Previously on cereal. From this American life in WBEZ Chicago, it's cereal.
One story told week by week.
I'm Sarah Canig. Today's episode is mostly going to take place in the courtroom.
Before we get into the arguments at trial, I just want to play you this thing from a nun's jury selection.
I used to be a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and I covered some trials.
If I happen to be in the courtroom for jury selection, it was always such a good reminder of what living in Baltimore was like for so many people.
Here's what I'm talking about.
December 8, 1999. I'm a nun's first child.
Have you or any close family member ever been the victim of a crime convicted of a crime served time for a crime or have pending criminal charges?
A lot of people rise from their seats and then line up to talk to the judge.
I can't tell exactly what proportion of the jury pool but it looks to be at least half.
Why don't you come up to tell me?
My husband's son was convicted of murder.
Good morning. My husband was broken into and we were robbed in the middle of the night.
I was the six-year-old.
Good morning, 30-year-old.
Why don't you come up to tell me?
My husband was shot. I have a brother that's one at P-17.
In May, my parents and I were victims of an assault and a trooper, my aunt was shot in the head.
My husband was convicted of hand-gun violation.
My brother was convicted of a attempted murder.
My partner was a rape victim.
I was robbed of a small amount of money on the street.
Next. 207? 207? Good morning, 207.
Why don't you come up to tell me?
That I have two uncles, two servants, and I have four men.
One guy says, we moved from a very peaceful town in Oregon to a violent community.
And Judge Coral says, welcome to Baltimore.
Coral asks all these people whether they think they could still be impartial jurors on a non-case.
Some say no and they get dismissed.
Some say yes and he sends them back to their seats.
He was on the lookout for prejudice, all kinds of prejudice against cops, against prosecutors, against Koreans, and against Muslims.
One guy tells them he doesn't think he can be impartial because he's got a friend of the Muslim faith.
And he's seen him and also his son mistreat their families.
A friend of mine that was Brooklyn Clayton.
And I seen him mistreat his family, his wife and everything.
You know, I seen this woman between him and his son got up.
He got married. He did the same thing to his father did.
So I just could, you know, be honest with you.
Okay, I appreciate that honestly.
This brings me to something Shameem told me when I first interviewed her.
Shameem Ramon and non's mother.
Shameem and her husband say, yeah, Ramon.
They believe that non is innocent.
There's no question about it for them.
A non's father said to me, we've had no happiness in our family since that non was arrested.
It has been continuous torture.
Oh, I don't know what to say, believe me.
It's like my, I mean my whole body is like, no, you know, I cannot think, nothing we know more.
Yeah. But I know he didn't do it.
What, I mean, how do you guys make sense of what happened?
Like, how do you explain what to yourselves, I mean, not to the outside world to yourselves?
Like, how do you understand why?
Like, you must think about those.
Believe me, that's the only thing, you know, I still believe you know because we were Muslim.
There's discrimination.
And everybody feel the whole community because it was a Muslim child, that's why they're talking.
It's well easy for them to take him then the other people.
It was so, you know, and do you believe that?
Of course, yes, I do believe it too.
Yes, because it was easy to target, you know, for them to come and pick him up.
We still don't know why they're doing it, but again, I said discrimination because we are Muslim and we are, you know, minor in this country.
So this way they took it then.
I don't know. I mean, you can hear me not believing her, right?
The notion that the cops and prosecutors in this case were driven by anti-Muslim feeling, by racism, and by racism alone, that I found very hard to believe.
And I still don't believe that, by the way.
But I didn't want to write off what Shemim was saying either.
Because maybe anti-Muslimness crept in, contributed in some way to how the investigation and the prosecution operated, inadvertently or inadvertently.
Shemim said she hadn't personally felt discrimination just out in the world in Baltimore before the trial.
And she didn't feel it after, not even after 9-11.
But at a hearing on a non-Bail status, on March 31, 1999, she felt it.
The courthouse that day was packed with people from a non-Mosc, the Islamic Society of Baltimore.
They'd raised tens of thousands of dollars for his defense.
They offered to put up their own houses and other properties to secure his bail.
A non-saturni's during the bail phase of his case were two guys named Chris Floor and Doug Colbert, the family would hire Christina Gutierrez soon after for trial.
Chris Floor remembers the busloads of people who came to a non-S bail proceedings, filling the courtroom and the hallways.
He said he'd never seen anything like it before or since.
I remember almost every inch of the available standing space in the courthouse at the Wabash District Court where the bail review happened being full up with people.
So a lot of beards and a lot of traditional guard.
Many of the people here are people who you would almost say they're extended family.
They care for each other's children.
It's sort of the old-fashioned sense of community.
That's Doug Colbert who did the talking during this hearing.
And so the people who are here in this courtroom represent the doctors and the teachers and the lawyers and the accountants and the correctional officers, as well as three religious leaders, E-Moms, who are from different mosques here in Baltimore.
So the community here judge is here to say, first of all, that they commit themselves to promise to vow that they will now need supervised ad non-shoot-e-me release, should bail be set.
But at the same time, they will also accompany him to court as well.
