WAITING THAT MORNING FOR THE JUDGE TO APPEAR, KARP rose from the prosecution table and sauntered over to where the court clerk sat reading a sports magazine. He was physically relaxed but mentally focused on what he had to do, and it showed in the way he walked.
He was well aware that everything he did in that courtroom was being watched by the jurors from the day they walked in until the day they walked out for the last time. They studied his body language, so he exuded confidence in the way he sat, stood, moved, smiled, and even poured water for Kenny Katz, his young co-counsel who sat next to him, the witnesses, and perhaps the defense attorney. And they noted the tenor of his voice, which was resolute and firm—with an easy laugh when dictated, unless the moment called for righteous indignation, in which case he avoided shrillness and was simply forceful and well reasoned.
Nothing was feigned, however; he was just himself. If he appeared at ease and unscripted, it was because he was prepared. For Karp, pretrial prep was a religious experience, as in total commitment. He couldn’t countenance losing a case because he wasn’t ready. He made it a point to outwork and outprepare every adversary. The defense bar knew it, which was why, more often than not, defendants pleaded to the top count, hoping to get somewhat of a break at sentencing.
“If you can’t explain to a jury a case as you would to your family and friends while sitting in your living room, you’re not ready,” he’d told Katz when they started the process of picking the jury three weeks earlier.
“Good Monday morning to you, Al,” he said as the burly clerk looked up.
“Good morning, Mr. Karp. We about done with jury selection?”
“Close. One more will give us the twelve tried and true, but don’t forget the alternates,” Karp replied, turning so he could see the gallery. Although he liked Al Lopez, who’d been with the courts since Karp could remember, his real purpose in visiting was so that he could nonchalantly “check out the house” and the fifteen remaining members of the jury pool sitting on the spectator benches. Eleven of their number already sat in the jury box waiting for one last addition, and then four alternates would be selected, before The People v. Sharif Jabbar got under way.
And just as the sworn jurors and prospective jurors were watching everything he did, he was studying them as well. In fact, he was something of a connoisseur when it came to jury selection; he approached it as an artist might approach a scene he wanted to paint—with patience, a plan, and an eye for detail.
Three weeks earlier, the supreme court trial courtroom known as Part 39 on the eleventh floor of the Criminal Courts Building had contained a pool of seventy-five prospective jurors, when Judge David Marvin Mason began the proceedings by asking Karp to give the venire, or jury pool, a brief description of the case and the main players in the real-life drama about to be played out in front of them.
“Thank you, your honor. Welcome to Part 39 of the Supreme Court, State of New York, County of New York. I am District Attorney Roger Karp, and I will be responsible for presenting the evidence on behalf of the People of the State of New York during the course of this trial. His honor, Supreme Court Justice Mason, will be presiding. Seated at the prosecution table is Assistant District Attorney Kenneth Katz, who will be assisting me during the course of the trial,” he’d said, gesturing with his hand. “At the defense table is Ms. Megan O’Dowd, and next to her is the defendant, Imam Sharif Jabbar. Now, for purposes of understanding the nature of the charges, I will read to you the indictment in this case, handed down by the grand jury.”
After Karp had essentially read the jurisdictional location, date, time, and place of the crime, he’d concluded: “That the defendant, Sharif Jabbar, acting in concert with other individuals with intent to cause the death of Miriam Juma Khalifa, caused her death by stabbing her multiple times about her throat and body.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, please understand that the indictment I just read against the defendant is the accusatory instrument in this case. It is not evidence and should not be considered by you as evidence. The evidence in this case will come from the lips of witnesses, after they are sworn, while seated in that witness stand, and from whatever exhibits his honor receives and marks in evidence.
“At this time, I am going to read to you a list of prospective witnesses who might be called to testify at the trial. If you know any of them, please let us know when you are questioned during the voir dire, and we’ll inquire as to the nature of any relationship that may exist.”
Karp had then told the jury pool that chief court clerk Al Lopez would call off a dozen names at random. “Those of you who are called, please come forward and take a seat in the jury box.” He’d looked over at the clerk and added, “Mr. Lopez, I believe that we are ready to proceed.”
