The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [165]
Superior Court Judge Judith Champagne and her staff in Department 124 in the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles allowed the author complete access to her courtroom, chambers and holding cells and answered any question posed. To the judge, Joe, Marianne, and Michelle a great debt of thanks is owed.
Also of great help to the author and contribution to the story were Asya Muchnick, Michael Pietsch, Jane Wood, Terrill Lee Lankford, Jerry Hooten, David Lambkin, Lucas Foster, Carolyn Chriss, and Pamela Marshall.
Last but not least, the author wishes to thank Shannon Byrne, Mary Elizabeth Capps, Jane Davis, Joel Gotler, Philip Spitzer, Lukas Ortiz, and Linda Connelly for their help and support during the writing of this story.
Look for the next Lincoln Lawyer novel,
The Brass Verdict.
Also look for the most recent Michael Connelly novel,
The Drop.
Following is an excerpt from the opening pages of The Brass Verdict.
One
Everybody lies.
Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.
A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.
The trick if you are sitting at the defense table is to be patient. To wait. Not for just any lie. But for the one you can grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts out on the floor.
That’s my job, to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience. To be the truth in a place where everybody lies.
Two
I was in the fourth day of trial in Department 109 in the downtown Criminal Courts Building when I got the lie that became the blade that ripped the case open. My client, Barnett Woodson, was riding two murder charges all the way to the steel-gray room in San Quentin where they serve you Jesus juice direct through the arm.
Woodson, a twenty-seven-year-old drug dealer from Compton, was accused of robbing and killing two college students from Westwood. They had wanted to buy cocaine from him. He decided instead to take their money and kill them both with a sawed-off shotgun. Or so the prosecution said. It was a black-on-white crime and that made things bad enough for Woodson—especially coming just four months after the riots that had torn the city apart. But what made his situation even worse was that the killer had attempted to hide the crime by weighing down the two bodies and dropping them into the Hollywood Reservoir. They stayed down for four days before popping to the surface like apples in a barrel. Rotten apples. The idea of dead bodies moldering in the reservoir that was a primary source of the city’s drinking water caused a collective twist in the community’s guts. When Woodson was linked by phone records to the dead men and arrested, the public outrage directed toward him was almost palpable. The District Attorney’s Office promptly announced it would seek the death penalty.
The case against Woodson, however, wasn’t all that palpable. It was constructed largely of circumstantial evidence—the phone records—and the testimony of witnesses who were criminals themselves. And state’s witness Ronald Torrance sat front and center in this group. He claimed that Woodson confessed the killings to him.
Torrance had been housed on the same floor of the Men’s Central Jail as Woodson. Both men were kept in a high-power module that contained sixteen single-prisoner cells on two tiers that opened onto a dayroom. At the time, all sixteen prisoners in the module were black, following the routine but questionable