After he finished, the prosecutor, Vicki Wasch, took that same crowd.
The people Doug Colbert describes as solid, respectable folk who make sure a non-dose the right thing.
Wasch cast them as a room full of aiders and a bettors.
The same people who are likely to help a non-run away to Pakistan.
And that's why he shouldn't get bail.
Your Honor, the fact that the defendant has strong support from the community, that is what makes him unique in this case.
He is unique because he has limitless resources.
He has the resources of this entire community here, our investigation reveals, that he can tap resources from Pakistan as well.
It's our position, Your Honor, that if you issue a bail, then you are issuing from a passport under these circumstances to flee the country.
We do not want another shine-binded situation, Your Honor.
We are asking you... I told you I wasn't going to take it.
That's Judge David Mitchell telling the big crowd to settle down.
Shine-bind is Samuel Shine-bind, a kid who was accused of brutally killing another Maryland teenager in 1997, and then absconded to Israel.
Ms. Wasch said she'd talked to a Mr.
Harry Marshall, a senior legal adviser for international affairs with the Justice Department.
And Mr. Marshall had explained to her that the U.S.
had tried unsuccessfully to extradite certain criminals from Pakistan.
And he cited that there is a pattern in the United States of America where young Pakistan males have been jilted, have committed murder, and have fled to Pakistan.
And we have been unable to extradite them back.
He gave me a specific instance that's occurring now that's pending in Chicago, where the factual pattern is frighteningly similar.
Again, it's a young Pakistan male who was jilted by his girlfriend who fled the country, and they have had no success, and he indicated it would be a dim situation indeed if the defendant would flee to Pakistan.
We have information from our investigation that the defendant has an uncle in Pakistan, and he has indicated that he can make people disappear.
That information about the badass uncle?
I think they got that from a non-science teacher.
I'm not kidding. The cops talk to this teacher on March 24th, and in their notes it says the teacher, Mr.
Nicholson, had had a non as a student the year before.
The word brooding is in there.
Then it says, suspect, quote, had an uncle in Pakistan who could make people disappear, unquote.
Under that it says, they drained blood from cow at the mosque one day.
He was pumped. So that odd tidbit for Mr.
Nicholson ends up as an argument at a non-s bail hearing.
I couldn't find any other source for it in the detectives or state's attorney's files I looked at.
A non-s attorney made a stab at fact checking Wash's information, one thing led to another, and three weeks after that hearing, Ms.
Wash writes a letter to Judge Nichol, apologizing if she misled the court.
She said she'd misconstrued information from Mr.
Harry Marshall of the Justice Department.
She talked to him again, and he made it clear that there was not a pattern of young Pakistani men committing murder after they'd been jilted and then running off to Pakistan.
And that other case she'd mentioned, the frighteningly similar one out of Chicago, quote, that case parallels Saeed's case only that it involves a Pakistani male charged with murder, where the victim was known to the defendant, Wash wrote.
Even in her apology, there's an error.
A non is not Pakistani. He's American, with Pakistani heritage.
And maybe this seems like I'm parsing, I don't mean to.
I'm only pointing all this out because to me, it shows how easy it is to stir stereotypes in with facts, all of which then gets baked into a story.
Something like, those Muslim men, they can't control their pride, their passions, they kill their lovers and flee the consequences, with the full support of their families and communities.
That's what shocked Shameem.
Obviously, the state never said and was careful not to say, Adnan did this because he's a Muslim.
But they did skirt this idea a few times at trial.
They wanted to show that this wasn't a normal high school romance, that this young couple was under an unusual amount of scrutiny and pressure from their families.
And because Adnan's culture forbid the very thing he wanted, that's why he reacted the way he did to the breakup.
They had various witnesses talking about what happened at the homecoming dance or how the relationship was secret.
Prosecutor Casey Murphy tells the jury, the crime was not about love, it was about pride.
And in his opening argument, you've heard this language before in an earlier episode, but it bears repeating, Prosecutor Kevin Urek talks about how Adnan reacted when Hay broke up with him.
Quote, he became enraged, he felt betrayed that his honor had been besmirched, and he became very angry, and he set out to kill Hayman Lee.
This is merged. That's not a word you're accused by accident.
It's not a word you usually hear applied to a 17-year-old kid at Woodland High School.
It's a word from the old country where honor killings come from.
And this word honor, it comes up a lot too.
For instance, one day I was looking through a huge set of documents from the detectives investigation, and I came upon a confidential report.
In late August of 99, so six months after Adnan's arrest, a woman who runs a consulting group that, among its services, helps law enforcement understand other cultures, wrote a report for detectives Ritz and McGillvary.
It's titled, Report on Islamic Thought and Culture with Emphasis on Pakistan, a comparative study relevant to the upcoming trial of Adnan Sayed.
The report is eight pages long, I'm going to skip to the money shot, summary as it relates to Mr.
Sayed. Quote, for her to have another man dishonored both Adnan Sayed and his belief structure.
It is acceptable for a Muslim man to control the actions of a woman by completely eliminating her.
It goes on, within this harsh culture, he has not violated any code, he has defended his honor.
