By S. Sponte, Esq.
Maybe it was the comeuppance colleagues have been promising me for years, or maybe it was the result of poor trial preparation. Some have even suggested it was because I was cocky, but I don’t think so. I’m too damn smart for that. It was probably just one of those things that happens, though not usually to me.
When I asked the witness where she was from, she could have said, “From Hell,” and been right. If I had had any inkling, any inkling at all, of what was going to happen, I would have shot her on the spot, fully confident that any jury in the land would have accepted my defense of justifiable witnicide.
It all started inauspiciously enough. I was representing the co-executor in an effort to remove his sister as the other co-executor of a deceased brother’s estate for stealing money from the decedent’s safe after he died. It was a non-jury trial, and on paper the case seemed quite well screwed together. We had one witness who saw the sister take envelopes from the safe, another who knew the envelopes contained money and yet another who heard her brag about the deed. Oh, there was no doubt of the respondent’s guilt, we just had to prove it.
One of the principal witnesses was an individual I shall hereinafter refer to as “Betty.” I refer to her as “Betty” because that was her name. Now, usually I make up a name to avoid embarrassing anyone who might read this. In this particular instance however, it is quite unnecessary. I am certain that neither Betty nor anyone she could possibly know has the ability to read.
Betty had been the long-time girlfriend of the deceased, and she had told me that she had counted the money with her boyfriend not one week before he passed on. Inasmuch as we knew how much money was in the safe after the funeral, her testimony was critical to prove that money was missing and in what amount.
Now call it a hunch, but I figured Betty was pretty upset that she got nothing in the will. It was the way she kept referring to the deceased as an SOB that tipped me off.
I shouldn’t be too critical of myself, I suppose. After all, the captain of the Titanic never saw the iceberg, and Betty was, if not less frigid, certainly a bit smaller.
Since all the other witnesses appeared inherently believable and considerably less problematic, I took a cue from baseball and decided that Betty would be my last witness, sort of like the way pitchers always bat ninth.
Well, if I didn’t appreciate the designated-hitter rule before, I sure do now. Betty was a disaster. She swore at the litigants, she answered questions that were not asked of her, and at one point she actually made an obscene gesture at the judge. And it got worse when she took the witness stand.
My first pitch to her was an underhand lob.
“What is your name?”
“Huh?” she replied.
“I said, ‘What is your name?’”
“Huh?” she said again.
“Betty, what is your name?”
“Betty.”
So far, so good. I thought, but I was mistaken. It would be the only question she got right.
To her credit, she did remember counting the money with the decedent before he shuffled off. She got the amount wrong, though, as well as the date. She did not place it within a week before he died, not even within the same year. In retrospect, I consider myself fortunate that she managed to place it sometime within this century.
I started to get that nameless, helpless feeling that erupts in the pit of the stomach when a trial starts to go awry. Not willing to take any more chances, I finished her direct testimony as quickly as I could and prayed for a lackluster cross-examination.
It was not to be. By the time the cross-examination was over, she allowed as how she had opportunity, means and motive sufficient to have stolen the money herself, and I swear she was on the verge of confessing to the assassination of JFK when the judge recessed for lunch.
After the noon break, I rested, and none too soon I might add. I was damned tired. As Betty left the witness stand, she passed by counsel’s table and asked me how she did. She’s unlikely to do that again any time soon.
The remainder of the case is hazy to me, kind of like a bad dream replete with random patterns of speech I could not decipher, images floating in and out of focus, and a melancholic mélange of disjunctive occurrences that, despite my best efforts at recollection, still defy clarity. Oh, I remember at one point raising an objection to opposing counsel’s grammar, but that’s about all.
A few weeks later I received the judge’s opinion in the mail. It came as no surprise that he dismissed our petition, the first time I’ve agreed with him in years, and I advised my client not to appeal. Oh, he might have had a shot, albeit slim, but that would have meant ordering the transcript and then reading it, and I wouldn’t do that to a dog, not even to my associate.
So, from this should we conclude that justice has been undone by the babblings of a disgruntled old lady? Not really. You see, after we got the opinion, the client simply snuck into his sister’s house, found the money in a shoe box under her bed and put it back in the estate account. To our knowledge, the loss has yet to be reported.
Copyright 1997, S. Sponte, Esq.