In contrast to both defense attorneys, the tall, lean, camera- and interview-shy Robert Smith seems to have channeled the actor Jimmy Stewart as he appeared in Anatomy of a Murder: calm, quiet, low-key, with a cutthroat intelligence he keeps under wraps, preferring to come across as your everyday ordinary citizen, just like the jurors he’s addressing. In truth, insiders call him “the Stiletto” for his ability to anticipate defensive moves and quietly slice them to shreds. Outside the courtroom, he’s a different guy entirely. A man of contradictory pleasures, he likes to skydive from airplanes in his spare time, doing cartwheels in the air at 180 miles an hour. There’s also an unverified rumor that he has sometimes engaged in parkour, the practice of jumping from high places in free fall to the ground, using momentum and the redistribution of body weight to perform impossible body maneuvers and land unharmed. It’s hard to know which version of Smith is authentic, especially when one defense lawyer describes him as “emotional” while a female colleague sums him up as hypocritical and delusional. Wears sunglasses all the time, she snaps. “Struts around as if women were falling over all around him.” Mike Lynch calls his trial work “lethal.” His partner in both Yogurt Shop trials, Darla Davis, will be his favorite death-penalty teammate, the tall and attractive, dark-haired, sharp-tongued woman whom detractors call simply “the Darla.” Together, they are fierce. A third ADA, Efrain de la Fuente, will soon join them; when both cases are reversed, he will be the only one of the three to stay on.
From January through March of 2000, the lawyers continued to prepare. Trial dates would soon be set for Springsteen and Scott. Awaiting his turn, Pierce would spend the next three years in the county jail, despite his constitutional right to a speedy trial. Welborn kept busy at his shop.
Disappointment dogs us, however adamantly we demand answers. When a jury comes in with a guilty verdict, all we really know is that’s how twelve people voted. As for not guilty, this might mean a lack of evidence or simply, as the British put it, “not proven.” But for the families of murdered children, ambivalence is unacceptable. Once a guilty verdict has been reached, they inevitably speak of their relief, not just because a painful process has ended but also because the truth has been discovered, the perpetrator identified and justice finally served.
Trials matter, of course. Studying them gives us a better sense not necessarily of what happened but of what various intelligent, determined, passionate and committed men and women made of whatever evidence and relevant speculation they’d come up with. They don’t, however, always provide what we really want. Yogurt Shop jurors did their job; so did the lawyers and the judge. But in the end, nobody was satisfied with how things turned out. Nobody at all.