And finally, for many ethnic Pakistanis, incidents like this are commonplace, and in Pakistan this would not have been a crime, but probably a question of honor.
I have no idea what the cops made of this report, whether they looked at it and thought, oh dear, and stuffed in in a file, never to be considered again, or whether they thought, huh, interesting.
But they were, at the very least, in regular communication with this consultant, especially during the early stages of the investigation.
Finally, I noticed that Jay also gives a shout out to Islam, it's during the second trial.
He's testifying about what happened after he picked it none up at Best Buys, they're driving back to school.
Jay says, quote, this is when we started to talk a little bit.
I don't know, he said to me, it kind of hurt him, but not really.
And when someone treats him like that, they deserve to die.
How can you treat somebody like that that you're supposed to love?
And then all knowing is Allah.
Yerik asks him, did he explain what he meant by that?
No, Jay says. It's a detail Jay mentions, neither to the detectives in his taped statements, nor during the first trial.
But why now? Allah only knows.
Reporting this story, I found plenty of examples of casual prejudice against Muslims.
One of a non's teachers, for example, quote, think about what he would have been taught about women and women's rights.
Another teacher I talked to told me she was terrified at the time that a non's relatives were going to come after her for talking to the detectives.
She told me she assumed his parents were evil.
On that website that lists all the bodies found in Leak & Park, the author's commentary about Hamin Lee's cases, quote, maybe my prejudice is showing through, but who in their right mind lets their daughter data man named Adnan Musud Syed.
The jurors we spoke to said Adnan's religion didn't affect their view of the case.
Lisa Flynn said maybe at first it interested her, but then she pretty quickly realized that more to the point Adnan was a teenager in America doing American teenager things.
She said once they all understood that whatever stereotypes they had went right out the window, which is exactly what you'd want in a jury.
But when we press them a little more, it seems stereotypes about Adnan's culture were there lurking in the background.
I don't feel religion was why he did what he did.
It may have been culture, but I don't think it was religion.
I'm not sure how the culture is over there, how they treat their women.
But I know some cultures women are second class citizens, and maybe that's what it was, I don't know.
He just wanted control and she wouldn't give it to him.
That's juror William Owens.
Here's Stella Armstrong.
They were trying to talk about in his culture and Arabic culture, men rule not women.
I remember hearing that.
You mean when you were deliberating, when the jurors said that?
Yes, when we were deliberating.
So he had put his whole life on the line for her.
And she didn't want no bo of anymore.
The first thing Christina Gutierrez, Adnan's trial lawyer, said in her opening statement about her client, this is in the first trial, was, quote, a non-Musud Sayed is an American citizen.
He was born in this country, like most American citizens.
She obviously knew, despite what happened at jury selection, that the jurors might be prone to anti-Muslim anti-foreigners sentiment, which probably explains why she spent what seemed to me a nutty amount of time during her opening, talking about what an immigrant is, what a mosque is, what Pakistan is, quote, a country formed in the Arab world, in the tip of the land mass
called Asia, unquote. She talks and talks about how Adnan was raised, about young romance.
The judge interrupts her four times.
How much longer will you be, Ms.
Gutierrez? Five minutes, Ms.
Gutierrez? One minute, Ms.
Gutierrez. She's rushing at the end, when she rather quickly throws suspicion onto J, and then finally, onto Mr.
S. I know I've talked about Christina Gutierrez in earlier episodes, about whether she should have talked to Asia McLean, or whether her style might have graded on jurors.
But now, I'm going to address this question head on.
Did she blow it? You might be surprised to hear that Adnan's only beef with Christina, in terms of what happened at trial, is that she never contacted Asia McLean.
He thinks it wasn't deliberate on her part.
He just thinks she made a mistake, like a surgeon's slip of the scalpel.
And personally, she was nothing but compassionate towards him, he said.
Always asking him how he was doing, she made sure he got the skin medication he needed, the glasses he needed.
She was his protector. I still, I mean, I still, she was just, I just, I just had like a great deal of affection for him, and I just really felt like, you know what I'm saying, she really really had my back in the, you know what I'm saying?
You just, you trusted her, like she knows what she was doing.
Oh, completely, I mean, completely.
Honestly, I couldn't, no one could explain it, no one could understand it unless they're in that situation.
The close thing I could think of is you combine a doctor and nurse, a school teacher of coach and your parents, you combine all that, then you may have an idea of how much, you know, I trusted the school years in that situation.
Because your life, your life is really in her hands.
Literally, right, literally.
I mean, no, she never really mentioned what her plan would be, I never really knew what it would be.
Christina died in January of 2004, so obviously I can't ask her what her strategy was for conjuring reasonable doubt.
I have to go by what we've seen in her notes and in the courtroom.
And based on all that, I can summarize her defense theory in four words.
Someone else did it, such as Jay or the new boyfriend Don or Mr.
S, the guy who found the body.
After all, she argued we don't even know for sure when he died, what day, it could have been the 13th or 14th or 15th.
Christina wanted to show that once the cops zeroed in on a non, they ignored other viable suspects.
