Hard Evidence

Except for the last line, Hardy didn’t believe a word of it, but he was pleased to discover that it flowed smoothly off his tongue.

They were inside Department 27, Fowler’s old courtroom. Hardy turned around and checked the gallery -Jane, Farris, Jeff Elliot. Glitsky made it a point to come down. Hardy was glad to see him; he’d looked into one of the May Shi

In her expression he read nothing, and in that nothing saw anger, betrayal, disgust. He looked away as the bailiff a

Chomorro looked young, fit and feisty. His wasn’t the physique of lean good health seen in advertisements. He gave more an impression of heavy solidity – a lack of fat on a heavy frame, like an old-fashioned fullback. His face had a light olive cast. His eyes were dark with brows that nearly met. The razor-styled hair was short without a trace of gray.

When he had gotten settled at the bench, the clerk of the court raised her voice: ‘Calling criminal case number 921072979, section 187, felony murder. The State of California versus Andrew Bryan Fowler.’

Because of the passage of Proposition 115, after June of 1991 lawyers in California for both the prosecution and the defense were no longer permitted to conduct voir dire on prospective jurors. Now the judge did it. This didn’t mean that lawyers had no say anymore in who eventually got on a jury – they still got their peremptory and other challenges – but the judge ran the show now. He or she asked the questions and gave instructions to prospective jurors, and people like Hardy and Pullios had to make do as best they could on some combination of information, instinct and luck.

Hardy had asked Chomorro if he could at least ask pertinent questions during the process, and the judge had denied the request. Hardy then submitted a list of questions that he hoped Chomorro would ask, but he entertained little to no hope that the judge would go along.

The jury-selection process could take hours or it could take weeks. Under the new and improved rules it tended to go faster than it had in the past – indeed, that had been the intention of Proposition 115. Andy Fowler’s jury would consist of twelve jurors and two alternates, and Chomorro had told both Hardy and Pullios that he would be very disappointed if they didn’t have a panel sworn in by the end of the first day.

The predicted mob materialized in the gallery. In the past two months, besides preparing his defense, Hardy had given no fewer than a dozen interviews on the case -television, magazines, newspapers. Now, with the impending trial coming up on center stage, the first four rows of the gallery behind Pullios filled with the media.

On the other side, he’d already seen Jane. He knew Celine would be in, and probably Farris.

Since there was no telling how long jury selection would take, Pullios had arranged to have a couple of her witnesses be on hand in the event it moved swiftly. Hardy thought he recognized the two guards from the Marina sitting together. John Strout could be summoned from the coroner’s office in a matter of minutes. The waiting was nearly over.

Fowler, after his million-dollar bail had finally been granted, had resumed a semblance of a normal life. He went into his office every day, maybe had lunch with some senior partners, maybe even played a little golf and te

It shouldn’t have surprised Hardy, but somehow it did, that Fowler was turning into a real help in his own defense. He still acted removed from the process – as though it involved someone else entirely – but that was his personal style, and once he’d been released from jail, on his own refined turf, it wasn’t so grating. Andy had a copy of all of Hardy’s files – witnesses, interrogations, the evidence list, newspaper articles – and he took notes almost daily with ideas that might either weaken the prosecution’s case or help to locate ‘X.’ In fact, his insistence that there was an ‘X’ did a lot to keep Hardy’s confidence up about Andy’s i

Nothing had pa

Jeff Elliot had kept in touch, but there hadn’t been anything close to a scoop since Fowler’s polygraph, and even that hadn’t been much from Jeffs perspective. He was one of the people to whom Hardy had given his new telephone number, and last week he’d called with renewed interest now that the case was getting hot again, but he’d had nothing new to contribute.

So if it wasn’t Andy Fowler – and Hardy had to believe it wasn’t, except for the sweaty moments in the middle of the night when he still questioned – whoever had killed Owen Nash looked like they were going to get away with it.

Eighty people were called for the first jury pool.

There were as many theories of jury composition as there were attorneys. Hardy and Fowler had spent hours discussing the relative merits of various professions and ‘types’ of people, ever aware that they might, when the crunch came, wind up empaneling an individual who went against type and killed them.

For example, every once in a while a secretary, who for some reason tended to be pro-prosecution, would show herself to have a soft heart and come up for the defense. On the other hand a long-haired musician (a typical pro-defense juror) could turn out to have a heavy-metal, neo-Nazi edge and lean to convict.

In spite of these possibilities the two men had come up with a general idea of who they wanted on the jury and who they didn’t. Whether Chomorro would ask the questions to identify the traits or professions they were looking for remained a mystery.

As it transpired, Hardy’s original idea to provoke some judicial prejudice had borne, and continued to bear, some sour fruit – witness Chomorro’s denials about voir dire.

There was still, though, enough early prejudicial activity to use in an appeal if it came to that, but first, as Fowler had convinced him, there was a trial to be won. If you overconcentrated on your backup position you could find yourself needing it. In fact, after all the preparation and discussion, it might after all come down, as it so often did, to old gut instinct.

There was, however, one rather unique wrinkle involved in choosing this particular jury. In the mind of the public, judges were generally held in high esteem, and Andy Fowler had been a judge. Would people who might be opposed to authority figures – defense jurors usually -find in Fowler a rebel they admired? Would the law-and-order types, normally pro-prosecution, view him as one of their own who’d just made a mistake, or would he be vulnerable to the wrath of the betrayed?