February 28 (almost a decade ago) I got called for jury duty. I had been in jury pools previously in Jefferson Parish, but never in Washington. We moved to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain in 2000. That morning, rather than cross the lake to go to Metairie to work, I pulled over in Covington at the relatively new parish office building. I waited with my fellow potential jurors most of the morning in the jury pool waiting room. I then got voir dire'd (something like that) and rejected for a cocaine possession panel because I'm too white and too conservative. Prior to that rejection, I watched from outside the proceedings awaiting the Q&A. Like most people, I was interested in the proceedings. In Jefferson it seemed most of the time we were waiting for a civil case, which isn’t quite as interesting as criminal. Because this was my first criminal case exposure I had a heightened level of curiosity about what was going on. These were some interesting looking people in the courtroom. I was fascinated by the defense attorney, particularly. He was a bit of a performer and a pretty funny guy. Very entertaining. I would have liked to have stayed on a bit longer because the guy was both charming and authoritative. He definitely had a way about him. The defendant he represented this day was one guilty-looking dude (sorry but central casting would have sent him out for every cocaine possession role). In fact he looked more like a dealer. Since I was rejected from serving on that jury, I, along with my other rejected poolers, went back to waiting and reading magazines in the potential jury panel waiting room, the dullest place on earth. In Washington Parish, when you get called for jury duty, you are there for a week. By 5:00 PM all the panels had been assembled and the rest of the pool was released. After my first day of sitting around and waiting, I got in the Jeep and drove home to Folsom. Using the power of the internet that night, I looked up Marion Farmer, the defensive attorney. Turns out he used to be the DA for Washington Parish years ago. In fact he was the DA when Faith Hathaway was murdered and left in Fricke's cave by Robert Lee Willie and Joe Vaccaro. Needless to say, I spent a couple hours reading about the murder, the cave and putting it together with “Dead Man Walking.” Willie was one of two murder row inmates that were combined into the main character in the movie. It stared Sean Penn as the composite, fictional murderer and Susan Sarandon as Sister Prejean, his “spiritual advisor.” I had seen the movie. I hadn’t really read about what Willie and Vaccaro had done to Faith Hathaway. When you’re picked for a jury, you’re not supposed to go home and do independent research on that or any other case. Since I hadn’t been picked and since I was reading tangentially about Marion Farmer’s history, it seemed kosher. I must admit I wanted to drive up toward Franklinton and find Fricke’s cave but I didn’t have time. I had to go back to the courthouse the next day and get bored to death. It did focus my mind, however, about how serious some of this stuff was.
The next day I get called back down to court with about a hundred other potential jurors and again, the voir dire took several hours. As we sat in the the jury box and got asked questions about who we were and how we felt about various issues, including capital punishment, I (in retrospect) got stupid and asked a question about an issue that they were going over and trying to get us (as layman) to understand. I wasn’t sure I understood what they were saying and wanted it to be clear. By now I realize I should have looked grumpy and kept my cotton picking mouth shut. But I was confident I was a white fat cat that the defense would like to see back at work. Besides, they asked us to pick a number from 1 to 10 to indicate your enthusiasm for serving on the jury. Several people were very interested. Many weren’t that interested. I picked a 1. Not interested. Out of the 120 prospective jurors they took 16. Like Chevy Chase said in Nat Lamps Xmas vacation, I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d woken up with my tongue nailed to the floor when I was picked. We were told to get our stuff and we would be taken home by deputies to collect what we’d need for a week or two of sequestration.
Ruth saw the cruiser pull up to our house in Folsom and watched as I was escorted by two deputies inside to get my clothes and toiletries. I wouldn’t be communicating with the outside world for at least a week and maybe longer.
Condensed version of what the trial was about:
Guy named Jesse Montejo (23, six feet tall, long ugly nose with sinus trouble, skinny, covered with tattoos from long prison sentence, shorts falling down around his waste showing his underwear, head bandana and "f" word every other word, this from video taping of the period just after his arrest, he cleaned up okay for the trial) is our defendant. Louis Ferrari, Jr. (61, toupee, youngish-looking with dyed black hair, wearing sandals with socks, owns a string (22) of laundries called Corporate Cleaners in and around Slidell, Louisiana, one of which is run by his wife Pat) is our victim (we see Louis from his autopsy photos and crime scene photos wherein his right eye is a red blossomed Ojo de Dios (where the 357 magnum bullet penetrated his skull) looking out at us from the grave. Ugly.
