Chapter 110: Courtroom 4B, Day One
The judge denied the motion to dismiss in November, in a two-page order that gave no reasons.
Brandt said two pages with no reasons was the best possible outcome, because a judge who explains himself early has usually decided.
So we got a hearing. Three days, February the fourth, fifth and sixth, before the Honourable Hollis Reyner.
I had never been in Courtroom 4B. My plea and my sentencing were both in 2C, downstairs.
Petitioners in post-conviction proceedings sit at counsel table, and I did, from ten o'clock.
I wore a grey shirt I bought for nineteen dollars and a skirt of Marisol's that she left on my chair without comment.
The State was represented by an Assistant Attorney General named Perrin Slack, forty-ish, four boxes, one junior.
He was not a monster. He was competent, and he was doing his job, and his job was me.
Our case in chief took a day and a half and consisted mostly of one man.
Dr Anselm Voit. Accident reconstruction, twenty-two years, six thousand five hundred dollars of my money and eleven months of my life.
Brandt qualified him in fourteen minutes. Slack did not object, which told us something.
Then she walked him through the vehicle. Dark blue estate, five doors, model year on the title.
The photographs went up on the screen. Frame three first, the rear, the buckled hatch.
The faded university parking sticker was in the corner of that frame, and Voit was asked to confirm it against the registration file.
A photograph is worth nothing until you prove what it is a photograph of.
Then frame fourteen, at eleven by seventeen, on an easel, for the rest of the morning.
Voit explained the seat track. A rail, a motor, a position sensor, and a module that stores the last commanded position.
He explained that the module does not know who is in the seat. He said it in direct, before Slack could say it in cross, and that was Brandt's decision, made in the car park at eight.
The recorded position was one hundred and forty-one millimetres forward of full rearward travel.
He put the reference tables up and gave the range of stature consistent with that position and mirror angle.
One hundred and fifty-two to one hundred and sixty-four centimetres. Call it five foot to five foot five.
Then Brandt asked about a man of one hundred and eighty-eight centimetres in that seat.
“He could not operate the pedals,” Voit said. “His knees would foul the wheel. He could not close the door with his leg in that position.”
Slack objected. Overruled. Voit said it again more slowly for the record.
That was eleven forty in the morning and it was the best eleven minutes I have ever paid for.
Then we broke for lunch and I did not eat, and then Slack got up, and the afternoon was different.
Cross-examination is not shouting. Nobody shouts. Slack asked short questions and waited.
“Doctor, the module records a position. It does not record a person.”
“That is correct. It does not record a time either.”
“The module does not timestamp the stored position.”
“So you cannot say from the data when the seat was last moved.”
“Not from the data alone.”
“The photographs are from four forty-one in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“Six hours and eight minutes after the collision.”
“Six hours and eight minutes.”
“In that time the vehicle was attended by police, by two paramedics, by a tow operator, and by yard staff.”
“That is my understanding.”
“Any one of them could have moved that seat.”
“Any one of them could have. I have no evidence that any of them did.”
“You have no evidence either way, do you, Doctor.”
“On that specific question, no.”
Then he took the airbag module, not preserved, and the occupant sensor, never downloaded in 2019.
He established the car was repaired, sold in 2021, and no longer available for inspection.
He established that Voit had never examined the car. Nobody had. There was nothing left to examine.
He finished at twenty past three with the question he had been building toward all afternoon.
“Doctor, can you tell this court who sat in that seat on the night of the fifteenth?”
“No.”
“Thank you. Nothing further.”
Voit sat there wanting to explain, and there was nothing to explain, and the judge excused him.
I had paid six thousand five hundred dollars, earned over eleven months in a storage unit, for a man to say no in one syllable.
Brandt did four minutes of redirect and got him to say that the position was inconsistent with a man of Dean's height, which was all we ever really had.
The judge called it at twenty to four and said we would resume at nine.
In the corridor Brandt put her bag down on a bench and looked at me.
“That was fine,” she said. “That went exactly as I told you it would go.”
“He said no.”
“He said no to a question about identity. He was never going to say anything else. The seat is not the case.”
“Then what's the case.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “The case is the notary.”