So rather than pinning down an alibi for a non, she dumped as much suspicion as she could onto these other players.
I mentioned before that a non's first trial ended in a mistrial.
Here's what happened. Christina was what Chris Flore described as a fighting person, generally a good quality and an attorney.
That scratchy part of Christina though, sometimes it could elicit a response, shall we say, in the courtroom.
Obviously it's an adversarial situation, both sides and a non's case were suspicious that the other was playing fast and loose when they could.
And it could get bristly.
Here's prosecutor Casey Murphy during a bench conference at the first trial before Judge Quarrels.
I'm going to inject to defense council calling my co-cancel on asshole at the trial table.
I should do just a moment.
I did not hear that. I wish I could complain to a judge every time someone called me an asshole.
Anyway, Quarrels says he knows Christina to be a quote pit bull on the pant leg of justice, unquote, but an otherwise courteous person and how about everybody just behaves themselves, okay?
But five days later Quarrels loses his patience with Christina.
It's over something small.
Kevin Uric asks if he can show exhibit 31 to the jurors.
It's the AT&T call records from a non's phone showing calls from January 12th, 13th and 14th.
Christina says she hasn't seen it before.
Uric says that's not true.
She has. They'd already stipulated to the call record.
She says, yeah, but I hadn't actually looked at it before.
I haven't physically seen this exhibit.
Quarrels calls them up to the bench.
Ms. Gutierrez, he says, if you're going to stand there and lie to the jury about something that you agreed could come in, I'm not going to permit you to do that.
Christina says, judge, the fact that I agreed but he cuts her off, that was a lie.
You told a lie. I'm not going to permit you to do that.
That's not a lie, judge.
I resent the implication.
Christina starts getting heated now.
Quarrels says, please be quiet.
Please be quiet. She says it's very hard to be quiet when a court is accusing me of lying.
I don't want to overdo it here, but it's possible that had this bench conference not happened, a non-shole life could have been different.
That first trial, according to a non, to Christina's colleagues, to people who were watching it, seemed to be going well for a non-side.
It was moving fast and Jay seemed to be more on the defensive.
Then this happened. And of course, jurors overheard it, despite the white noise they turn on during bench conferences to muffle the sound.
After a break, Christina asks for a mistrial.
Quarrels says he's gotten a note from alternate number four.
In view of the fact that you've determined that Ms.
Gutierrez is a liar, will she be removed?
Will we start over? Quarrels says to Christina, your motion for mistrial is granted.
Julie Remy was a law clerk for Christina at this time.
And she said moving into trial number two, Christina was confident.
I mean, look, the jury's pulled after the first at the end of the state case, and they're giving the indication that they're going to acquit.
And then you turn around and try in front of a different jury and it comes out completely, you know, the opposite.
Wait, so you guys pulled the jury after the mistrial?
I wasn't part of it, but I knew the jury was pulled after the mistrial.
By her? By her, and I believe, you know, the law clerk said.
Okay. Mike was involved.
I'm not sure. But the jury was pulled, and it was at the end of the state's case, they interviewed the jurors, and they gave every indication that they were heading toward an acquittal.
In fact, it wasn't quite at the end of the state's case.
The AT&T expert hadn't testified about the cell tower technology, and Jen hadn't taken the stand either, which is significant.
But it's true that the jury had heard the bulk of the state's case.
You know, to have that information, I mean, you got to feel pretty good about that, you know, as the defense attorney, I would expect him being the trial attorney myself that he would kind of want to stay the course and, you know, keep doing the same things.
And hope to get the same kind of result, but you just never know it, these juries.
True, different jury, but also different judge, slightly different arguments, different weather, for all we know, wins blowing slightly more this way or that.
There are so many factors, including chance, which no one wants to think about in a first-degree murder case.
But of course, luck is part of it, too.
About a month later, they start all over again with trial two.
Christina's strategy is the same.
Try to show that someone else killed Hay.
She did a lot of research in hopes of linking Mr.
S to the crime, or at least trying to link him to Jay.
Did he patronize the video store where Jay worked, for instance?
But she never succeeded.
During that second trial, it takes him doing, but she finally gets Mr.
S on the stand. He so desperately didn't want to be there.
The courthouse staff basically had to prevent him from leaving the building.
So even though he's her witness, he's a hostile witness.
Here's Christina trying to get him to explain how work orders at his job got filled.
If we could get to that specific job, we would do it at the time.
We can't do it at the time we'd do it when we could get to it.
That's my answer. Which might be the next day.
Whenever. When your work day would end, you would then leave.
I guess so. You wouldn't get well, sir.
Is that a yes or a no? I'm not asking.
Yes, yes. When your work day, don't you leave?
Okay. Of course, Mr. S was more of a side dish.
Christina's main prey was Jay.
She tells the judge. Judge, I'd just like to be heard.
It is our entire defense.
I really to make James the person who committed this crime.
With all the ways in which he acted guilty and describing the way is in fact in which he acted with consciousness of guilt by concealing evidence in his clothes, his boots, his outer coat, his shovels, wiping shovels to conceal evidence as he said.