Jesse gets out of prison in Florida after serving six years for so many armed robberies my head swam trying to grasp them all after having been incarcerated at the ripe old age of 17. Grows up in prison, eh? He moves to Louisiana to get some help from his Mom and Dad who don't have the same name (they sat in court, apart, he wouldn't look at this Mom, he don't like her, eh?) and gets an apartment (we got shown pictures, he can't keep house) and drives around in a van belonging to his Dad but which he gets the full use of. We see lots of pictures of lots of things over the course of the week, all blown up in a Powerpoint show. We also watched over twelve hours of video of questioning of the "suspect." The police can lie with impunity to any suspect. They tell him every lie they can think of to confuse him. "We can put you there. We can time DNA evidence. We got gunshot residue. Others put you there. They're talking right now. And so on. Keep lying to him until he begins to think they might really have something. They just can't promise him something they can't deliver and they can't threaten or intimidate him into a confession. Why Montejo didn't immediately get an attorney is anybody's guess. He did ask for one after about five hours and a detective jumps up and says, "okay, you're being charged with first degree murder, Jesse." Jesse then pleads for them to let him finish his "story" about what went down. Jesse is dumb, stupid and oh yeah, a murderer. Kind of fits though, huh?
Meanwhile details of the crime as reviewed from the start. Mr. Ferrari (the laundry owner) uses an ex-con (how many mistakes can Lou make?) named Jerry Moore to fix his dry-cleaning machines. Jerry's a crackhead, eh? Beats his wife. Don't pay his traffic tickets. Loses his driver's license. Damn good at fixing dry-cleaning machines but quits fixing the dry-cleaning machines cause he's lazy and druggie. Begs for advances from Lou Ferrari. Lou has a buncha' cleaners and drives to each every day to check ‘em out and also to collect his daily receipts, checks, and oh yeah, cash. Keeps the cash in a bag in the trunk of his white Cartier edition Lincoln Towncar. When Jerry begs him for money, he opens the trunk of his car, takes out his blue Corporate Cleaners laundry bag (right in front of Crackhead Jerry), extracts a wad of cash and gives him 20-40 bucks and tells him he's going to have to "work this money off Jerry, this ain't a gift, okay?" Soon they argue a lot over money. Lou tells Jerry, "Hey, I ain't afraid of you." (uh, he should have been)
Meanwhile because Jerry's lost his driver's license because he don't pay his traffic tickets he gets picked up hitchhiking by our boy Jesse Montejo who works locally (immediately after moving to Slidell after being released from prison in Florida) for one week at changing tires at a tire dealer and two weeks as a roofer but gets discouraged at how hard all that work is. Jerry says, "hey, Jesse, I make 40 bucks an hour fixing dry-cleaning machines but I can't get around to the cleaners because I can't drive, so how about driving me around for 50-60 bucks a day. You'll be my "wheels" dude." Jesse says, sounds like easy money Jerry, let's do it. He quits the roofing job. But Jerry doesn't always pay up well. He tends to smoke up all his money. Crack can get expensive, apparently.
Meanwhile one day while driving him around, Jesse witnesses Louis Ferrari pay Jerry out of his Lincoln's trunk with a wad of cash. Jesse remarks to Jerry, "I wish I had it like that." (exact quote from the trial) Jerry says, you don't know the half of it, that old guy keeps more money in his house AND in the trunk of his car than you'll ever need dude. He's loaded. AND, He don't lock his house. He don't even close his garage door. One day if you feel like it, you might want to check that shit out. I want a cut though, ‘cause I'm filling you in on a sweet thing. Remember, Thursday is the day he has the most money from weekly receipts. He even goes out for dinner every Thursday. Look in his closet too. Big stash there. Remember me when you do it.
Oh yeah. Jesse spends way too much money. Oh yea, He is also shacked up with his step-sister and her illegitimate daughter, uh, an "extended family" if you will. So he can't pay his rent and is being evicted and the little girl cries a lot. He also can't pay his $538.00 cell phone bill (more than his $450 apartment rent). He can't pay his utilities either. Oh, and he needs to upgrade his stereo and buy drugs. These are economic imperatives.
So, in order to get well, he gets his 17 year old step-brother to drive him over to Lou Ferrari's house. He will eventually give the boy a third of the proceeds of the robbery and a third to Jerry Moore. He shorts both of them of course. He keeps more than his share. They are both eventually charged with murder one (accessory). Their trials will come up eventually.
