A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett

prosecutor had pulled out all the stops and found himself furiously dramatizing the state’s version of Cuffee’s final moments as he lay helpless on his face, with Milcray poised above him repeatedly driving the knife into his head, neck, and back.
    Acting all of this out a few feet from the witness stand, directly in front of the jury box, the murder weapon in his hand, the prosecutor again and again swung the open knife, rolling his head and shoulders into each exaggerated stroke as he growlingly challenged the witness to deny that this, in fact, was how Cuffee met his death.
    â€œAnd didn’t you then—like this!—stab him? And then—again!—like this? As he tried to crawl away? And—again!”
    But the sensational dramatization—which the judge refused to interrupt, and which sent the victim’s family howling from the room as several of the jurors squirmed in disgust—built to a crashingly flat climax.
    To the blistering assertion that this was how it had happened, Milcray offered a simple answer.
    â€œNo.”
    If anything was going to shake him, one thought, it would have been that.
    So egregious did I find the whole performance that, as Milcray returned to his seat—slightly hunched, as if afraid of bumping his head on something—I felt a deep desire to see the prosecutor lose the case. How did that whisper of a thought affect what followed? It is difficult to say.
    Sentiment aside, the prosecution’s case left a crucial question unaddressed: motive. It is true that the law did not require proof of a motive (in a second-degree-murder trial, only intent to kill must be shown, not the motivation for doing so). But a sane individual, asked to find an apparently mild-mannered person—one with no history of violent crime—guilty of a grotesquely cruel murder (twelve of the stab wounds fell in a small area in the back of the head), strongly wishes for at least a wisp of a rationale. When none can be offered, it is hard to resist entirely, as beyond doubt, a claim of self-defense.
    On this matter the prosecution had very little. In summing up the state’s case, the prosecutor again harped on a myriad of more and less grave inconsistencies in Milcray’s defense—the changed stories, the implausible account of the many wounds to the back (how could they have been delivered while Cuffee was on top, given that they were all on the side
opposite
Milcray’s knife hand?), the limited evidence of struggle in the small space (knickknacks still standing on the television, right next to a life-or-death thrash?)—and added to these some positively weird things that the prosecutor himself thought anomalous: for instance, why hadn’t Cuffee and Milcray engaged in any foreplay before they began to disrobe? If, as Milcray testified, Cuffee’s penis was flaccid when he first removed the panties, how could he have had an erection just moments later, when he turned back from putting on the condom? Such peeves told us more about the prosecutor’s erotic universe (it seemed to me) than they did about Milcray’s testimony. As for the concluding assertion—that we were looking at “the face of evil” when we surveyed the defendant—it seemed patently false to me, whatever may have happened in that room that night.
    Clearly there were very serious problems with Milcray’s account(s). Much of what he had told us was not credible. Yet, for all that, the prosecution could offer distressingly little in response to that powerful lingering question: Why? The best that the state could do was to paint a picture of Milcray as a spurned lover, and as a man torn apart by the “inner demons” of his sexual double life. That night, the prosecutor intimated, Milcray had sat on the futon longing for more than a quick lay, but Antigua wanted to have sex and move on. (Remember, Nahteesha said Antigua was going to get rid of him!)