Murder in the Courthouse by Nancy Grace

the other side of the courtroom.
    The look Dana Love shot at Adams’s mother could have cut stone. It was a look of pure hatred. It was clearly borne of resentment at the long years Adams was coddled by his mom, at the numerous excuses for Adams’s bad behavior she made, culminating in a final act of violence.
    Adams’s defense team made a big stir at their table, scrambling among themselves, as it turned out, for a handkerchief the lead defense lawyer dramatically pulled from his lapel and handed back to Tish Adams. Immediately, prosecutors stood, and striding quickly toward the judge’s bench, barked out the word “Sidebar!”
    â€œCounsel, approach the bench! Including you, Mr. DelVecchio.”
    Hailey knew enough from all her years prosecuting in court that Alverson was already on to the defense ploy of having the jury focus on the grieving mother of the defendant, not the grieving mother of the victim, Julie Love. Thankfully, the prosecutor was on to it too, but Hailey hoped he could cut off DelVecchio next time before the play was made.
    As it was, all twelve jurors were still staring sympathetically at Tish Adams, who was now breathing deeply into a clear plastic breathing mask attached to a portable cylinder of pure oxygen.
    Ugh. This was going to be a long trial.
    Hailey couldn’t stop staring either, even though she suspected all the sobbing was a preplanned charade, the defense and Tish Adams clearly in cahoots. As Hailey watched the judge’s stern face framed by the suited backs of all the attorneys, they turned and strode back to their counsel table.
    To see DelVecchio’s face, smiling and preening toward the jury, you’d think he had just won an argument in the U.S. Supreme Court when, in fact, he’d just gotten his first dressing down from the judge. The whole game was new to the jurors, but Hailey knew that soon enough, most of them would catch on to the game Adams’s defense was playing.
    After the reading of the indictment in which the accusations and a partial description of the deaths of Julie Love and baby Lily were laid out, the jurors repeatedly glanced at Todd Adams as if trying to reconcile the two brutal murders with the good-looking, athletic young man sitting behind the defense table. His mother was still overtly crying, but now silently into DelVecchio’s hanky, following the judge’s admonition.
    The judge turned toward the jurors and launched into a set of typed, pretrial jury instructions to provide somewhat of a road map as to how the trial would go.
    The case commenced. The lead prosecutor stood up, pushing his chair back from counsel table, approaching a podium directly centered before the judge. He laid out a stack of paper on which he had handwritten pretrial motions to the judge. He began in a conversational tone, but as the intensity of the story increased, he picked up the pace and pitch. By the time he showed the jury a photo of Julie Love—the one at Christmas time, decked out in her Christmas-red satin pantsuit, her tummy bulging with baby Lily—all twelve jurors plus the alternates were at the edge of their seats. And this was just for motions, openings hadn’t started!
    But just before the prosecutor, Herman Grant, punched the slide projector button to proceed to the next image up on a slide screen on the other side of the courtroom, DelVecchio stood and loudly shouted out.
    â€œObjection! The state is trying to poison us all against Todd Adams, and I won’t have it, Judge! This is so cruel and unfair, to use the life of Julie Love in this manner . . . just to get a conviction!”
    Hailey cringed as Grant turned, his face in a rage, and then Julie Love’s mother put her head in her hands, leaning on her husband’s shoulder.
    â€œSend out the jury!” Alverson said it calmly but Hailey could tell the judge was angry. He couldn’t afford to show emotion and jeopardize a death penalty case,