Unintended Consequences - By Marti Green Page 0,19
doesn’t cause any trouble, so she pretty much flies under the radar.”
“She seemed pretty emphatic this afternoon that they both killed their daughter,” Tommy said.
“That’s not what she said in her testimony. There she said she stood by and watched George kill Angelina,” Melanie said.
Heading up this investigation was new turf for Dani. Before, the facts had been handed to her and she stirred them up into a legal argument. For it to be a winning argument, though, she had to analyze the facts, something she excelled at. Her analysis of the facts so far didn’t add up. “You’re right, Melanie. When they questioned her at her home, she said, ‘We killed her.’ Her story changed when she testified at George’s trial. Now she’s back to her original statement: ‘We killed her.’ But she said something else today that throws everything in her testimony into question. Remember when she asked if she’d said what she was supposed to say? If she’d done it right?”
Tommy shook his head. “Let’s go over it again. The police knocked on her door, asked questions, and she fingers herself and her husband. I assume they took her down to the station, she went over the details, and she realizes she’s in big trouble. She figures they’ll go easier on her if she was just a watcher, so her story changes. Then they ask her to do it again for the trial. Don’t you think that’s what she was referring to, doing it right at the trial?”
“It could be that. Or maybe she was told to say something different.”
Melanie looked puzzled. “Why would the prosecutor have her change her story? Her immediate confession was enough to convict George. How would it help them if she’d only been a bystander?”
“I don’t know. But if the police or the prosecutor asked her to change her story, there must be a reason. Maybe her version didn’t match the details of the crime, so they fed her a story. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”
They sipped their drinks silently for a moment. Before flying to Indianapolis, Dani had held on to a slim hope that they’d know after interviewing Sallie whether her version of the events was real or a delusion. Instead, the truth seemed even more distant.
The clouds had drifted away and Dani rummaged through her pocketbook for her sunglasses. They headed north on Interstate 65 to Michigan City, less than three hours away. Melanie drove while Tommy continued to track down leads with his cell phone and Dani studied the file. They hadn’t advanced any further in their understanding of the case since finishing dinner last night. Today they’d meet first with Warden Coates and then with their client. They traveled in silence, all of them aware of the limited time and the stakes at hand.
As they drove, the realization struck Dani that never before had she met with a death-row inmate in a case where the decision for HIPP to represent him resided with her. She must decide whether she believed in his innocence. She must decide whether he got one more chance to try to escape the sentence he’d lived with for seventeen years. The heaviness of this responsibility weighed on her and she wondered if she’d made the right choice in her career path. As an associate editor of the Harvard Law Review, graduating with honors, she could have gone anywhere. She’d been handed offers on silver platters, from obscenely well-paying positions with white-glove Wall Street firms to federal judicial clerkships with some of the brightest legal minds on the bench. She’d chosen the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. That’s where she met Doug. Those were heady days while they lasted, but then Jonah came along. They could have turned him over to day care and kept going in the fast lane, but really, they couldn’t. Not after his diagnosis. Jonah deserved his chance in life, whatever that might be, and they both wanted to make sure he got it. Dani dropped out of law for about seven years, while Doug accepted an associate-professor position at Columbia Law School. And four years ago she signed on with HIPP. Now that Doug taught criminal law, specializing in death-penalty law, she guessed you could say she practiced and he preached. A bad lecture didn’t condemn a prisoner to a lethal injection, but she didn’t have it so easy. If she couldn’t sort through the facts and