The twelve who had stepped forward and sat in the jury box had then been questioned as a group, first by the prosecution and then by the defense. They were asked personal questions about such things as their employment, education, and marital status and questions involving the justice system, such as whether they’d been victims of crimes, had previously served on a jury, and, in a case like this, how much of the pretrial publicity they had followed and what, if any, effect it had had on them.
They had been kept on the panel or dismissed based on their answers and their demeanor. Some prospective jurors had been excused for personal reasons and others “for cause,” such as evincing a bias toward either side or expressing the inability to follow the law as given by the court. Still others had been sent away by the attorneys using “peremptory challenges,” meaning that either Karp or O’Dowd did not want that particular individual to sit on the panel even if there was no cause to have the juror excused by the judge. The peremptory challenges did not have to be justified or explained.
The vacated seat had then been filled by one of the remaining prospective jurors, who, it was hoped, had been paying sufficient attention throughout, still sitting on the hard wooden benches of the gallery.
In addition to the general questioning, however, Karp had made a motion to be allowed to voir dire each individual prospective juror away from the others in chambers. He’d argued that “the massive amount of publicity surrounding this case and its sensitive nature—particularly in this city—greatly increases the potential for bias for and/or against either party given our post-nine-eleven world.
“I believe that they will be more forthright outside the hearing of others,” he’d said. “They won’t feel the need or be tempted to conform their answers to what others around them are saying.”
The judge had frowned at the request. He obviously wasn’t happy about the motion, first, because it would greatly extend the time it would take to pick a jury, and second, because he simply didn’t like Karp. Before his appointment to the bench, New York Supreme Court Justice David Marvin Mason had swum in the same political pond as Megan O’Dowd, in that he’d never met a left-wing cause he wouldn’t champion. As such, he was no fan of the more conservative traditionalist Karp, and since being assigned to preside at the trial, he had bent over backward to accommodate defense requests and motions.
However, two issues had worked in Karp’s favor for this request. One was that Mason knew the media were all over this case, and despite their liberal bent, they still blew with the winds of public opinion when it came to Islamic terrorists. Also, his last two rulings against a Karp-led prosecution team had been thrown back in his face by the appellate courts, and he was wary of being overturned again. Furthermore, the defense had offered little in the way of opposition to Karp’s request for individual voir dire, so he’d reluctantly allowed it.
O’Dowd had also not opposed Karp’s suggestion that instead of the statutorily mandated twenty peremptory challenges allowed to each side in a murder case, they would stipulate to increase it to thirty. It wasn’t a new strategy for him and was one that defense attorneys normally didn’t object to. It was their core belief that the majority of prospective jurors were pro-prosecution, and therefore the defense attorneys wanted more opportunities to keep “law-and-order types” off the jury.
However, Karp saw it differently. He’d learned his first hard lesson the first time he’d clashed with O’Dowd in court—in the case of the four self-proclaimed members of the so-called Black Liberation Army cop killers from Harlem. In that initial trial, which had ended with a hung jury, he’d made several mistakes, the first of which had been the way he’d approached jury selection.
It had started when he’d questioned the prospective jurors en masse and by the book: “Keep it short, straightforward, simple, and then sit down; let the defense bore the prospective jurors with a lengthy, tedious voir dire.”
The problem was that the book had been written before the cultural implosion that had begun in the 1960s and swept through the 1970s. That change had ushered in a general mistrust of the government, specifically police officers.
“If you’d asked a prospective juror in the 1950s if he would believe a police officer’s word, at least nine times out of ten, he would have said, ‘Sure, of course,’” he’d explained to Katz as they’d prepared for voir dire in the Jabbar case. “But after that, the mantra became ‘Question Authority.’ Add that to police scandals and corruption investigations, and suddenly, people didn’t trust cops, or any other representatives of the government, including us. Cops got it the worst. They were referred to as pigs and bullies.
“It used to be that people didn’t think a couple of bad apples spoiled the barrel; now they think they’re all bad apples, except maybe a few. Up to the mid-sixties, it was the defense lawyers who would ask prospective jurors if they would believe cops more than anyone else and try to get rid of anyone who did. Now, we’re the ones who need to ask whether the juror can fairly, without bias judge a cop’s testimony and not automatically reject it.”
