95

I’ve been doing this long enough to know you can’t trust a jury to get things right. What the judge said about not considering bias, or sympathy, or the sentence these bad guys are going to get when you’re weighing the facts against the law is just not how it goes down. It’s one thing to say that in the hope that it will guide some of them, but it’s another thing to watch a group of adults, nearly all of them with below-average intelligence or suspect language skills, revert to their opinions and whether or not they like the defendant on trial.

I’ve seen it play out wrong an awful lot over the past thirteen years. When it comes down to it, juries are a bunch of human beings who are nearly always exhausted by the end of the argument phase because they’ve been overloaded with a sophisticated level of legal information that many of them have never been asked to deal with in their entire lives. I have reservations with this bunch. I saw them jump at the Angela Alvarez drama that Safulu’s attorney cooked up, and at Lucrecia Lucero too. Either might be enough to tip things.

All the same, it’s out of my hands. Now I can only stand when I’m directed to, button my blazer on the top button, and hope like hell to hear some guilties come down. Mostly, I hope Kristina gets her win, for selfish reasons, because if she doesn’t, she’ll be insufferable. It’d be one more failure we’d be tied to, her and I, one more thing she can’t forgive me for.