Both in a statement and on cross to conceal evidence of his involvement.
Christina crossed Xamon J on five different days.
She was exhaustive and exhausting.
Her questions are detailed and deliberate.
But somehow the way she questioned him and maybe it was the half speed pacing or the sing-songy aggression.
Somehow to me, it added up to something less than effective.
Her punches and there were many, many punches don't always appear to land.
The prosecution just did like a masterful job of presenting the facts.
Anon says Christina, actually he calls her Miss Gudieras, that Miss Gudieras did do some great things for him.
She was successful in barring the school nurse from testifying it as second trial, for instance.
That was the woman who said she thought Anon was faking his reaction after his death.
But he says he wishes some of her arguments had been clearer.
The state's argument, flawed as it might have been, it was at least linear.
It seemed like Christina, Miss Gudieras, I don't want to say she was confused in things, but she was just saying it wasn't like a clear outline, like the prosecution had.
It just seemed like everything was kind of jumbled.
She took so long to question Jay.
She took so long to cross examine people.
It was almost like you don't even remember what we started talking about.
You kind of lose the red of what is this even out.
To give you an idea, in Jay's first and second tape statements to detectives, he tells them different stories about when and non first told him he was going to kill Hay.
In the first statement he says a non mentions it that same day, January 13th, while they're driving an on back to school at lunchtime.
In the second tape statement, he says a non told him the night before, and also that Anon had been talking about it for four or five days already.
When he testifies it trial though, he goes back to the first version that he first heard about it from Anon on the 13th.
So obviously Christina questions Jay about all this.
It's fertile territory for her side.
Listen to how she does it.
This tape goes on for a while by the way, but I want you to get the full effect.
Another occasion you told them, well the conversations I had with Anon say they heard more or five days early.
Yes, me. And let me make sure because now there are new.
The first you're very first into a curve at a time when they were searching for code.
And on that occasion did you tell me to cut on the 13th?
No. Then your second interview after the tape recorder got turned on.
Did you tell me to cut on the 13th?
No, man. On the 15th of March.
Did you tell me to cut on the 13th?
I believe so. Well, sir, if you recall the action on the 15th of March, you told them that Anon told you that he was going to kill that bitch.
Yes, I remember. So on the 15th you actually told them that you knew a whole day ahead of time that Anon was going to kill his girlfriend.
Pardon? It's even in its postman.
I can't hear you, sir. No.
So something just happened.
Jay just admitted something or didn't admit something.
But I honestly can't tell if it's a point for the defense or for the prosecution or if it's a draw.
There were lots of stretches like this where it seemed as if her cross examination went so far into the weeds it was hard even for me reading it years later to hack back to the main trail.
A juror that Dana interviewed a guy named theater, Wotus said Christina's strategy was a little lost on them too.
That defense attorney everybody, we didn't spend a long time ago, but everybody would seem to think that they're talking but they're not saying nothing.
They were not making a point.
So there was just like a lot of words.
Right. They talked and talked and didn't prove anything.
You know what I mean? There's a good chance though that Christina leaves these threats hanging for a reason as another defense attorney explained to me during cross examination, you don't want to tie each point up in a bow in the moment.
You don't want to tip your hand because then the other side might come back with questions on redirect examination that could undo what you've just laid out.
So you save all the threads and then tie them up in a nice fat, unassailable bow at closing after all the testifying is over.
And indeed Christina does revisit Jay's testimony at her closing, the gist of which is the detectives arrested a non because of what Jay told them and what Jay told them wasn't true.
Quote and he lied to them about many, many things.
It wasn't just that things didn't match up.
They were lies. They called them lies.
Jay called them lies on the 15th of March on the 18th of March on the 13th of April every single time lies.
Clearly Christina put a ton of time and effort into discrediting Jay, but the fact is the jurors believed them.
They didn't think he'd be sitting there talking about this if it weren't true.
She was less rigorous on other aspects of the case.
The cell phone records, for instance, her main argument there was that the way the state's expert, Aberwanowitz, tested the sites wasn't valid because he used an Ericsson phone to make the calls, a different brand than a non's, which turned out to be a bad bet on her part.
The brand of the phone doesn't matter.
But what she didn't do with the cell phone evidence was attack the state's timeline call by call tower by tower or point out with clarity that a significant swath of the day.
The hours between noon and 6 p.m.
on the call log do not match Jay's testimony.
There did come a moment in the second trial though when Christina really came to life and just kicked ass.
She teased some information out of Jay.
She hoped to change the course of the proceedings.
It had to do with Jay's plea agreement with the state and specifically the attorney who was representing Jay.
According to a non when she figured this one thing out about Jay's lawyer, she told a non this was their big chance.
Remember the scooters getting really excited about that?
Like this is like a huge thing.
Jay had been charged with a felony accessory after the fact of first degree murder.
He pled guilty and had an agreement with the state that if he cooperated, basically showed up in court and told the truth, his sentence would reflect that in the end he got no jail time.
For that plea, he had his own lawyer, a woman named Anne Benerroya.
She was representing him pro bono.