If anything, jurors leaned more toward the defense, Karp had told his protégé, especially in New York City, one of the most liberal populations in the country. But he had learned to deal with it, starting with the retrial against O’Dowd and her cop-killer clients when he “threw away the book.”
In the retrial, Karp had argued that massive pretrial publicity had swung the door wide open for biases against either side. He had then won a motion that each juror be individually questioned. He’d painstakingly talked to each juror about all of his or her views: political, social, economic, religious, and philosophical—looking for anything that might affect that juror’s ability to be fair and impartial, “without fear or favor to either side.” And he’d paid particular attention to how they answered his questions about law enforcement. Had they had bad experiences with police officers? Were they less likely to believe a police officer than anyone else?
It had been a long, laborious process that lasted eight weeks and was still the jury-selection record for the State of New York. And he’d come up with a jury that after three months found the four defendants guilty of murder.
Selecting the jury in the Jabbar case had taken less than half as long, though certainly longer than it would have using the traditional method. But Karp had selected scores of juries since that other case, and he was much more zeroed in on what he was looking for and battling against when finding the magical twelve.
With O’Dowd loudly broadcasting her trial strategy in the media, Karp had known that once again, she hoped to capitalize on the public’s distrust of government and its agencies, especially intelligence agencies. How he dealt with that would be vital to this case. Two federal agents—Tran and Jojola—had witnessed the murder of Miriam Juma Khalifa in the basement of Jabbar’s mosque, as the imam led his jihadis in celebrating her brutal execution. The defense attorney’s only chance was to claim that Tran and Jojola were lying and had even committed the murder themselves as part of a government conspiracy to use the War on Terrorism to silence the imam and destroy his mosque.
Once again, he was faced with the big-lie defense. O’Dowd would try to obfuscate the truth by creating a fiction so outrageous and mixed with half-truths and lies that some jurors might believe she couldn’t have made it up—especially any who already tended to believe that federal agents regularly conspired to commit crimes to frame innocent people and that the DAO was a racist organization.
O’Dowd was not stupid; much to the contrary. She knew that if she faced a jury that would reach its verdict based on the factual evidence, her client would be convicted. So she needed jurors who were wired with a shortcircuit between their reason and their fringe political conspiratorial fantasies. The trial venue was on the island of Manhattan—advantage defense.
On the other hand, Karp wanted jurors who would work as a team and didn’t deviate from the norm simply for the sake of being different. He hoped to root out potential jurors who might disregard the evidence and decide the case using their emotions and intuition. He needed mature, thoughtful people who could put their personal beliefs aside as much as possible and calmly, objectively see through the defense’s smokescreen and judge the case solely on the merits of the evidence. He wanted people with a stake in the stability and safety of their community, who had respect for law enforcement and the justice system, and who were used to sizing up other people and their intentions, like shopkeepers.
They were the ones he hoped he’d placed on the jury so far, and whom he was now looking for in those prospective jurors who were left to fill the one remaining seat. Part of his approach to picking a jury included seeing how they dressed and acted. The guy in tennis shorts and a T-shirt was saying he thought the process was bullshit and had no respect for the system. He was not a good choice. But the women who every day appeared in nice dresses and the guys who wore slacks and button-down shirts were saying that they took their duty as citizens seriously and respected the system. Those were the people he was looking for.
However, there weren’t many of them left in the gallery. And there was no telling which of their names Al Lopez would call if he didn’t accept the juror whose name had been called to fill the twelfth seat shortly before court had adjourned on Friday. If he didn’t keep that man, as Katz had urged, he wouldn’t be able to do anything about whomever was called to replace him. Karp had used twenty-nine of his peremptory challenges and had only one left.
As Karp glanced around the courtroom, he noted that there was twice as many court security officers present as during a run-of-the-mill murder trial, even for a high-profile defendant. Many more were placed in the halls and the entry leading into the courtroom, and the officers were extra vigilant and thorough at the security checkpoint coming into the building.
When the media had asked about the additional security, which was prearranged with Karp’s office, the court administrator had explained that precautions were necessary to protect Imam Jabbar from anyone with a grudge against alleged murderous Islamic extremists. Not a difficult story to believe in New York City.
