Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System Read online

  OBJECTION!

  N A N C Y G R A C E

  w i t h D I A N E

  C L E H A N E

  OBJE

  CTHOW HIIGH-PRIOCED DEFENSEN!

  ATTORNEYS, CELEBRITY

  DEFENDANTS, AND A 24/7 MEDIA HAVE HIJACKED OUR

  CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

  N E W

  Y O R K

  Copyright © 2005 Nancy Grace and Diane Clehane All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.

  First eBook Edition: June 2005

  ISBN: 1-4013-8267-3

  To Keith

  C O NTE NTS

  I N T R O D U C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

  C H A P T E R O N E

  D E F E N S E AT TO R N E Y S A N D OT H E R W I LY

  C H A R A CT E R S I H A V E K N O W N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

  C H A P T E R T W O

  W E T H E J U R Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 8

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  J A C K P OT J U S T I C E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

  C H A P T E R F O U R

  B L O O D M O N E Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  A I R B R U S H I N G T H E A W F U L T R U T H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 9

  C H A P T E R S I X

  T H E P O W E R O F T H E S TAT E I S A M Y T H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 4

  C H A P T E R S E V E N

  B L A M E T H E V I CT I M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  T H E C E L E B R I T Y FA CTO R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 0

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  THE DEATH-PENALTY BATTLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 8

  C H A P T E R T E N

  T H I S I S R E A L R E A L I T Y T E L E V I S I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 4

  C H A P T E R E L E V E N

  TO M Y C R I T I C S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 2

  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 3

  S E L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1 5

  I N D E X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 17

  OBJECTION!

  I NTRO D U CTI O N

  I REMEMBER AS IF IT WERE YESTERDAY, SITTING

  on the brick steps of my family’s home in Georgia that August. It was so still and hot and soundless. Nothing moved. Not a breeze, not the song of a bird, not a single movement to be heard or felt. The heat was so intense it seemed as if I could actually hear it rising up off the dirt in visible waves. Not even a car drove by. The stillness and the heat that summer were oppressive and constant in my ears. I felt like I was being sucked into their vacuum.

  A few weeks before, my fiancé had been murdered—“gunned down,” as we say in the media. Keith was shot five times in his beautiful face and back. It was only a few months until our wedding, but the gunman couldn’t wait. Violence doesn’t acknowledge weddings and anniversaries, birthdays and celebrations.

  Random violence entered my world.

  The world I grew up in didn’t know violence or hatred. The chimes in the Methodist church’s steeple literally called everyone home at six o’clock with hymns like “God Will Take Care of You” and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” My only encounters with violence and evil came through fleeting glimpses on the evening news at suppertime. All the horror seemed so far, far away. In my world, there was nothing as far as the eye could see but tall pine trees and soybean fields, peach orchards and rows and rows of corn and cotton, interspersed with pastureland.

  I didn’t know there was another world, one full of random violence bred from anger and desperation or, simply put, pure meanness. In my life at least, evil was a concept, not a reality. But that all changed in a 2

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  single moment. Keith’s funeral, the visits from our families and friends, the sympathy cards and the unnatural smell of hothouse flowers I received were all a blur. They still are. Sometimes I cried so much I couldn’t open my eyes from the swelling. I was lost. Keith’s world had ended, and mine had exploded.

  I remember trying to go back to classes. I couldn’t. The thought of sitting inside the four walls of a quiet college classroom studying Shakespearean literature, once my joy, was now like a heavy noose around my neck. I knew I could never go back to the world as I knew it.

  Wife, mother, and schoolteacher, it was not meant to be.

  I escaped the vacuum the only way I could. I did eventually go back to school. To law school. I prayed that I would one day graduate from Mercer Law School and then start the fight. I prepared for years, studying and working late into the night with the lamp on beside my bed, reading.

  Sometimes I even carried a lawbook in church. I knew the law would be my sword and my shield. I had to be ready when the time came.

  And it did. Seven years after Keith’s murder, I tried my first jury trial. At that moment, in that Atlanta courtroom, I took to the fight like a fish to water. In trying to cure the injustice heaped on other victims of violent crime, I was cured. For the next ten years, I fought in the pit—

  in felony courtrooms in what was then the murder capital of the country, inner-city Atlanta. The drug trade made the city a targeted sweet spot for heroin, cocaine, and pot flooding in and out of Miami. The battle consumed me. I fell asleep at night with my files spread out on my bed. I jumped up even on nonjury days at 5:00 A.M., thinking somehow I was late to court. Every case was a cause I could take up, because every case represented a victim.

  Guilty pleas caused me great personal turmoil. How was I to dis-cern if today’s shoplifter would become tomorrow’s armed robber? I quickly gained a reputation for being unreasonable when negotiating pleas and vicious at trial. I didn’t care. The battle was all that mattered.

