Both lead attorneys asked questions of the prospective jurors. Raymond could feel what the questions were getting at.
Have you ever been mugged or otherwise robbed? Ever been a victim of violence? Are you a gun owner? Are you for or against gun control laws? Ever heard of Stand Your Ground laws, like the ones they have in Florida and several other states—though not this one? What are your thoughts about them?
Each lead attorney could dismiss potential jurors. For obvious cause, or without stating a reason. But if they did so without stating a reason, they had only a limited number of those wild cards.
“Peremptory challenges,” he typed. “Three for each side.”
But that much he could have learned by reading a book.
What Raymond observed on his own was this, though he might not have gathered it into these words: The idea, on the surface of the thing, was to weed out prejudice. But underneath the surface, Raymond saw that both attorneys were quite aware of prejudice, even in the jurors they let stay. Their whole job seemed to rely on prejudice. Prejudices in a courtroom felt to Raymond like a deck of cards to be strategically played in some kind of cynical game. Everyone had some prejudice, and that seemed to be part of the process. And the attorneys seemed to want that.
Just not against their client.
The tricky part appeared to be that people rarely stated their prejudices out loud. You had to read between their lines and hope you were reading them correctly.
“I want to start by making one thing very clear,” the attorney said. The one Raymond had been calling “their” attorney in his head. “I am not against carrying a licensed handgun for the purpose of self-protection.”
Raymond typed the words “Opening Statement: Prosecution” on his keyboard.
The man paced back and forth as he spoke, briefly turning his back on the jury, then facing them to drive a point home.
“And of course we all want to have the right to protect ourselves. And we should have that right. It’s a funny thing about our rights, though. There’s a fact about them that we don’t want to see, but we have to see it. We simply have to, if we’re expected to live together in any kind of peace. We’re all living right on top of each other in this city, and there will be times when our rights will be in conflict.
“What’s the first thing you ever learned about rights in school? I know the first thing I ever learned about them, and it was in kindergarten. My kindergarten teacher taught us that the right to swing our fist ends where the other guy’s nose begins. Remember that?
“So maybe you’re sitting here thinking, I have a right to fire my gun if I think I’m in danger. But does your neighbor have a right to fire his gun at you if he thinks you’re a danger to him? You might notice how the question looks very different from the two different ends of the firearm.
“Now for the really important question.”
He turned quickly to face the jury. Swept his gaze from one face to another. Met as many eyes as he could.
Raymond was still wishing there was even one Latino or Latina face on that jury. But there had been only three in the jury pool, and all three had been excused by the defense attorney, ostensibly over unrelated concerns.
“What if your neighbor is wrong? What if you’re only trying to help, but he—or she—mistakenly thinks you mean him some kind of harm, and he fires on you? Ends your life? Takes you away from your spouse and your children? Does he have that right? What about your right to walk down the street in safety?
“Look, I have a handgun in the drawer of my bedside table. If someone breaks in and tries to do any kind of harm to my wife or me . . . well, all I can say is, God help that person. But with the license to carry and use a gun comes an enormous responsibility. And it’s pretty simple, ladies and gentlemen: You have to be right. You owe it to the guy who’s trying to give you back your wallet to be sure you know the difference between a robber and a good Samaritan. You have to be willing to hold your fire for just a moment—even a split second—until you know for a fact what kind of situation you’ve got on your hands. Sure, it’s a temptation to think there’s some risk involved in waiting that split second. And maybe there is. But to fail to take that risk is to put too much weight on your own rights and not enough on the other guy’s. It’s thinking only of yourself. We all put ourselves first. That’s just human, and maybe it’s not even a bad thing. But we at least have to make the other guy a very close second. Because, you know what? Luis Velez had a right to go home that night. He had a right to raise his children. He had a right to be there when his wife gave birth to their third child.”