In truth, there had been a number of threats against Jabbar worth monitoring, including some connected to the NYPD, whose officers were killed because of Jabbar’s involvement in the attack on the stock exchange. And there were unconfirmed reports that some members of Jabbar’s former congregation had sworn some sort of blood vengeance for the deaths of their sons whom he’d led astray and, in Mahmoud Juma’s case, the daughter who’d been murdered in cold blood.
However, Karp’s chief concern was about threats to one of his witnesses, Dean Newbury. Not from revenge-minded police officers and distraught families but from the organization the old man had once led, the Sons of Man, and they were far more dangerous. If he’d needed any further proof of that, it had arrived the week before with a telephone call from Espey Jaxon, who in a tight, angry voice informed him that Denton Crawford, the disgraced former congressman and SOM member, had been assassinated along with a half-dozen U.S. marshals.
Jaxon explained that Crawford was being moved to the Supermax penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, for his protection as a deal was worked out for his cooperation. The transfer was supposed to have been top-secret, given the same stringent security measures that the U.S. Marshal’s Office used to transport the “worst of the worst.”
“It was an inside job,” Jaxon said, seething. “Apparently, one of their own betrayed his team, who were killed, and then this son of a bitch participated in ambushing the jet that was used to fly Crawford to Colorado. He was killed by Joe Rosen, one of the marshals on the Crawford security detail. Unfortunately, Rosen was also killed, as was Crawford. Another marshal, a friend of mine named Jen Capers, was shot, too, but it looks like she’s going to recover fully.”
“Thank God for that. I know Jen Capers,” Karp had said. “She’s a good friend of Clay Fulton’s as well.”
Jaxon had gone on to describe what happened as best as it could be pieced together by talking to Capers and the evidence at the scene. “Sorry to break the bad news,” he’d added. “But there’s more. Jen got a good look at the leader of the bad guys; we’re pretty sure it was Nadya Malovo.”
“Could have guessed,” Karp had lamented. “I hope there will be a day when she sits in the docket and I prosecute her.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” Jaxon had said. “I’d rather put her six feet under.”
“I wouldn’t shed any tears at her funeral,” Karp had replied, “unless it’s for the innocent people she’s killed.”
“Apparently, the feeling is mutual,” Jaxon had noted. “She let Capers live at least in part to pass on a message for you: ‘Tell him that I will take my revenge against him one life at a time until he is the last one, and then I will take him, too.’ Sounds pretty personal, so watch your back.”
Karp had thought about it and then shrugged. There was no doubt that Malovo was extremely dangerous, and she had apparently fixated on him as her nemesis. But if he’d let threats get to him, he would have gone into private practice a long time ago. “When you find her, tell her to get in line, and it’s a long one,” he’d told Jaxon.
There was no question the Sons of Man would be even more anxious to silence Newbury than they had Crawford. In fact, they’d already tried. Several months earlier, Fulton had reported that various sources, including Dirty Warren passing the messages for Grale, were saying that some high rollers with a lot of clout were trying to locate Dean Newbury.
“The bastards are promising a boatload of money,” Fulton had said.
Over the past couple of months, according to the detective, the reports of attempts to find Newbury had grown fewer. But even if Jaxon hadn’t been around to point it out, Karp knew that the lack of new inquiries wasn’t because the Sons of Man had given up. They had just backed off to try another route.
It worried him. He’d never intended to use Crawford as a witness in the Jabbar trial. But he did plan on calling Dean Newbury as the nexus connecting Al-Sistani, Malovo, and the defendant. And Newbury would be at his most vulnerable being transported between the Tombs, where he’d been moved for the trial, and the eleventh floor . . . and while in the courtroom.
Fulton had worked with the court security staff to ramp up precautions. Starting with jury selection, everybody—attorneys, clerks, court reporters, journalists, spectators, and cops not assigned to court security—passed through the metal detector. Then, when they reached the eleventh floor, they had to pass through a gamut of bomb-sniffing dogs and more officers with metal-detecting wands. All bags were X-rayed, searched, and sniffed. And anything resembling a weapon—including any liquids—was confiscated.
During the trial, anyone with access to the well of the court, the attorney tables, the witness stand, the jury box, and the judge’s dais would have had to submit to a background check. Everyone else had to stay in the gallery on the other side of the bar, and even there, the first two rows had been reserved for defense and DA support staff, as well as detectives and police officers on the prosecution side. Fulton also planned to salt the gallery with plainclothes members of his bureau.