She wasn't a public defender.
She was a private defense attorney.
Now Christina had been complaining to the court that the prosecution hadn't been totally forthcoming about Jay's plea and how it came about, which isn't unusual in a trial like this one.
But in the middle of the second trial, Jay says something, something that Christina would later call the magic information.
It happened on the stand when she was asking Jay how Benerroya came to represent him.
She asks, did anyone help provide you a lawyer?
Yes, ma'am. Mr. Eurick.
Mr. Eurick, the prosecutor in this case helped provide you a lawyer?
Yes, ma'am. What? Gueterra's freaks out.
This is the magic information.
Jay testifies that after his last interview with detectives in April of 99, he had no contact with the cops or the prosecutors until September 6th, so a long stretch where he doesn't know what's going on.
He says he'd called the office of the public defender to try to see if he could get himself a lawyer, and they told him, unless you've been charged, we can't help you, which is true.
So, Jay says the next thing that happens is the cops come to see him on September 6th and tell him he's about to be charged with accessory after the fact, and that he'll be able to get a lawyer.
The next day, September 7th, they come pick him up, they book him, and they take him to the state's attorney's office.
He meets Kevin Eurick, the prosecutor.
Jay says he's never met Eurick before, and then he says Eurick introduces him to Ann Benerroya, who can represent him for free.
Jay and Benerroya talk privately for a while, and then they sign the plea agreement.
Then, that same day, they all go across the street to the courthouse and present the signed plea to a judge.
If you were a loved one as an attorney, your jaw is hanging open right now, correct?
Prosecutors do not find attorneys for witnesses they are prosecuting.
That is not a thing. A former prosecutor who worked in the Baltimore office at that time said she'd never heard of anything like that happening before.
It sounded very strange to her.
Hence, Gutierrez is freak out.
There is no jurisdiction in America, there are fours of prosecutors, some right to pick out, hold for it to witness this.
No where. If Jay got a free lawyer thanks to the state, Christina argues, that's what's called a benefit.
It's worth money. And it could look like Jay is being paid by the state for his testimony, or else maybe Jay felt beholden to the state for giving him this benefit, and therefore might lie to please them.
And if it could look like that, she says, then the defense was entitled to know about it before this second trial, or the first trial began.
And here she was learning about it at this late date.
That she said was a violation of the rules of discovery.
She sounds so mad. The jury is not present for this ranting by the way, but probably she was also giddy with Gacha excitement.
She told the judge, this is so patently improper.
To have a witness who has this benefit and may feel indebted in a way that may affect what he justifies to the man who provided him a lawyer, to the man who selected the lawyer.
Once she'd bitten into this, Christina did not let go.
She wanted to rest from it everything she could, maybe a mistrial, maybe some other relief.
They spent hours on this issue over several days of the trial, sometimes in front of the jury, sometimes not.
I called Beneroy about this to find out if it was true that Eurik sought her out and that the first time she met Jay was in Eurik's office on the same day they signed the plea agreement.
She said, no, it could not have happened that way, absolutely not.
A trial though, Eurik doesn't dispute it.
And at Jay's sentencing in 2000, Beneroy says to the judge, quote, when Mr.
Eurik first mentioned this case to me and asked me if I would consider speaking to Jay, unquote.
The judge wanted to heard agreed with Christina that this arrangement looked fishy at best.
She was not happy about it, but she also said, the witness in question, that is Jay, he doesn't seem to be aware that it's messed up.
He doesn't appear to think he's getting a benefit or being paid in some way for his testimony or that anything untoward went on.
So it would seem his testimony isn't tainted by any of this and that's the main thing.
So a for effort, Judge Herd tells Christina, but overruled.
And that more or less was that.
In terms of defense witnesses, the case Christina brought was swift, it took about two and a half days for her to rest.
Aside from the cops, a private detective and the guy who surveyed the burial site in Lincoln Park, the other witnesses Christina put on the stand were mostly character witnesses who had either neutral or nice things to say about a non.
Whatever his assignment, Adnan strives for excellence at all times.
His teachers remark that he's a bright, conscientious and hardworking student who approaches his studies with sobriety.
That's Adnan's guidance counselor, Betty Stucky, reading from a college recommendation she wrote for him, which incidentally she printed out for a non on January 13th, the same day, hey, disappeared.
She was the last defense witness, a trial.
When Robbie and childry first told me about Adnan's case, she don't make she thought Christina had bungled it on purpose, even, so she could make money off the appeal.
That was the only way Robbie could account for screwing up the Asia thing.
And she said she thought Christina's defense, the witnesses she brought, were laughably weak.
I do not agree with Robbie's assessment of Christina.
I do not believe Christina threw this case on purpose.
Because from reading the transcripts and watching the trial videos, you can see her scrapping on Adnan's behalf at every opportunity.
Sometimes in long and rather beautifully constructed, extemporaneous paragraphs.
She made a thousand strategic decisions about what to pursue when she had four clerks plus an associate, so five people working on the case.
It's not like she did some sloppy rush job.
You know, I know that losing the case she was sick over it.
I don't think she ever got over that case.