  It is of those years that I am the proudest. I made next to nothing, but the reward to my heart and soul was priceless. I had the opportunity O B J E C T I O N !

  3

  to be the voice of those who have no voice, most often women, children, and minorities, overlooked and never heard in our system. I learned what they don’t teach you in law school, that the Constitution protects the accused, blanketing them and safeguarding their “rights.” Victims have no voice, no face, and no recourse. The Founding Fathers, with all due respect, did not consider them, and today
our courtrooms, our judges, our lawmakers follow suit.

  My transition from a courtroom in Atlanta to a New York City television studio was by happenstance. While serving as a special prosecutor in Atlanta, I was called to sit on a panel of legal experts in the Hall of Justice in New York City while still prosecuting in Atlanta. I happened to be seated between two renowned defense attorneys—Johnnie Cochran, straight off the O. J. Simpson case, and Roy Black, straight off a victory in the William Kennedy Smith rape case. Naturally we got into a huge fight!

  Several months later, the elected district attorney in Atlanta, my boss, decided to retire. I was devastated. Not only had Mr. Slaton given me the chance to become a trial lawyer at a time when very few women in the South were litigating in courtrooms, he was like a grandfather to me.

  I didn’t know what I would do. I hadn’t gone to law school to handle slip-and-falls, argue whiplash car accidents, or haggle over contracts. I wanted justice for crime victims. Nothing else was important to me.

  I considered public service with the battered-women’s center, but then, the founder of Courtroom Television Network, Steve Brill, flew to Atlanta and asked me face-to-face to join his new experiment, co-anchoring a legal talk show with Johnnie Cochran. I deeply disagreed with the Simpson defense, and with the option of high-priced defense work looming, I wanted to take Cochran on. I took off for New York shortly after Mr. Slaton served out his office. In 1997, I arrived in New York City with two boxes of clothes, a curling iron, and $200 in my savings account. Even now, all these years later, while sitting on a dark set staring into a camera lens, I wonder if I should go back to the courtroom to battle adversaries who trick Lady Justice, taking them on one by one.

  4

  N A N C Y G R A C E

  But I accept that just as I was led to the airwaves, I know God will lead me to my next battle, making my path clear. I continue on, grateful.

  This is what I know . . . there is a very real struggle going on in our world today—the age-old struggle between good and evil. Maybe it sounds simplistic, but it is true nevertheless. We must stand up and fight for what is right, even when we know we could very well lose. I find my sharpest sword to be the truth and I use it whenever I can.

  When the sorrow, the frustration, the moments with Keith forever lost surface, my response is to fight. Herein is the truth as I see it. I’m on the inside of the struggle for justice, calling out to all who will listen.

  This is what I see and what I know, regardless of whether it is politically incorrect or disturbing or tastes bitter going down. The battle of good against evil is real and palpable and is being waged in your local courthouse.

  The struggle for justice in this country didn’t end with the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s happening now. The fight has only started, and is raging in courtrooms all across this country.

  Please, take a listen, friend.

  C H A P T E R O N E

  D E F E N S E AT TO R N E Y S A N D OT H E R W I LY

  C H A R A CT E R S I H A V E K N O W N

  THE FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL

  ALL THE LAWYERS.

  —William Shakespeare

  “I WAS JUST DOING MY JOB.” THAT’S THE TIRED

  excuse offered up by every defense attorney whenever they’re asked how they do what they do—how they pull the wool over jurors’ eyes to make sure the repeat offender they’re defending walks free. I’ll never know how they can look in the mirror when their client goes out and commits yet another crime, causing more suffering to innocent victims.

  I’ve heard, “I’m just doing my job—it’s in the Constitution,” too many times to count. Just doing their jobs. They make it sound like they’re making doughnuts, drawing the yellow line down the street with a spray gun, or manning a toll booth on the freeway, nothing personal, just doing their jobs. In response, I agree with Dickens: “If that’s the law, then the law is an ass.”

  That same tired excuse has been used to explain away wrongdoing throughout history. Everyone from the repo-guy to the utility worker who cuts off electricity to the needy to the parking-lot attendant who 6

  N A N C Y G R A C E

  won’t refund your quarters after you lose them in a broken meter to banks who foreclose on Christmas . . . they all work the same excuse. They’re all just doing their jobs. When it comes to defense attorneys singing the same chorus, I don’t buy it. Justice is not “just a job.” The duty of a jury is to render a true verdict, a verdict that speaks the truth. How is that attainable when the “job” of defense attorneys is to use every means possible to get their clients acquitted—regardless of the truth?

