Chapter Twenty-nine
Twenty-nine
Officer Vivian Maxwell described Campo as disheveled, hurt and frightened.
She said Campo kept asking if she was safe and if the intruder had been caught.
Even after she was assured on both questions, Campo remained scared and upset, at one point telling the officer to unholster her weapon and have it ready in case the attacker broke free.
When Minton was through with this witness, I stood up to conduct my first cross-examination of the trial.
“Officer Maxwell,” I asked, “did you at any time ask Ms. Campo what had happened to her?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What exactly did you ask her?”
“I asked what had happened and who did this to her. You know, who had hurt her.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She said a man had come to her door and knocked and when she opened it he punched her. She said he hit her several times and then took out a knife.”
“She said he took the knife out after he punched her?”
“That’s how she said it. She was upset and hurt at the time.”
“I understand. Did she tell you who the man was?”
“No, she said she didn’t know the man.”
“You specifically asked if she knew the man?”
“Yes. She said no.”
“So she just opened her door at ten o’clock at night to a stranger.”
“She didn’t say it that way.”
“But you said she told you she didn’t know him, right?”
“That is correct. That is how she said it. She said, ‘I don’t know who he is.’”
“And did you put this in your report?”
“Yes, I did.”
I introduced the patrol officer’s report as a defense exhibit and had Maxwell read parts of it to the jury. These parts involved Campo saying that the attack was unprovoked and at the hands of a stranger.
“‘The victim does not know the man who assaulted her and did not know why she was attacked,’” she read from her own report.
Maxwell’s partner, John Santos, testified next, telling jurors that Campo directed him to her apartment, where he found a man on the floor near the entrance.
The man was semiconscious and was being held on the ground by two of Campo’s neighbors, Edward Turner and Ronald Atkins.
One man was straddling the man’s chest and the other was sitting on his legs.
Santos identified the man being held on the floor as the defendant, Louis Ross Roulet.
Santos described him as having blood on his clothes and his left hand.
He said Roulet appeared to be suffering from a concussion or some sort of head injury and initially was not responsive to commands.
Santos turned him over and handcuffed his hands behind his back.
The officer then put a plastic evidence bag he carried in a compartment on his belt over Roulet’s bloody hand.
Santos testified that one of the men who had been holding Roulet handed over a folding knife that was open and had blood on its handle and blade. Santos told jurors he bagged this item as well and turned it over to Detective Martin Booker as soon as he arrived on the scene.
On cross-examination I asked Santos only two questions.
“Officer, was there blood on the defendant’s right hand?”
“No, there was no blood on his right hand or I would have bagged that one, too.”
“I see. So you have blood on the left hand only and a knife with blood on the handle. Would it then appear to you that if the defendant had held that knife, then he would have to have held it in his left hand?”
Minton objected, saying that Santos was a patrol officer and that the question was beyond the scope of his expertise. I argued that the question required only a commonsense answer, not an expert. The judge overruled the objection and the court clerk read the question back to the witness.
“It would seem that way to me,” Santos answered.
Arthur Metz was the paramedic who testified next.
He told jurors about Campo’s demeanor and the extent of her injuries when he treated her less than thirty minutes after the attack.
He said that it appeared to him that she had suffered at least three significant impacts to the face.
He also described a small puncture wound to her neck.
He described all the injuries as superficial but painful.
A large blowup of the same photograph of Campo’s face I had seen on the first day I was on the case was displayed on an easel in front of the jury.
I objected to this, arguing that the photo was prejudicial because it had been blown up to larger-than-life size, but I was overruled by Judge Fullbright.
Then, when it was my turn to cross-examine Metz, I used the photo I had just objected to.
“When you tell us that it appeared that she suffered at least three impacts to the face, what do you mean by ‘impact’?” I asked.
“She was struck with something. Either a fist or a blunt object.”
“So basically someone hit her three times. Could you please use this laser pointer and show the jury on the photograph where these impacts occurred.”
From my shirt pocket I unclipped a laser pointer and held it up for the judge to see.
She granted me permission to carry it to Metz.
I turned it on and handed it to him. He then put the red eye of the laser beam on the photo of Campo’s battered face and drew circles in the three areas where he believed she had been struck.
He circled her right eye, her right cheek and an area encompassing the right side of her mouth and nose.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the laser back from him and returning to the lectern. “So if she was hit three times on the right side of her face, the impacts would have come from the left side of her attacker, correct?”
Minton objected, once more saying the question was beyond the scope of the witness’s expertise. Once more I argued common sense and once more the judge overruled the prosecutor.
“If the attacker was facing her, he would have punched her from the left, unless it was a backhand,” Metz said. “Then it could have been a right.”
He nodded and seemed pleased with himself. He obviously thought he was helping the prosecution but his effort was so disingenuous that he was actually probably helping the defense.
“You are suggesting that Ms. Campo’s attacker hit her three times with a backhand and caused this degree of injury?”
I pointed to the photo on the exhibit easel. Metz shrugged, realizing he had probably not been so helpful to the prosecution.
“Anything is possible,” he said.
“Anything is possible,” I repeated. “Well, is there any other possibility you can think of that would explain these injuries as coming from anything other than direct left-handed punches?”
Metz shrugged again. He was not an impressive witness, especially following two cops and a dispatcher who had been very precise in their testimony.
“What if Ms. Campo were to have hit her face with her own fist? Wouldn’t she have used her right—”
Minton jumped up immediately and objected.
“Your Honor, this is outrageous! To suggest that this victim did this to herself is not only an affront to this court but to all victims of violent crime everywhere. Mr. Haller has sunk to—”
“The witness said anything is possible,” I argued, trying to knock Minton off the soapbox. “I am trying to explore what—”
“Sustained,” Fullbright said, ending it. “Mr. Haller, don’t go there unless you are making more than an exploratory swing through the possibilities.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “No further questions.”
I sat down and glanced at the jurors and knew from their faces that I had made a mistake.
I had turned a positive cross into a negative.
The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim’s face were self-inflicted.
The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.
Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury’s feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.
Roulet leaned toward me and whispered, “What the fuck was that?”
Without responding I turned my back to him and took a scan around the courtroom.
It was almost empty. Lankford and Sobel had not returned to the courtroom and the reporters were gone as well.
That left only a few other onlookers. They appeared to be a disparate collection of retirees, law students and lawyers resting their feet until their own hearings began in other courtrooms. But I was counting on one of these onlookers being a plant from the DA’s office.
Ted Minton might be flying solo but my guess was that his boss would have a means of keeping tabs on him and the case.
I knew I was playing as much to the plant as I was to the jury.
By the trial’s end I needed to send a note of panic down to the second floor that would then echo back to Minton.
I needed to push the young prosecutor toward taking a desperate measure.
The afternoon dragged on. Minton still had a lot to learn about pacing and jury management, knowledge that comes only with courtroom experience.
I kept my eyes on the jury box—where the real judges sat—and saw the jurors were growing bored as witness after witness offered testimony that filled in small details in the prosecutor’s linear presentation of the events of March 6.
I asked few questions on cross and tried to keep a look on my face that mirrored those I saw in the jury box.
Minton obviously wanted to save his most powerful stuff for day two.
He would have the lead investigator, Detective Martin Booker, to bring all the details together, and then the victim, Regina Campo, to bring it all home to the jury.
It was a tried-and-true formula—ending with muscle and emotion—and it worked ninety percent of the time, but it was making the first day move like a glacier.