This is Julie Remy again, who worked for Christina at the time of Adnan's trial.
And I can tell you the physical effects and the depression that I saw firsthand.
I mean, she was, I think she went into kind of a deep depression after that case.
And I don't think she ever really bounced back.
And if she really was impacted by the loss of that case.
People who worked with Christina back then, they also said the same thing.
That she was tireless and she cared a lot about her cases, including Adnan's.
She was always going, going a hundred miles an hour.
One guy said she'd sort of fly into the office in the morning, sunglasses on, hair flying, barking orders.
She smoked and she cursed and she fiercely mentored her clerks.
She could be a giant pain in the ass, but also she was a giant in the profession, not just in Maryland, but nationally.
She did the first or at least one of the first DNA cases in Maryland to figure out how to explain it to a jury.
I heard a story that she went to a grade school and practiced.
When she was a child, she said she was a child, and she was a child.
She said she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child.
And she said she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child.
And she said she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child.
And she said she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child, and she was a child.
That's Shamim, a non-mother.
She and her husband consulted with friends and leaders at the mosque about who to hire.
Everyone said Christina sounded great.
They felt like they were lucky to get her.
Whatever she asked for, we'll just go and get it before we lose her, because we was afraid if we lose her, we don't have that, you know, like a nice attorney.
Shamim said Christina's bedside manner, at least with them, lacked a certain delicacy.
She said they were both intimidated by her, and that they could never get her to talk to them about a non-cased or what was going on.
And Shamim says she thought Christina had lost some of her magic in the courtroom by the second trial, that she seemed sort of agitated.
So, in all the time she would be smoking in and out, and she was waiting another kind of person before she was indicted to fester.
Christina initially asked for $50,000 to represent a non, that fee would more than double by the end of the second trial.
Members of the mosque had donated lots of money to help pay her.
But Shamim says that toward the end of the second trial, Christina had begun to bully them about money.
If they managed to get Christina on the phone or in a meeting, Shamim said the only topic would be money.
Money money, Shamim said.
At one point, Shamim says Christina told a non-s parents she needed them to bring her $10,000 cash to the courthouse to pay for a jury expert.
So, this was kind of strange, but when I told my friend, I said, don't worry, she's doing her job.
That's weird. That's strange.
It was weird to me because of so, you know.
How could you even fit $10,000 in your pocket?
I'd say, and plus she said bring it cash.
Yeah. I mean, usually they're supposed to take the check like, you know, but she said, no, bring it cash.
I'll wait, I mean, what?
Was that the only time that she asked for cash?
She asked for cash. Yes, she asked for cash.
Weird. Yes. But evidently, she never hired the expert.
Shamim says there came another time toward the end when Christina insisted a non-s parents owed her money and that she could take their house if they didn't pay up.
They said they had paid her for everything.
They were so scared they transferred their house into their oldest son's name.
I bring all this up because a non-s parents were not the only ones who had dealings like this with Christina.
I spoke to another couple, Ron and Sue Whitman, and to hear them tell it on the heels of a non-s conviction in early 2000, Christina began to go downhill pretty fast.
The Whitman's hired Christina to defend their 15 year old son in what might be the worst and saddest case I've ever heard.
Their son, Zach, was accused and ultimately convicted of killing their younger son, Greg, who was 13.
It's just a terrible gruesome confounding case.
And so the parents can't even begin to imagine, but anyway, they seek out Christina because she's been recommended to them and they'd read about her defense work in the paper.
And at first she was great, they said.
She successfully argued a couple of important pre-child motions.
Ron Whitman said she was magnificent in the courtroom.
But then as time went on, things started to get weird.
This is around the same time she was working on a non-s case.
She'd be late, really late, filing briefs with the court.
The Whitman's case was in Pennsylvania.
They live right on the border with Maryland.
So that meant the briefs had to be filed in the courthouse in Harrisburg.
They'd check in for weeks in advance with Christina, they said, asking, how's it going?
When can we review the brief?
No brief. Day of even, no brief.
Twice Ron had to go wait for the brief in person at Christina's office in Baltimore and then race the 80 miles to Harrisburg, meeting up with Sue along I-D-3, so they could get it stamped by 4.30pm at the court.
Ron said one of them would have to run in while the other waited.
They didn't even have time to park the car.
The Whitman's talk about many of the same things Shemeam told me that they couldn't get a hold of Christina or saw that things weren't getting done, but when they asked people who knew her, they were told, don't push it.
It'll be fine. Here's Sue Whitman.
And they would say to me, this is how Tina works.
This is don't tell Tina what to do.
This is what she does. She's very good at it.
Don't worry about it. So someone that has worked with Tina for years tells you that this is just her way.
Then you think that this is just her way.
Ron says it got worse and worse.
Announced trial ended in late February of 2000.
By the end of that same year, Christina had been hospitalized at length.
She had diabetes, she had MS, she got very, very sick.
Her law clerks told me they'd bring files to her in the hospital.
One of them told Christina would sneak cigarettes in the bathroom.
In other words, she was still at it.
And maybe she shouldn't have been.