“Short of being able to read minds and get a jump on what somebody’s contemplating,” Fulton had said, “I can’t think of anything more to do.”
“I think you’ve got it covered. What else is happening?” Karp had asked.
“We’ve got a lot of other work in the hopper, and we’re stretched pretty thin. I’ll be bouncing in and out of the court during the trial, and I have good people assigned to the trial, headed up by Sergeant Cordova; he’s as sharp as they come and as tough as nails. I’ll check in from time to time, and I will be present for Newbury’s testimony to keep an extra eye on the crowd. But unless you think I have to be there full-time, I’m probably of more use elsewhere.”
“No, I don’t see the need,” Karp had replied. “Mike Cordova’s a good man. Younger, probably better eyes, too.”
“Hey, hey,” Fulton had growled. “This bull is still king of the pasture.”
Karp smiled at the remembered metaphor just as the court clerk announced the arrival of Judge Mason. The judge glared briefly at the prosecution table and nodded agreeably to O’Dowd, who returned the acknowledgment. Without further ado, Mason announced that they would now resume questioning of the man who’d been called to replace the juror dismissed before court had adjourned on Friday.
“Ms. O’Dowd, I believe you said you were finished with your voir dire,” the judge said. “Am I correct?”
“You are, your honor,” O’Dowd replied.
The judge turned to Karp. “Are the People ready?”
“We are, your honor,” Karp said as he rose from his seat and faced the handsome black man sitting in seat twelve.
The forty-five-year-old looked back at him without expression, his eyes steady, neither smiling nor frowning. Hassan Malik had been the subject of a spirited debate between Karp and ADA Kenny Katz, who’d argued after court recessed for the weekend that they had to remove him from the jury.
“Why?” Karp had asked.
“Well, let me play devil’s advocate here. The fact is, he’s a black Muslim, obviously sympathetic to the defense,” his protégé had replied.
It wasn’t an unreasonable argument. The defense had obviously hoped to keep Malik on the jury; O’Dowd’s questioning had been geared toward assuring the court that despite his religion, Malik could put aside his personal feelings and follow the law as laid out by Judge Mason. Of course, that’s not what she hopes if he does remain on the jury, he’d thought.
They all knew that O’Dowd didn’t hold out much hope that the prosecution would allow it, but she wanted to make sure the judge didn’t dismiss Malik for cause. That way, Karp would have to use his last peremptory challenge to knock him off the panel.
In this case, Katz agreed with O’Dowd, though for his own reasons. “You can’t seriously be thinking about leaving him on,” he’d insisted. “He’s American-born, but as a Muslim, he is obliged to put God above country. And Jabbar, whether Malik agrees with his politics or not, is an imam—an imam who has sworn on the Koran that he was not responsible for Miriam’s death. And the defense has been playing the racism and anti-Islam cards since January, which, by the way, has been a hit on Arab-language television here and abroad. Why take a chance that this guy harbors some resentment? It’s pretty obvious that O’Dowd would pay us to let him on the jury.”
Karp had been looking out of the eighth-floor window at the pedestrians below. The People of the State of New York, he’d thought. The reason we do this. “But she thinks there’s no way in hell we’ll do it,” he’d said, almost to himself. “We’ll let her prejudices work against her.”
“How do you mean?” Katz had asked.
“Just this: Other than trying to set it up so that we’d have to use our last peremptory challenge to have Mr. Malik removed, Megan O’Dowd hardly bothered to question him with any depth for two reasons. The first is that she doesn’t think we’ll allow Mr. Malik to serve, so why waste her breath on an extended voir dire. But the more important reason is that O’Dowd is a racist.”
“A racist? You mean she hates whites?”
“No, I mean she’s your garden-variety radical white racist,” Karp had replied. “She assumes that because Malik is black and a Muslim, he’s automatically going to side with another black Muslim. No questions asked. She is in effect saying that because Mr. Malik is a black man, he is incapable of exercising his responsibilities as a good citizen who will listen to the testimony, look at the evidence, and decide if another man—not an imam—broke the law. The same law, by the way, that protects black Muslims from criminals also.”
“And what’s to say he isn’t that guy?” Katz had asked.
