Insult to Injury

Chapter Eleven…SOME WITH A FOUNTAIN PEN

153

DRIVING HOME FOLLOWING JOAN’S TESTIMONY, I WRESTLED WITH different approaches for our closing argument. If only I knew what the jurors were thinking. But this was a very noncommunicative group—disturbingly so. After having spent four weeks sitting not ten feet from them, I still had no more of an idea where they were coming from than I’d had on the first day of trial.

Some arguments are best made to yourself—alone, in your car, with the windows rolled up. That this company was an outfit being run by a gang of avaricious, devious, sinister, inhumane, malevolent, amoral people was one such argument. That the jury should simply do to them what they had done to Joan—drive them into bankruptcy—was another. ...