A Red Scare
When your worst trial is actually your best, and also your own.
At the peak of my activity as a criminal advocate, it was typical of others to perceive me in a bumbling, comical light. The ethical dubiousness of my endeavor was, for a time, set aside for the delight of the spectacle. But as I sunk down from criminal advocate to actual criminal, my competency somehow rose. Bumbling and comical became methodical and sinister. You see this with all sorts of crime, and murder especially. All murderers are imbued with a superhuman capacity for carnage, all because they have fewer behavioral filters compared to most people. It’s a weirdly flattering myth that overlooks murder’s labor-intensiveness. The best murderer is not just uninhibited, but has both the upper body strength and the logistical prowess to allocate his free time in order to, for instance, dispose of a body effectively. But clearly murderers can fail, and require defenders, who can also fail. One of my cases where both things happened persists in haunting me.
Most would remember People v. Rodney Stigler even if I hadn’t been involved. So this summary is for the few people who missed the podcast, the Dateline episode, or the Hulu documentary. Mr. Stigler, age 49, was by all accounts a respectable citizen. Amicably divorced with two teenaged children, Stigler was a mid-level executive in health insurance. He was the kind of affable person who related to everyone and seemed endlessly accommodating. He instigated water balloon fights with the neighborhood kids on Independence Day and flashlight tag on Labor Day. He even narrowly lost a seat on his Board of Education. He donated clothes and books regularly, often directly to people he knew for certain needed them. So when he struck and killed a man returning a cart in the Whole Foods parking lot with his Ford Explorer, people were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Stigler told police that he was fumbling with his glasses that had fallen to the floor when he hit the man, even as eyewitness accounts, and CCTV footage, had him driving pin-straight and at full speed. He pled guilty to reckless endangerment and destruction of property, got a year of probation with a suspended driver’s license and had to compensate Whole Foods for the cart. Not so bad as his eldest son had a learner’s permit.
Yet within a week of the restoration of his privileges and his car’s grill, Stigler was in a similar situation. This time he struck a woman on the downtown sidewalk. Stigler claimed that his steering wheel “froze,” but the authorities were less inclined to leniency. He pled no-contest to vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to six months of house arrest and six months of garbage clean-up on I-78.
It was after the third incident that I was brought in. This time, Stigler had run over one half of a couple holding hands in the middle of a park. Stigler said he’d been drinking, but his passed sobriety tests and BAC of 0.00 indicated otherwise. And when police compared the earlier incidents they noticed a pattern that each person he’d struck was wearing some kind of red hat. One had a Rutgers cap, one had a beret, and one had one of those oversized foam sombreros you see at sporting events. Stigler was charged with first-degree homicide and I took on my first serial killer case.
Once again I was tasked with having to prove the innocence of a defendant in the face of overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Stigler admitted, with some shame, his earlier deceptions meant to fool police and sooth his loved ones. Now he was ready to come clean as an erythrophobe. The color red struck him with such fear that all notions of right and wrong dissolved and public order lost all salience. Right away there were complications. Stop signs, traffic lights, Pizza Hut roofs, blood, and his car’s own paint job did not seem to impair him. Could it have been the hats, I asked him? “No.” Could it have been a reflex of some latent OCD? “Absolutely no.” A NIMBY zoning dispute? “What the fuck are you talking about?” So he amended his condition as a fear of “red in motion.”
Respecting my client’s wishes, I delved into the labyrinth of color theory. I got the judge to forbid all traces of red from courtroom, including the nation’s flag. I even got his daughter to switch to black lipstick even as it clashed against her hair, complexion, and personal style. More unusually, I brought in expert testimony: a color historian, a chromotherapist, color spiritualist, a friend’s cousin who went to FIT. All of whom were not cheap; all of whom were in no way effective.
This was a case with some unique failures. One was that the prosecutor out-gamed me in narrative framing. She was smart in utilizing the hats, holding up each one in her opening with such context as to place them back atop the people my client had killed. Though more effective was her leaving them on a table for the duration of her case for the jury to contemplate when they were bored. This carried over into public sentiment. Every day of the trial I walked up to the courthouse where a mass of people had gathered, all wearing oversized foam hats in protest of my client’s heinous conduct. Shriners organized parades with their red fezes and tiny red cars outside my office—actually it was just a booth in a warehouse complex where my mail ended up, but fine: message received. It will forever be a mystery to me how 12 oversized foam hats made it to the jury in time for the verdict. They deliberated for only 20 minutes.
Rodney Stigler’s dream of mowing down anyone who he felt deserved to be is forever deferred. The appeals process was very hurtful. Having the R-word entered into the New Jersey judicial record thanks to your actions is one thing, having Keith Morrison repeat it verbatim nearly stopped my heart. My own adventure was sure to be abbreviated. Yet a weird thing happened, quite similar to what happened above. I was not seen by the real lawyers as some freak show; rather I was regarded with something like empathy. I’d unlocked a tragic experience that transcended strict professional standards. They seemed to know instinctively the embarrassment and doubts I was suffering. It was as if the trial was mine rather than Stigler’s, and much more than my actual trial. And even if that’s not the best way to think about it, I used this experience to reconfigure my conduct thereafter. I would surely encounter far darker and uglier criminals than Stigler, and far more incomprehensible crimes than his own, but I would not be the automatic dumping ground for the most pathetic scraps of the justice system. Cases would henceforth be mine to shape, the clients’ stories were mine to frame. If juries could not be persuaded they could at least come away with a startling reorientation of the dimensions of real life that will haunt them as surely as my worst—yet best—cases haunt me.
And in the event that I am permitted to lecture law students again, I will happily divulge my art of jury selection.