Ron Whitman says it should have been clear to everyone around her that Christina couldn't keep up with her cases, but no one cried uncle.
Ultimately, in January of 2001, if I have my years correct, we had a brief due at the Supreme Court of the United States in 10 days.
And she had told us that she had a university of Baltimore law professor who would she had worked with many times before doing the drafts.
And finally, I called him.
And he said, I haven't talked to Tina about your son's case for a year and a half or two years.
The Whitman's say Christina asked them for an additional $65,000 for work she had to know full well she couldn't do.
That they gave her $25,000 for an expert, but Christina never paid the guy.
So he came to them for the money.
They said that happened with a second expert too for a few thousand dollars.
If she was too sick, why didn't she tell them?
Why did she leave them hanging?
Christina's career had collapsed by the spring of 2001, a year after a non-strial ended.
According to newspaper stories in the Baltimore Sun, written by me, Christina had gotten in trouble with the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland.
Clients were complaining that she'd taken their money and had not done the work she promised or not used it the way she said she would.
The state fund that compensates people when their lawyers misused their money paid out a total of $282,328 on 28 claims against Christina.
The largest payout was to the Whitmans.
The Whitmans feel as though she was lying to them, trying to get as much money out of them as she could.
A more generous assessment would be that Christina was in denial about how sick she was.
And people who worked with her told me she was never much interested in the business side of things.
It wasn't her forte. One former law partner of Christina's told the Whitmans that Christina had been slipping for a while, the past five years even.
There have been a lot of news stories this week that a non-sgotten appeal.
That's not quite true. He had an initial appeal which was denied and he had a hearing for post-conviction relief also denied.
But he appealed that denial to a higher court, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
And recently that court ordered the state to respond to one aspect of a non-spetition by January 14th.
So it is still alive by thread.
A non-spetition is based on a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, meaning Christina Gutierrez screwed up.
The brunt of the claim is about Asia McLean that she might have provided an alibi for a non-at-trial if Christina had talked to her.
But the part of the petition that the higher court wants the state to answer is actually about a different complaint.
Namely, that a non had asked Christina to seek a plea deal.
Twice he'd asked and Christina never did it.
Prosecutors in a non's case said they never made an offer, but Christina also didn't seek one.
Even though a non says he asked or two, once before his first trial and once before the second.
When I first read his petition, I told a non that I found it hard to believe he'd asked for a deal.
He's been so unshakable for 15 years that he's innocent that he had nothing to do with his death.
And it also seemed to me as if he trusted back then that the system would sort all this out and he'd go home.
But a non told me there were times when he was really scared.
He was trying to be brave for his family.
But then he'd hear stories or watch guys he knew get 50-year, 70-year life sentences.
And it would hit him. I could be imprisoned for the rest of my life.
I think it's so difficult to understand these things, not ever having been in that situation.
I would always think before I ever came to jail, that a person only would plead guilty to something because they did it.
No way would a person ever plead guilty to something.
Once you come into this whole system, one thing that you really learned is that no one really beats cases.
And when it comes to first-degree murder cases, it's almost impossible.
I can think in all the years of Interprison, I could probably think of a handful of people who ever beat a first-degree murder case.
Simply because the odds are just so stacked against you.
So there are people that I've met and I've known and I'm so jealous of them.
And not in a bad way in a good way because when we were over the jail, over the city jail, they were lower advised.
And I'm looking at them.
I'm just taking a deal of life suspended for 30 years.
Life suspended for 20 years.
Whether you did it or not.
Because the way the elements of the case are, you don't have a strong alibi.
You have someone coming to court saying that you did it, whether you did it or not.
You're going to go on front of a jury and 12 people are going to convince you because they have never sat in your shoes before.
So it's really a choice that you have in a life sentence versus a choice that you have in my life.
Because now I still communicate with some of these guys.
They're actually getting ready to go home, you know, 15, 16 years later.
Anon says when he's seen younger guys come in on parole violations or for whatever reason, he tells them, take the deal.
Regardless of whether you did it, take the deal.
Because Adnan has maintained his innocence, he's got no hope of getting out or very little hope.
That's how the system works.
He understands that now.
Technically, Adnan is eligible for parole, but the chances of getting it are so slim for anyone with a life sentence for first degree murder, but especially if you don't show remorse.
Because, you know, what if he's a psychopath, right?
Next time on cereal. Serials produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas and me, Emily Condon is our production and operations manager.
Ira Glass is our editorial advisor.
Research in fact, checking by Michelle Harris.
Administrative support from Elise Bergerson.
Our score is by Mark Phillips, who also mixed the episode.
Our theme song is by Nick Thorburn, who provided additional scoring.
Special thanks to John B.
Minor, Terry O'Connor from Purdue University, Scott Calvert, Craig Timberg, Meredith Cohn, Lisa Pollock, Chuck Salter, Blake Morrison, David Cohn, and Natasha Lesser.
Our website, where you can listen to all our episodes and find photos, letters, and other documents from the case and sign up for our weekly emails, cerealpodcast.org.
Serials are production of this American life and WBZ Chicago.