We get presented the crime something like this: Thursday September 5, 2002 at 4:45 PM Jesse enters the Ferrari house through the opened (probably) garage door. At 5:10-5:15 Mr. Ferrari comes home to drop off groceries he just bought before driving over to meet Pat and his son for supper at Cracker Barrel. Montejo kills Ferrari at 5:15 - 5:20. Takes Lou's car keys, steals his car, signals his step-brother to follow him out of the neighborhood. Small neighborhood. Lots of people see these strangers driving around. Lou's car following a blue Chevy van with a cattle guard on the front. Cleans the car out and dumps it three blocks from where he lives (phew, that's dumb). Pat Ferrari finds the body at 5:50 or so when Lou doesn't show up for supper at Cracker Barrel. She drove around looking and went home to find him dead. The police arrest Montejo at 3:30 PM the next afternoon and interrogate him for 12 hours. Jerry Moore gives him up as the killer. The family knows Jerry Moore might well have had something to do with it because it was pretty obvious he and Lou were falling out about money all the time. At 3:30AM the next day, Jesse confesses on video tape. He looks like a very tired, very lost kid finally trying to tell what he did. Except his story is one of about nine he tells. He is an ingrained, pathological liar. When he took the witness stand he told another version. Utterly ridiculous. A black guy from the ghetto did it and said if he told on him he'd kill his family. What it came down to was Mr. Ferrari scratched Jesse in a struggle and got his DNA under his fingernails. Three shots fired in the house. Two hit Mr. Ferrari. One into the couch. Several stories about how it went down. I cried when Pat Ferrari took the stand and told her own, very personal, very difficult version of what happened. Waiting for her husband at the restaurant where they ate every Thursday night with her son and daughter-in-law. Re-tracing her husband's normal steps to backtrack him to their house in case he had a flat tire. Finding his body slumped down in the kitchen. Hard on her. Very, very brave. Tough autopsy photos blown up on a projector in the courtroom. Tough crime scene photos. Evidence envelopes with skull fragments in them. I cried again the next to the last day (confined it to the jury room) when Scott Gardner, the assistant DA, cross examined Jesse Montejo. I sorta believed Jesse's lie number seven or eight about Lou Ferrari catching him ran-sacking the house and during a struggle he shot Lou in the side and when he wouldn't stop coming forward, shot him in the head. Then on the way out of the house the gun was cocked and he had to stick it in his pants and felt he had to discharge it first so he fires into the couch. There was bullet hole in the couch, the (?third?) shot fired, according to Jesse's eighth or ninth version. Version one: he wasn't there. Version two: Jerry Moore did it. Version three: it was an accident, and so on and so on. But Scott got Jesse to re-tell lie number ten on the witness stand, about the black guy named "DP" who forced Jesse over to the couch and put his head down on the couch and warned him that if he ever told anybody, he'd kill him and all his family, and fired a shot, right next to this head into the couch to scare him. And Scott said, hey Jesse, that's what you did to Lou Ferrari. That was the first shot, not the third. The one you used to try to scare him, intimidate him into giving you "the big stash". And then it all came crashing down for me. The confused, stupid, lying kid executed Lou Ferrari. The third shot traveled through his right eye socket and through his brain, through a bag of potato chips and into the wall. He'd served two co-terminus five and six year sentences in Florida for armed robbery. He was identified by the people he left behind. He now knew "never leave a witness behind." It made me as sad as anytime in my life. Sad for Lou. Sad for Jesse. Sad for humanity. I wanted to believe he had had such a struggle and he had a gun in his hand and it was just something that happened. I wanted to believe the kid wouldn't just kill like that, in cold blood. And when it came to me, it bothered me. Between the time he left Lou's body behind on the kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood, looking out on the world with a huge big red right eye staring at eternity for Pat to discover and the time he was tracked down by a discount card he used at a local grocery store, he managed to buy a new stereo system for his van. Big shaker speakers and amplifier. What a fucking waste. And yeah, everybody says, how stupid can you be to carry cash in your trunk, leave your house unlocked, with a 357 magnum in your bedroom (Lou was shot with his own gun). I hear that. I hear that. But I can't think it. I don't care if it's true. Not after seeing what happened to Lou and Pat Ferrari. I'm sorry but nobody deserves that. I was an alternate juror. Sat through the whole proceeding, right front row, immediately next to the witness box, but didn't deliberate. Was sequestered for a week. Took me home on a Friday with two deputies and more or less placed me under house arrest for a week at Holiday Inn. We were in court Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday. The jury found him guilty in two and half hours and sentenced him to lethal injection the next day in three hours. I became friends with a few people on the jury including the foreman, an ex-Delta pilot. We talked for a while about the deliberation. I might have argued against the death penalty. I don't really know but it just doesn't matter. Nothing really matters for Louis Ferrari any more. I can forgive Jesse Montejo, I guess. He really never had a chance to begin to understand how people are supposed to act. He learned most of what he thinks in prison. They revealed to us after the trail that Jesse had a prison tat on his back about never leaving a witness alive. I hope that one day Pat Ferrari can get some peace. But I doubt it. If they really kill Jesse in ten to twenty years after automatic appeal after appeal, I hope it brings closure for her. I argued with another juror that a man's life isn't about its end, no matter how horrible, it's about what went on every day of those sixty one years. Lou had a lot of good days before his last. That final day is really no more important than the day his son was born, or his daughter. God, I hope I'm right.
