Murder by Family by Kent Whitaker

Author:Kent Whitaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

SWITCHING HORSES

Now that Bart had been arrested and was back in Sugar Land awaiting indictment, things started moving, and Dan began developing legal strategies. Bart told him the same thing he had told me in my first visit to the jail: he was willing to plead guilty to spare me and Tricia’s family from having to endure a trial. The only problem was that the district attorney was still going for the death penalty, and as long as that was a possibility, Dan wouldn’t let Bart confess. Since trials consist of two parts (the guilt/innocence phase and the punishment phase), if Bart confessed, the trial would go immediately into the punishment phase (which meant either life in prison or death). Bart was ready to accept spending his natural life in prison, but if he confessed without having the death penalty taken off the table, Dan said that it would seriously limit his legal options in the punishment phase, making it more likely that the death penalty would result.

Dan was confident that a deal could be struck, since even in Texas (which is famous for its executions), many district attorneys were starting to back away from the death penalty. Public sentiment across the country was turning away from it as well, and Texas juries were becoming less inclined to grant executions.

Texas has two types of capital murder conviction: Capital Murder, Life in Prison; and Capital Murder, Death Penalty. When compared with pursuing a conviction for Capital Murder, Life in Prison, the cost and time involved to go after a death penalty conviction were enormous. For one thing, the jury selection process was much more involved, giving the defense greater advantages. And since only a unanimous decision secures a death penalty, the prosecutor “loses” if even one of the twelve jurors holds out for life in prison.

Dan reasoned that in light of those odds and the fact that all the surviving victims (my family and Tricia’s) had pleaded that execution not be pursued, the death penalty would probably be eliminated as a potential punishment. (While the request of the victim’s family to abandon the death penalty is not binding on the prosecution, it is significant: such pleas are seldom ignored. In this case both sides of the victims’ family campaigned strongly against it.)

I had a lot of confidence in Dan because I had known him for years. In fact, it was only because of that connection that I had consulted him in the first place. Back in early 2004, when Bart began looking for an attorney, it was more as a contingency plan than something we expected to need. If I had not known Dan for so long, we probably would have started with someone less high profile. At that time (a month after the shooting) all I knew was that the police considered Bart a suspect. Although I believed it was just a matter of time before they moved on, I couldn’t take the risk of being unprepared. I needed to secure legal counsel—just in case.

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