his cocounsel, Fran Robinson, would have preferred a separate trial, but the judge’s ruling didn’t seem so bad. It meant the judge would frequently be instructing the jury that a witness’s testimony was not evidence against Kenny but against the other three—a distinction, said Fran Robinson, that might come across as a signal from the judge that Kenny was not one of the bad guys.
The session ended with some housekeeping. “I sit nine to one,” the judge told the lawyers. “There’s a reason for that.” He didn’t want to waste the jury’s time with drawn-out legal haggling about the admissibility of evidence or other legal concerns that inevitably arise during a trial. “We’ll talk about those things in the afternoon,” he explained. Moreover, the afternoons would provide the lawyers time to catch their breath.
With that, the civil rights action, now regarded as one of the biggest in the history of the Boston Police Department, was ready: Jury selection was slated for December 7. Mike’s lawyers were at once confident and anxious. Sinsheimer, for his part, was eager to finally get going, believing opposing counsel for the cops and the city had underestimated them. Up against a Goliath, he thought he and Roach “made a great team. Steve was the best thing that ever happened to Mike Cox because of his attention to detail.”
What had begun one night at a fence on a dead-end street had grown into a major crisis for the police department, its commissioner, the city, and its mayor. The case had forced Boston to examine its police culture and racism. Would there be justice for Mike Cox? For Kenny Conley? For a city that, with its nasty racial legacy, was heading into a new century? Mike Cox was certainly tired of waiting. He’d realized long ago he could not depend on the police department for the truth. He was on his own, and he was ready. The trial, he said, “is the only forum I have to try to get the truth out.”
Mike was hoping for the best, and by that he didn’t mean hefty monetary damages. “I hope this case will change the department,” he said. “Because if it doesn’t, I would have lived through a terrible ordeal and no one will gain anything from it.”
CHAPTER 18
The Trial
Steve Roach, dressed in a dark suit, stood in the well of the courtroom. Even though he was the least experienced, he and cocounsel Rob Sinsheimer had agreed he would start them off. The Cox case was his baby; he’d lived with it for nearly four years and, in the days leading up to the December 7 start, had rehearsed hard for this moment.
He moved deliberately across the thick blue carpet and faced the twelve jurors.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” the jury of eight women and four men replied in unison.
Roach paused. He looked at them. Then he began: “Ladies and gentleman, this case is about police brutality, police cover-up and a blue code of silence.”
The jurors, seated in two rows in wooden chairs, listened intently to every word.
The Cox trial was among the first to be held