Post Script
I learned that jurors get coloring books. That they throw up a lot in the bathroom. We ate well most every night at decent restaurants, one of which I took Ruth to to try out after the trial. One morning for breakfast two guys shouted out to us to fry the “guilty sumbich” and got arrested on the spot. They looked surprised. The judge told us to ignore it. Wasn’t hard. One of my juror mates, the retired Delta pilot, flew his Navy fighter jet over his carrier inverted (and went on report) and popped his back jumping a motorcross bike when he was a kid. Another one them (retired army) got run over by a tank (crushed his leg). He had also been cleaved in the head by a machete when he broke into a building occupied by rebels when we invaded Granada. Split his helmet but he emptied his M-16 into the guy. The guy had a very hard head. We played Texas Hold Em at night. While the jury deliberated (I sat through the whole thing but was one of the alternates who wasn’t needed for deliberation) I played pool with police officers in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. One or two of the deputies were pretty good if they were winning. One or two games I ran so many balls in on them that they started to hit me when I was going to shoot and picked up the pool balls before I could run them in any more. Made me feel pretty good. They also cheated the pool table so we wouldn’t have to continuously put in quarters. What can I say, they were the law. I got filled in on the robberies that had occurred in the area. I was fast becoming one of the boys. I ran on the treadmill a lot. When the jury came in, they all sought me out to share with me what had happened during the deliberation. The guy who flew the carrier jet (the Delta pilot) was the foreman. They didn’t need many votes. The big argument was over the death penalty, not over if he was guilty, just over whether to kill him or not. I’m glad I didn’t have to vote for the death penalty. Probably would have because I said I would when I was picked for the jury. But you never know. Getting picked for the jury was an inconvenience. I know if I had had the chance to get out of it, I would have. It would have been a terrible mistake on my part. The experience was one of the singularly most educational weeks of my life. Not everything I learned was pleasant but it was all important, especially to Lou and Pat Ferrari and their daughter. I won’t hesitate next time to serve but I'm sure if I show any eagerness to do it, they'll reject me out of hand. But that won't surprise me.
After posting this story, I became aware that the capital murder case, on which I was a jury alternate, eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court, for appeal. The unsuccessful appeal is chronicled here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montejo_v._Louisiana
The next day I get called back down to court with about a hundred other potential jurors and again, the voir dire took several hours. As we sat in the the jury box and got asked questions about who we were and how we felt about various issues, including capital punishment, I (in retrospect) got stupid and asked a question about an issue that they were going over and trying to get us (as layman) to understand. I wasn’t sure I understood what they were saying and wanted it to be clear. By now I realize I should have looked grumpy and kept my cotton picking mouth shut. But I was confident I was a white fat cat that the defense would like to see back at work. Besides, they asked us to pick a number from 1 to 10 to indicate your enthusiasm for serving on the jury. Several people were very interested. Many weren’t that interested. I picked a 1. Not interested. Out of the 120 prospective jurors they took 16. Like Chevy Chase said in Nat Lamps Xmas vacation, I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d woken up with my tongue nailed to the floor when I was picked. We were told to get our stuff and we would be taken home by deputies to collect what we’d need for a week or two of sequestration.
