Carlos Garcia came late to Yogurt Shop. In early September 2001, after Springsteen had been convicted but before Lynch could get the next trial under way, the Texas legislature approved a statute requiring that in a capital case, one of the two attorneys assigned to represent an indigent defendant must be drawn from the short list of certified capital counsel—lawyers with substantial experience in defending clients who face a possible death sentence. Through no fault of the judge, Mike Scott was represented by Tony Diaz, a civil litigator with scant criminal experience, and Dexter Gilford, an attorney who was respected and articulate but hadn’t made that list. But because his family was paying them, Scott didn’t qualify as indigent, so the rule didn’t apply. On the other hand, allowing Diaz to lead the defense all but guaranteed an appeal on grounds of ineffective counsel, and a potential reversal. Despite objections from the prosecution, Lynch chose to honor the statute anyway. “I never understood why he did it,” Carlos Garcia told me many years later. “He didn’t have to.”
Forty-two at the time, a former prosecutor from a small town on the Texas-Mexico border, Garcia was so busy working on his third capital case that he hadn’t paid much attention to Yogurt Shop. And he wasn’t particularly interested in the job, given the stakes, the late start and his penchant for fastidious preparation. But he was a true believer when it came to the death penalty, and like all trial lawyers, he liked the hands-on tussle of adversarial law, so he agreed to take the case if the other two men yielded the lead position to him. To give him time to catch up, Lynch postponed the next hearing for two months; when they were used up and Carlos asked for more time, the judge postponed again. Not ready will become Carlos’s mantra during the entirety of Scott—a motion for a 120-day continuance his most insistently recurring request.
In his early career, Garcia had focused on the pursuit of child sexual offenders. A round man with short legs and curly, prematurely gray hair, full-blooming cheeks and sparkling eyes, he seems—and is—authentically warm and engaging, but on the job he’s all-out. “He may look like the Pillsbury Doughboy,” a cop told me, “but Carlos can be tough. He can rile people up.” When he took on Scott, he figured he’d be finished in no time. After all, his client had confessed; he’d plead him out, get a shorter sentence and dodge the death penalty. But after he talked to Gilford, read police reports, studied evidence photos, watched the videotapes and got hold of Johnson’s PowerPoint presentation, he turned a corner. “Those boys had nothing to do with it,” he says now, flipping his hand upward as if brushing an absurd idea away. “They were kids. Those girls would’ve laughed at them if they tried anything. Even if they did have a gun.”
Garcia’s an excellent attorney and a prodigious researcher, but if he’s brought to trial before he’s ready, his arguments can be diffuse and wordy. When Mike Lynch referred to Scott’s lawyers as “anal-retentive on the law,” he was mostly talking about Garcia, whose linguistic bypasses, intense attention to detail and curlicued style of questioning explain why the trial carried on for so long.
After the guilty verdict, Garcia kept working on Yogurt Shop. In 2009, after Scott’s conviction had been overturned, a colleague sat in the courtroom of the 167th District Court and listened to him practice a new opening statement. Perfect, she called it, moving and precise, organized and finely tuned; perhaps the best she’d ever heard. Too bad nobody else got to hear it. Scott was dismissed before he had a chance to present it.