Karp had shrugged. “Nothing,” he’d admitted. “The same nothing that prevents any juror from ignoring the law or letting his or her personal beliefs dictate how he or she votes. All you can go on are their answers during the course of the voir dire and their demeanor. Did you read Mr. Malik’s responses on the jury questionnaire?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You see his previous employment response?”
“He was in the army,” Katz had said, “and served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, like me.”
“He wasn’t just in the army or a combat veteran, was he, Kenny?”
“No, he was a top sergeant and an MP . . . a cop. You think that’s more important than his religious beliefs? I knew some black Muslims in my unit, and they caught a lot of shit from some of the other guys. A few were pretty bitter about it.”
“Obviously, we’ll have to feel him out about that. But let’s look at the facts. The fact that he was a master sergeant suggests that he was promoted for good reason and then committed no offenses that would have got him demoted, right?”
“Right.”
“And he was in for twenty years, all of it with the military police.”
“As a top sergeant, he’s a leader of men, and I assume that not all of those men would have been black Muslims. So he must have been a team player. Am I right?”
Katz had smiled, seeing the writing on the wall. “You are correct, sir.”
“He got out with an honorable discharge and a full pension from the United States government. And he now owns his own garage, where he works as a mechanic, which also makes him a small businessman with a stake in the safety and stability of his community.”
“Right on all counts. But that still doesn’t mean his experiences as a black Muslim in the U.S. Army didn’t make him angry. Maybe that’s even why he got out.”
“We’ll ask him about it when we get our shot on Monday,” Karp had said. “I think it will become obvious if there’s a problem. But I’ve got a feeling that a military cop who saw firsthand the depredations of Islamic extremists isn’t automatically going to side with another one. All O’Dowd sees is a black man. Besides, if we use the last of our challenges, the next juror called could be worse, much worse. And let me ask you this. You were a sergeant and saw combat. You were decorated; he was decorated. What does your gut tell you?”
“The good news is I like the fact he was a military cop,” Katz had replied. “The bad news is I’m still concerned if he will follow the law.” Having seen the light, Katz had asked, “Are you worried that O’Dowd will get suspicious if we don’t remove Mr. Malik? Maybe she’ll think you know something and decide to take her chances on the next person. Maybe she’ll use a challenge.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Karp had replied. “We’ll just have to use a little finesse.”
An earlier prospective juror had set the stage for a little finesse when Karp had him in the judge’s chambers for individual voir dire. He had asked if the middle-aged man, a history teacher at a Manhattan prep school, had any “political, social, economic, religious, or philosophical reasons” that he would not be able to reach a fair and impartial verdict.
“I am a twenty-five-year member of the American Workers Party.”
“A Communist?” Karp had asked.
“Communist. Socialist. It’s not against the law to belong to any political party of my choosing,” the man had said defiantly.
Karp had held up a hand. “You’re absolutely right; I was just trying to clarify. And do you believe that affiliation might prevent you from following his honor’s instructions and reaching a fair and impartial verdict in this case?”
“Well.” The man had sniffed as he adjusted his round eyeglasses. “As a member of the party, I am opposed to the current government of the United States.”
“By your answer, I take it that you also believe our laws are illegal within the scope of your deeply felt political philosophy?”
“Yes, I believe it is an illegal government controlled by rich capitalists and their puppeteers, the international Jewish cabal. And therefore its laws are also illegal.”
“Is it fair to say that as a committed Communist, you also believe that our government is immoral?”
“Absolutely.”
“It follows, then, that law-enforcement officers are instruments of the government, used to control the population, like Cossacks serving to keep their masters in power?”
“Perfectly stated, Mr. Karp.”
“I see,” Karp had said, and turned to Judge Mason. “Your honor, it’s clear from this gentleman’s answers that he will not only not believe police officers who will testify, but he will also not follow the law as his honor will instruct. I ask that this man be excused for cause.”
“I oppose,” O’Dowd had chimed in immediately. “It’s still not illegal, though perhaps we’re almost there, to have a different political philosophy from that of the esteemed district attorney. He didn’t say he’d refuse to follow the judge’s instructions or that he would automatically disbelieve police officers.”
Judge Mason had looked at the juror. “Sir, are you saying you’d refuse to apply the law as I instruct?”