Ruth saw the cruiser pull up to our house in Folsom and watched as I was escorted by two deputies inside to get my clothes and toiletries. I wouldn’t be communicating with the outside world for at least a week and maybe longer.
Condensed version of what the trial was about:
Guy named Jesse Montejo (23, six feet tall, long ugly nose with sinus trouble, skinny, covered with tattoos from long prison sentence, shorts falling down around his waste showing his underwear, head bandana and "f" word every other word, this from video taping of the period just after his arrest, he cleaned up okay for the trial) is our defendant. Louis Ferrari, Jr. (61, toupee, youngish-looking with dyed black hair, wearing sandals with socks, owns a string (22) of laundries called Corporate Cleaners in and around Slidell, Louisiana, one of which is run by his wife Pat) is our victim (we see Louis from his autopsy photos and crime scene photos wherein his right eye is a red blossomed Ojo de Dios (where the 357 magnum bullet penetrated his skull) looking out at us from the grave. Ugly.
Jesse gets out of prison in Florida after serving six years for so many armed robberies my head swam trying to grasp them all after having been incarcerated at the ripe old age of 17. Grows up in prison, eh? He moves to Louisiana to get some help from his Mom and Dad who don't have the same name (they sat in court, apart, he wouldn't look at this Mom, he don't like her, eh?) and gets an apartment (we got shown pictures, he can't keep house) and drives around in a van belonging to his Dad but which he gets the full use of. We see lots of pictures of lots of things over the course of the week, all blown up in a Powerpoint show. We also watched over twelve hours of video of questioning of the "suspect." The police can lie with impunity to any suspect. They tell him every lie they can think of to confuse him. "We can put you there. We can time DNA evidence. We got gunshot residue. Others put you there. They're talking right now. And so on. Keep lying to him until he begins to think they might really have something. They just can't promise him something they can't deliver and they can't threaten or intimidate him into a confession. Why Montejo didn't immediately get an attorney is anybody's guess. He did ask for one after about five hours and a detective jumps up and says, "okay, you're being charged with first degree murder, Jesse." Jesse then pleads for them to let him finish his "story" about what went down. Jesse is dumb, stupid and oh yeah, a murderer. Kind of fits though, huh?
Meanwhile details of the crime as reviewed from the start. Mr. Ferrari (the laundry owner) uses an ex-con (how many mistakes can Lou make?) named Jerry Moore to fix his dry-cleaning machines. Jerry's a crackhead, eh? Beats his wife. Don't pay his traffic tickets. Loses his driver's license. Damn good at fixing dry-cleaning machines but quits fixing the dry-cleaning machines cause he's lazy and druggie. Begs for advances from Lou Ferrari. Lou has a buncha' cleaners and drives to each every day to check ‘em out and also to collect his daily receipts, checks, and oh yeah, cash. Keeps the cash in a bag in the trunk of his white Cartier edition Lincoln Towncar. When Jerry begs him for money, he opens the trunk of his car, takes out his blue Corporate Cleaners laundry bag (right in front of Crackhead Jerry), extracts a wad of cash and gives him 20-40 bucks and tells him he's going to have to "work this money off Jerry, this ain't a gift, okay?" Soon they argue a lot over money. Lou tells Jerry, "Hey, I ain't afraid of you." (uh, he should have been)
Meanwhile because Jerry's lost his driver's license because he don't pay his traffic tickets he gets picked up hitchhiking by our boy Jesse Montejo who works locally (immediately after moving to Slidell after being released from prison in Florida) for one week at changing tires at a tire dealer and two weeks as a roofer but gets discouraged at how hard all that work is. Jerry says, "hey, Jesse, I make 40 bucks an hour fixing dry-cleaning machines but I can't get around to the cleaners because I can't drive, so how about driving me around for 50-60 bucks a day. You'll be my "wheels" dude." Jesse says, sounds like easy money Jerry, let's do it. He quits the roofing job. But Jerry doesn't always pay up well. He tends to smoke up all his money. Crack can get expensive, apparently.
Meanwhile one day while driving him around, Jesse witnesses Louis Ferrari pay Jerry out of his Lincoln's trunk with a wad of cash. Jesse remarks to Jerry, "I wish I had it like that." (exact quote from the trial) Jerry says, you don't know the half of it, that old guy keeps more money in his house AND in the trunk of his car than you'll ever need dude. He's loaded. AND, He don't lock his house. He don't even close his garage door. One day if you feel like it, you might want to check that shit out. I want a cut though, ‘cause I'm filling you in on a sweet thing. Remember, Thursday is the day he has the most money from weekly receipts. He even goes out for dinner every Thursday. Look in his closet too. Big stash there. Remember me when you do it.
