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Armed with Woods as a witness, Peasley brought charges against McCrimmon, Mi
During the Soto-Fong trial, Stuehringer criticized the way Godoy had handled the evidence, especially the items with the fingerprints. Peasley defended Godoy with characteristic zeal, and, in the end, won a conviction and a death sentence against Soto-Fong. The trial deepened the bond between Peasley and Godoy. "I thought that Ken did a really good job putting everything back together and saying I'm not a bad cop," Godoy told me. Godoy was so moved by Peasley's defense of him that when he married for the third time he asked Peasley to perform the civil ceremony. (Tucson law enforcement is a small world, and Godoy's wife is also a Pima County prosecutor.)
In 1993, Peasley also won convictions in joint trials against McCrimmon and Mi
It was in these trials, in 1993, that Peasley started bending the truth about the evidence. He knew that a jury would have suspicions about a dubious character like Keith Woods, so he tried to enhance Woods's credibility, urging jurors to believe Woods because what he'd told Godoy was "something that Woods could get only from those people who were directly involved in causing the deaths" of the three victims. Peasley said that investigators knew nothing about the three defendants until Woods volunteered the information during his interview, on September 8, 1992. McCrimmon and Mi
Only a moment's hesitation by a single juror kept the case alive. Immediately after the verdicts were a
Rick Lougee and Ken Peasley could pass for fraternal twins. Both men are fifty-seven, of medium height and weight, with gray hair and a gray beard. Peasley has a slicked-back pompadour, Lougee the tousled look of an aging hippie. Though made from similar raw material, the two men come out of different worlds. Like Peasley, Lougee took a circuitous route to Tucson. He was born into a middle-class family in Co
Lougee and I were talking in the small adobe house, across the street from the university, where he lives with his wife, who works for him as a paralegal, and their twelve-year-old son. By the late nineties, Lougee had been a defense lawyer for more than two decades, and he had few illusions about the system, or about his own clients. "I normally don't ask my clients whether they're guilty," he told me. "Personally, I don't care. But the first thing Chris said to me was 'Dawg, I didn't do it.' Frankly, it didn't make much of an impression. I've tried hundreds of cases. I've heard it all from clients before."
Late one night, shortly before McCrimmon's retrial in 1997, Lougee started reading the transcript ofWoods's first tape-recorded interview with the police, the one on September 8, 1992. Lougee noticed that, during the course of that long, rambling conversation, Woods made a brief reference to an earlier discussion with Godoy. "I said to myself,'Holy shit, Joe had talked to him before,' " Lougee said. "I see how Peasley has been finessing this issue. He's been arguing to the juries that Woods must be telling the truth because there is no other way that Woods could have known this information. Now I see that's not true. It becomes clear to me that Woods didn't come up with those names-Godoy did."
At the last minute, in 1997, the judge severed McCrimmon and Mi
"Had you come up with the name Andre Mi
Godoy further testified that he had never heard of Martin Soto-Fong before the September 8th interview.
Peasley drove the point home: "The first time you heard any of those three names would have been in the conversation with Keith
Woods on September 8, 1992?"
"Yes," Godoy replied.
"I knew that Godoy had committed perjury in that trial," Lougee said.
Mi
"Peasley was leaning on the counsel table, hissing at me. His saliva was on me," Lougee recalled. "His finger was six inches away from my face." Repeatedly, in a series of heated conferences with the judge, Peasley expressed shock that Lougee could question his integrity, and dared the defense lawyer to lodge a formal complaint against him.
"He is accusing me of suborning perjury, and if he is going to make those accusations," Peasley said to the judge outside the hearing of the jury,"he should have filed a-"