Authors: Fairstein Linda
Mike and I zigzagged our way through the
hapless gaggle of criminals—some arguing with their public defenders, others
waiting with family members or friends—who filled the fifteenth-floor corridor
of the criminal courthouse.
“Somebody’s got Battaglia wound up about Barr, or
knows something about her attacker,” I said.
“So when we finish here, I’ll drive you to her
apartment.”
“I just called Mercer. He’ll meet us there, too.”
He pulled on the large brass handle of the door in
the middle of the hallway, holding it back so that we both could enter Part 53
of the Supreme Court of New York County, Criminal Term.
Harlan Moffett was on the bench, his back to the
courtroom, seemingly engrossed in the
New York Law Journal
. Mattie
Prinzer, the first woman to head the OCME crime lab, was seated alone in the
front row. Only the staff was present—no spectators—and a well-dressed man who
appeared to be younger than I, sitting at the defense table, the one farther
from the empty jury box.
The court clerk saw us enter and signaled to the
reporter, then got the judge’s attention. “We have the prosecutor, Your Honor.
Shall we bring the prisoner in?”
Moffett spun in his chair and folded the
newspaper. “Good to see you, Ms. Cooper. Detective, thanks for making yourself
available on such short notice. Say hello to your adversary, here. What’s your
name again, son?”
“Eli Fine.” He got to his feet and extended his
hand to shake mine after I entered the well and dropped my files on the table.
“You have a chance to meet your client yet?”
Moffett was in his seventies, close to mandatory retirement. His once-thick
white hair had thinned and faded to a dull gray, but the garnet pinky ring he
sported still sparkled as he twisted it while he talked.
“I spent a couple of hours with him at Rikers
yesterday, after I flew in.”
“Let’s have Jamal Griggs,” the judge said,
motioning to the court officer in charge. “How long you been out of school,
Eli?”
“Six years, sir.”
“I’ve been a judge for more than thirty.” Moffett
had been around long enough to know most of the New York bar that practiced in
this forum. The courthouse regulars were used to his schmoozing and put up with
his clumsy attempts at humor in hopes he would rule in their favor. The judge
didn’t bother to clean up his act for strangers.
Fine was biting his lip. “Judge, would you mind if
we—?”
The court reporter had worked with Moffett often
enough to know to keep her fingers away from the keyboard until the judge
signaled that he wanted to go on the record.
“Take off your sunglasses, Mr. Fine. That’s what I
mind. We’re not in Malibu. You admitted in New York?”
“Yes, sir. I graduated from New York Law School.
Took the bar both here and California.”
“Long as we’re legal, son.”
The door to the holding pen opened and an officer
led Jamal Griggs into the room. He smiled when he saw his lawyer, and waited
for his hands to be uncuffed before taking the seat beside him.
Fine was whispering something to Griggs when
Moffett interrupted him. “What brings you to town today?”
“Ms. Cooper and her team have been conducting an
investigation, and—”
“We’ve got a habit here, son. We stand up when we
address the court,” Moffett said, turning the motion papers over to read the
name of Fine’s law firm. “Stein, Schlurman, and Fine. Ever try a murder case,
son?”
Eli Fine slowly rose to his feet. “Entertainment
law, sir. It’s our specialty.”
“Entertainment lawyers? That’s an oxymoron,”
Moffett said, resting his elbows on the bench and tapping his fingertips
together. “Ms. Cooper’s had—what is it, dear? Six, seven trials to verdict in
front of me. You’re not careful, she could take you to the cleaners. What’s
your motion?”
The young lawyer looked at the reporter. “Are we
on the record?”
Moffett rapped the gavel to regain Fine’s
attention. “When
I
tell you we are. Give me a sense of what you want.”
“As you know, Judge, my client is incarcerated for
an armed robbery. Despite Ms. Cooper’s best efforts to connect Jamal to the
unsolved homicide of Kayesha Avon, his genetic profile did
not
match the
evidence in the case,” Fine said, reading from notes that I expected had been
prepared for him by a defense attorney familiar with the language of a criminal
law practitioner. “Now she’s come before this court on an absurd fishing
expedition, having applied for an out-of-state search warrant to get into the
California database. I’m here to oppose that application.”
“Come all this way to try to stop Ms. Cooper? I’m
impressed, son.” Moffett rubbed the hem of his sleeve over the garnet stone in
his ring, admiring the polishing job when he finished. “Now, what’s in that
databank that’s so damn important to the People of the State of New York?”
“Nothing worth invading the privacy of any
citizens of California, sir. The attorney general has taken a strict position
on protecting the integrity of the state’s database.”
“What are you after, Alexandra?”
I was on my feet, ready with my arguments. “We’d
like to do a familial search, Your Honor.”
Moffett cupped his hand to his ear. “A what?”
“A familial search, Judge. It’s a new forensic
technique, and we’d like to use it in this matter. The warrant requests the DNA
profile of Jamal’s brother, Wesley Griggs, which we believe is in the crime
scene evidence database of California.”
“Wesley’s a convicted felon out there?”
“No,” I said. That would make our task simpler.
His profile would probably be in the FBI’s CODIS files if that were the case.
“We understand he was present at a drug-related shooting, and that genetic
material of his was recovered and processed. He’s not in the convicted offender
files, but we have reason to believe he’s in the evidence databank.”
“Why go through all this red tape?” Moffett said.
“You asked the AG nicely for it?”
“Yes, Your Honor. But Mr. Fine is right.
California is among the toughest jurisdictions on kinship searches. They simply
don’t allow them at this point, although there is precedent in several other
states. There haven’t been many cases on point. I’ve submitted documents to you
and have a copy for counsel,” I said, passing a memo and stack of scientific
treatises to the court officer to give to Eli Fine.