The prospective juror had shrugged. “Depends. I would follow my own conscience, but I would certainly listen to what you have to say.” He’d looked at Karp. “I, at least, am not some jack-booted authority figure trying to impose my will on the oppressed.”
“Your honor, this fine fellow is clearly unwilling to answer the question directly, much less say he will follow the law,” Karp had pointed out. He knew that judges in general didn’t like to excuse potential jurors for cause, as it opened the door for appellate review post-conviction. And this judge would be even more reluctant because it was Karp who was asking.
Judge Mason had then asked the juror again if he would follow the law without question, “even if you disagree with it.” At that point, the juror had realized that for him to remain on the jury, which he clearly wanted so that he could “fight the system,” he would have to answer affirmatively. “Well, if you put it that way, then yes, I suppose I would,” he’d said, smirking at Karp.
The judge had then ruled: “I decline to remove this man for cause. Mr. Karp, your request is denied.”
Karp, suppressing the urge to engage further with Mason, had declared, “Then I will use one of my peremptories. I don’t want him contaminating the rest of the jurors; I want him escorted out of the courtroom.”
The judge’s ruling had incensed Karp, given the juror’s obvious bias, but it had given him an idea about how to handle Hassan Malik. He asked again to voir dire the man in chambers. Once there, he started by questioning Malik about his past leading up to his service overseas and experiences as a black Muslim in the U.S. Army.
“While you were in the army, did you have any problems because of your religion?” Karp asked.
“Officially, no, sir,” Malik replied.
Karp noted the use of sir. “What about unofficially?”
Malik’s expression hardened. “There were instances of some animosity, particularly after nine-eleven and later when I was overseas.”
“What sort of instances?”
“Taunting, things said so that I could overhear,” Malik replied. “A dead rat placed on my bunk with a note that read, ‘Watch your back, sand nigger.’”
“Did some question your loyalty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Angry.”
“What did you do about it?”
The man shrugged. “Nothing I could do about it, sir. So I just did my job.”
Karp furrowed his brow as though the next question troubled him greatly. “Mr. Malik, are you loyal first to the United States or to your religion?”
“As a Muslim, I place nothing before my duty to Allah.”
Allowing his shoulders to sag just a bit, Karp looked at Judge Mason. “Your honor, I have concerns about his statement that his first loyalty would be to Allah.”
Mason looked balefully at Karp but then turned to Malik. “In honesty, Mr. Malik, I understand that you place God before country. That does not exclude your participation on this panel. However, I do want to ask on behalf of Mr. Karp here if you believe that you can listen to the evidence and, after being instructed on the law by me, reach a fair and impartial verdict.”
Malik scowled and glanced at Karp. “My religion does not prevent me from serving on the jury and following instructions, sir.”
“Very well,” Mason said with a slight smile as he turned to Karp. “Anything more?”
Karp hesitated and then shook his head. “No, your honor.”
“Then I suggest we return to the courtroom,” the judge said.
When they’d reassembled in the courtroom, the judge asked Karp, “Are you going to use your peremptory challenge to keep this man from being seated?”
Karp bit his lip. “May I have a moment to confer with my cocounsel?” he asked.
“You may, but make it quick,” Mason replied. “It’s the eleventh hour and time to move on in this trial.”
“Yes, your honor,” Karp replied, and returned to the prosecution table, where he leaned over to whisper to Katz. “Don’t speak aloud, but act as if we’re locked in debate over this. I want O’Dowd to think that we are only reluctantly accepting Malik as the lesser of possible evils.”
Katz pointed out, “Apparently, no one noticed that you didn’t ask Mason to remove him for cause.”
Karp kept the frown on his face, but his eyes twinkled. “Funny how that worked,” he said, then shook his head and rapped his knuckles on the table. He looked at the remaining jurors and shook his head again, as if afraid of what prejudices against the prosecution might lurk in the gallery. Finally, he turned back to the judge with a sigh. “Your honor, Mr. Malik is acceptable to the People.”
Mason barely hid the smile on his face. “Ms. O’Dowd?”
The defense attorney also smiled. “Your honor, the defense is satisfied with Mr. Malik’s presence on the jury.”
The judge rapped his gavel. “Okay, we now have twelve. Let’s get on with selecting the four alternates.”