  The 2002 murder trial of David Westerfield, found guilty of kidnapping and murdering his seven-year-old neighbor, Danielle van Dam, is one of the most horrifying examples of the true business of being a defense attorney. The minute her disappearance was made public, there was an intense, massive, and frantic search involving hundreds of volunteers, all desperately working around the clock to find any trace of this beautiful girl. They combed the hillsides, the brush, the canyons, and the creeks near the van Dams’ San Diego home. Danielle’s parents, Damon and Brenda van Dam, were completely distraught.

  Brenda appeared on television over and over, begging for her daughter’s return. Her face was swollen from crying, her eyes were raw and red. While this was going on, Westerfield’s defense lawyer, Steven Feldman, was trying his best to bargain with prosecutors—to cut a plea deal. Feldman knew Westerfield had only one bargaining chip, the location of Danielle’s body. In exchange for life behind bars as opposed to death by lethal injection as dictated by California law, Westerfield would give up the location of the little girl’s remains.

  Knowing full well his client was a child killer, Feldman went into open court to launch a defense that consisted of dragging the seven-year-old victim’s parents through the mud, ruining their reputations within the community, and revealing to the jury and the world that the couple had once been swingers. The defense boldly claimed the van Dams had unwittingly introduced a sexual predator into their own home. Knowing it wasn’t true, Feldman argued someone else had killed Danielle—some predator linked to her parents. Nothing could be further from the truth. The predator was David Westerfield.

  O B J E C T I O N !

  7

  Feldman also chose to twist science itself to prove a series of lies to the jury. He produced a forensic entomologist to tell the jury that the larvae (maggots) on this beautiful child’s body were of such an age as to preclude Westerfield from suspicion. He reasoned that the larvae were hatched on the body at a time when Westerfield was already under tight surveillance by police, and therefore he could not possibly be the killer who disposed of the child’s body.

  The argument was incredibly scientific and innovative—but hardly original. Turns out Feldman had used the exact same defense and the exact same “expert” in another murder trial and snagged an acquittal because of it. The second time around, it wasn’t creative, innovative, or clever, just tired and rehearsed. Most important, the defense didn’t fit the facts of the case or the truth.

  I am sick at heart that an officer of the court concocted that defense while knowing the whole time his own client knew where Danielle was hidden. Feldman is a veteran trial lawyer and under the law is entitled to put on the best case he can on behalf of his client. Still, it’s so dis-heartening that juries are hoodwinked every day by defense lawyers just “doing their jobs.” Our adversarial system allows it—in fact, encourages it. They get paid tons of money to do it. Successful defense attorneys are idolized, treated like rock stars.

  And hey, they’re just doing their jobs.

  “ T H E D A R K S I D E ”

  Lewis R. Slaton was the elected district attorney of Fulton County in inner-city Atlanta, where I tried cases for ten years. He was like a grandfather to me, and when he announced he was retiring after thirty-seven years in office, I was shocked. I went to his office an
d begged him to serve another term. I said the public—and, most important, the city’s crime victims—needed him. But he was well into his seventies and wanted to spend his remaining years with his wife and say good-bye to 8

  N A N C Y G R A C E

  the courthouse. What could I say? I walked from his office with my head reeling, not knowing what I would do. I knew that the newly elected district attorney would likely fire all the top litigators left over from Slaton’s administration, as is the custom, and I would be left with the alternative every veteran prosecutor faces at some point: being out of a job and considering the “dark side”—defense work.

  I hadn’t gone to law school to do slip-and-falls, write wills, or do real estate closings. After my fiancé’s murder, I abandoned my plan to teach college literature and entered law school specifically to help other crime victims—to try to do right. All I knew, all I wanted, and all I loved, was criminal prosecution and victims’ rights. In court, I was finally home.

  When Slaton’s announcement was made public, I discovered a myriad of job possibilities to consider—all for a lot of money to boot.

  Unsolicited offers from criminal-defense firms started pouring in. The salaries thrown my way were more than I had ever dreamed of. If I took a defense job, I could say good-bye to my second (and third) jobs, exchange my car with the smoking engine for one that actually ran every day, and stop shopping exclusively at Marshalls and Kmart. But from the get-go, it was wrong. All wrong.

  I accepted that as soon as the newly elected district attorney fired me, I’d rather teach law school than be a defense lawyer. I sent out my résumé to local colleges and universities and hoped for the best. Then, out of the blue, came Court TV, which gave me a platform to speak out on behalf of victims’ rights. After an entire career as a public servant, a trial lawyer, I packed up and headed to New York.

  There was no way I could ever stand in front of a jury and use the knowledge and talents God gave me to “just do my job.” No way. I knew that if I ever did, I’d look in the mirror every morning and see Keith’s blue eyes looking back at me.