“So you want to make some law here, hon, is that
it?” Moffett said, shuffling papers around on his blotter. “Eli, did you brief
this for me?”
“No, sir. I figured you’d take oral argument.”
“From the land of the hip-shooters, young man,”
Moffett said, swiveling in his chair and pointing to the elaborate portrait of
Lady Justice, standing beneath the flag, with the words
E Pluribus Unum
at her feet. “You know how that translates, Mr. Griggs?”
Jamal leaned forward and squinted at the Latin
inscription, then shook his head.
Harlan Moffett stood and adjusted the belt on his
trousers before wagging a finger at the defendant. “
E Pluribus Unum.
Always hire local counsel, Mr. Griggs.”
“Judge, I really object to that kind of comment in
front of my client,” Fine said.
“Move for a change of venue if it suits you. You
got some nice racetracks in California. I’d like to hold these proceedings
somewhere near Santa Anita myself,” Moffett said, taking his seat. He liked the
ponies more than he enjoyed writing decisions, since he had an unusually high
percentage of reversals by the Court of Appeals. “Maybe I’d better take some
testimony.”
He pointed at the reporter and made a few comments
about the nature of the hearing, then asked me to call my witness. I signaled
for Mattie to go out to the witness room to wait for her turn to testify, and I
called Mike’s name into the record.
Mike Chapman walked to the stand and placed his
hand on the Bible that the court officer held out to him. I walked him through
his education at Fordham College, where he majored in military history, through
his years on the job and early successes that vaulted him to the prestigious
homicide squad, and brought him to the current re-investigation of Kayesha
Avon’s death.
“Did you respond to the scene of the crime,
Detective?”
“Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“At what location?”
Mike stated the address. “On the rooftop of her
apartment building, in the projects at Taft Houses in East Harlem.”
I let him describe the heartbreaking sight of the
college student’s body, after she was abducted from the elevator in her own
building on her way home from class.
“Were you present the following day, eight years
ago, at Ms. Avon’s autopsy?”
“Yes, I was.”
“What findings were made by the pathologist?”
“There were six stab wounds in Kayesha’s neck and
chest, one of which pierced her heart.”
“Was there any blood evidence found at the scene?”
“No. No, there was not.”
“Any fingerprints?”
“None.”
“Any seminal fluid?” I continued.
“Yes. There was semen in her vaginal vault, and
also on her right thigh. She appeared to have been sexually assaulted before
she was killed.”
“Was a genetic profile developed by a forensic
biologist at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you tell us what efforts were made at that time
to find a match to that DNA sample?”
“As Your Honor knows,” Mike said, “back then, we
were in the infancy of databanking. We ran the crime scene samples against the
entries—many thousand fewer than there are today—and had the lab make
comparisons to specific suspects we developed through the tip hotline.”
“Was a match ever declared?” I asked.
“Nope. Not even close.”
“What else did you do?”
“Every six months, I asked Dr. Prinzer at OCME to
run the evidence against the convicted offender databank, which has been
growing steadily, Judge. Kept going back, hoping to get lucky.”
Mike had been haunted by the brutality of Kayesha
Avon’s death. He had refused to give up the investigation to the more recently
formed cold-case squad, determined to find the young girl’s killer himself,
with the help of this revolutionary scientific technique.
“Was Jamal Griggs’s DNA profile among the samples
submitted during the last seven and a half years, Detective?” I asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Is it correct that Jamal Griggs had a homicide
conviction?”
“Yes, he did. But because he had been a juvenile
offender at the time of the murder, his DNA was not included in the databank.”
“Do you know the facts of that case?”
“Yeah. I do.” Mike paused and stared directly at
Griggs. “Jamal was fourteen years old. He had dropped out of school to sell
drugs with his big brother, Wesley.”
Eli Fine pushed his chair back but seemed
uncertain about whether he should be objecting to this line of questioning.
“The girl he killed was sixteen,” Mike went on.
“Jamal stabbed her in the back when she made the mistake of accidentally
busting up a drug sale by knocking on the wrong door.”
“Did there come a time when you asked Dr. Prinzer
for a comparison to be made to Mr. Griggs’s DNA?”
Mike shifted in his seat and ran his fingers
through his hair. “Yeah, about three months ago, just after his robbery
conviction.”
“Would you tell the court what result you were
given?”
“Objection, Your Honor.”
“On your feet, Mr. Fine,” Moffett said. “That’s
the only way I can overrule you. What grounds?”
“Hearsay.”
“You’re not offering this for the truth of it, are
you, Alex? Dr. Prinzer’s going to testify, too, isn’t she?” Moffett asked,
without waiting for my answers. “Overruled. It’s just a hearing, young man. You
got no jury. Save your energy for cross-examination.”
Fine sat down and scribbled furiously on his legal
pad while Mike answered the question. “There was no hit, Ms. Cooper, but Dr.
Prinzer told me she had a partial match.”
I finished questioning Mike, establishing that every
other means of identifying the perpetrator in Kayesha’s homicide had been
unsuccessful. Moffett needed to understand that a kinship search was our only
alternative. Fine went nowhere with his brief cross-examination, and Mike
stepped down from the stand.
“The People call Dr. Mathilde Prinzer,” I said.
She would take the scientific piece of the testimony forward.
It took more than fifteen minutes to list her
credentials and establish her unique expertise in this still-evolving field of
forensic science. If this case of first impression was to stand up to appellate
scrutiny, I wanted the full effect of this brilliant scientist’s body of work.
In addition to her daily routine with the five
city prosecutors’ offices and the NYPD, Mattie had been among the OCME heroes
of 9/11, working doggedly with her colleagues to identify victims from
thousands of tiny fragments of human tissue.