Oh yeah. Jesse spends way too much money. Oh yea, He is also shacked up with his step-sister and her illegitimate daughter, uh, an "extended family" if you will. So he can't pay his rent and is being evicted and the little girl cries a lot. He also can't pay his $538.00 cell phone bill (more than his $450 apartment rent). He can't pay his utilities either. Oh, and he needs to upgrade his stereo and buy drugs. These are economic imperatives.
So, in order to get well, he gets his 17 year old step-brother to drive him over to Lou Ferrari's house. He will eventually give the boy a third of the proceeds of the robbery and a third to Jerry Moore. He shorts both of them of course. He keeps more than his share. They are both eventually charged with murder one (accessory). Their trials will come up eventually.
We get presented the crime something like this: Thursday September 5, 2002 at 4:45 PM Jesse enters the Ferrari house through the opened (probably) garage door. At 5:10-5:15 Mr. Ferrari comes home to drop off groceries he just bought before driving over to meet Pat and his son for supper at Cracker Barrel. Montejo kills Ferrari at 5:15 - 5:20. Takes Lou's car keys, steals his car, signals his step-brother to follow him out of the neighborhood. Small neighborhood. Lots of people see these strangers driving around. Lou's car following a blue Chevy van with a cattle guard on the front. Cleans the car out and dumps it three blocks from where he lives (phew, that's dumb). Pat Ferrari finds the body at 5:50 or so when Lou doesn't show up for supper at Cracker Barrel. She drove around looking and went home to find him dead. The police arrest Montejo at 3:30 PM the next afternoon and interrogate him for 12 hours. Jerry Moore gives him up as the killer. The family knows Jerry Moore might well have had something to do with it because it was pretty obvious he and Lou were falling out about money all the time. At 3:30AM the next day, Jesse confesses on video tape. He looks like a very tired, very lost kid finally trying to tell what he did. Except his story is one of about nine he tells. He is an ingrained, pathological liar. When he took the witness stand he told another version. Utterly ridiculous. A black guy from the ghetto did it and said if he told on him he'd kill his family. What it came down to was Mr. Ferrari scratched Jesse in a struggle and got his DNA under his fingernails. Three shots fired in the house. Two hit Mr. Ferrari. One into the couch. Several stories about how it went down. I cried when Pat Ferrari took the stand and told her own, very personal, very difficult version of what happened. Waiting for her husband at the restaurant where they ate every Thursday night with her son and daughter-in-law. Re-tracing her husband's normal steps to backtrack him to their house in case he had a flat tire. Finding his body slumped down in the kitchen. Hard on her. Very, very brave. Tough autopsy photos blown up on a projector in the courtroom. Tough crime scene photos. Evidence envelopes with skull fragments in them. I cried again the next to the last day (confined it to the jury room) when Scott Gardner, the assistant DA, cross examined Jesse Montejo. I sorta believed Jesse's lie number seven or eight about Lou Ferrari catching him ran-sacking the house and during a struggle he shot Lou in the side and when he wouldn't stop coming forward, shot him in the head. Then on the way out of the house the gun was cocked and he had to stick it in his pants and felt he had to discharge it first so he fires into the couch. There was bullet hole in the couch, the (?third?) shot fired, according to Jesse's eighth or ninth version. Version one: he wasn't there. Version two: Jerry Moore did it. Version three: it was an accident, and so on and so on. But Scott got Jesse to re-tell lie number ten on the witness stand, about the black guy named "DP" who forced Jesse over to the couch and put his head down on the couch and warned him that if he ever told anybody, he'd kill him and all his family, and fired a shot, right next to this head into the couch to scare him. And Scott said, hey Jesse, that's what you did to Lou Ferrari. That was the first shot, not the third. The one you used to try to scare him, intimidate him into giving you "the big stash". And then it all came crashing down for me. The confused, stupid, lying kid executed Lou Ferrari. The third shot traveled through his right eye socket and through his brain, through a bag of potato chips and into the wall. He'd served two co-terminus five and six year sentences in Florida for armed robbery. He was identified by the people he left behind. He now knew "never leave a witness behind." It made me as sad as anytime in my life. Sad for Lou. Sad for Jesse. Sad for humanity. I wanted to believe he had had such a struggle and he had a gun in his hand and it was just something that happened. I wanted to believe the kid wouldn't just kill like that, in cold blood. And when it came to me, it bothered me. Between the time he left Lou's body behind on the kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood, looking out on the world with a huge big red right eye staring at eternity for Pat to discover and the time he was tracked down by a discount card he used at a local grocery store, he managed to buy a new stereo system for his van. Big shaker speakers and amplifier. What a fucking waste. And yeah, everybody says, how stupid can you be to carry cash in your trunk, leave your house unlocked, with a 357 magnum in your bedroom (Lou was shot with his own gun). I hear that. I hear that. But I can't think it. I don't care if it's true. Not after seeing what happened to Lou and Pat Ferrari. I'm sorry but nobody deserves that. I was an alternate juror. Sat through the whole proceeding, right front row, immediately next to the witness box, but didn't deliberate. Was sequestered for a week. Took me home on a Friday with two deputies and more or less placed me under house arrest for a week at Holiday Inn. We were in court Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday. The jury found him guilty in two and half hours and sentenced him to lethal injection the next day in three hours. I became friends with a few people on the jury including the foreman, an ex-Delta pilot. We talked for a while about the deliberation. I might have argued against the death penalty. I don't really know but it just doesn't matter. Nothing really matters for Louis Ferrari any more. I can forgive Jesse Montejo, I guess. He really never had a chance to begin to understand how people are supposed to act. He learned most of what he thinks in prison. They revealed to us after the trail that Jesse had a prison tat on his back about never leaving a witness alive. I hope that one day Pat Ferrari can get some peace. But I doubt it. If they really kill Jesse in ten to twenty years after automatic appeal after appeal, I hope it brings closure for her. I argued with another juror that a man's life isn't about its end, no matter how horrible, it's about what went on every day of those sixty one years. Lou had a lot of good days before his last. That final day is really no more important than the day his son was born, or his daughter. God, I hope I'm right.
Post Script
I learned that jurors get coloring books. That they throw up a lot in the bathroom. We ate well most every night at decent restaurants, one of which I took Ruth to to try out after the trial. One morning for breakfast two guys shouted out to us to fry the “guilty sumbich” and got arrested on the spot. They looked surprised. The judge told us to ignore it. Wasn’t hard. One of my juror mates, the retired Delta pilot, flew his Navy fighter jet over his carrier inverted (and went on report) and popped his back jumping a motorcross bike when he was a kid. Another one them (retired army) got run over by a tank (crushed his leg). He had also been cleaved in the head by a machete when he broke into a building occupied by rebels when we invaded Granada. Split his helmet but he emptied his M-16 into the guy. The guy had a very hard head. We played Texas Hold Em at night. While the jury deliberated (I sat through the whole thing but was one of the alternates who wasn’t needed for deliberation) I played pool with police officers in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. One or two of the deputies were pretty good if they were winning. One or two games I ran so many balls in on them that they started to hit me when I was going to shoot and picked up the pool balls before I could run them in any more. Made me feel pretty good. They also cheated the pool table so we wouldn’t have to continuously put in quarters. What can I say, they were the law. I got filled in on the robberies that had occurred in the area. I was fast becoming one of the boys. I ran on the treadmill a lot. When the jury came in, they all sought me out to share with me what had happened during the deliberation. The guy who flew the carrier jet (the Delta pilot) was the foreman. They didn’t need many votes. The big argument was over the death penalty, not over if he was guilty, just over whether to kill him or not. I’m glad I didn’t have to vote for the death penalty. Probably would have because I said I would when I was picked for the jury. But you never know. Getting picked for the jury was an inconvenience. I know if I had had the chance to get out of it, I would have. It would have been a terrible mistake on my part. The experience was one of the singularly most educational weeks of my life. Not everything I learned was pleasant but it was all important, especially to Lou and Pat Ferrari and their daughter. I won’t hesitate next time to serve but I'm sure if I show any eagerness to do it, they'll reject me out of hand. But that won't surprise me.
After posting this story, I became aware that the capital murder case, on which I was a jury alternate, eventually made it's way to the Supreme Court, for appeal. The unsuccessful appeal is chronicled here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montejo_v._Louisiana
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