Beyond Terror - Softcover

REVORD, RAOUL D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1462048641 ISBN 13: 9781462048649

Publisher: iUniverse, 2011

Synopsis

She would be severely beaten and likely killed if she stayed, but certainly killed if she tried to leave. Was it self-defense, or was it murder? To defend his client, one lawyer from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula must find the truth in forensic evidence and through a sensational trial, portray to the jury a drama of the life of Jean and John Davis. Revord’s  Beyond Terror tells readers this gripping story of a battered wife who suddenly is left no choice but to end years of domestic violence by killing her abusive husband.

Attorney David Chartier was spending quality time with his family in their cabin near the Upper Twin Lake when a phone call from a highly distressed woman broke the peace and serenity of that evening. It was Jean Davis, David’s longtime client, calling from the Michigan State Police Post where she is being held for her husband’s murder. After years of physical and emotional abuse, Jean abruptly realized that her only chance of staying alive was to kill her husband.

So begins David’s investigation, examination, gathering and analysis of forensic evidence that will provide a defense for his client. Beyond Terror follows the proceedings of the trial, beginning with David’s investigation at the scene until the final verdict from the jury and appellate decision of the Court of Appeals. A shocking and unexpected end to the novel awaits readers.

A trial lawyer for forty-eight years himself, Revord delivers this fictional story—inspired largely on real events—with much precision, capturing the technicalities and the drama involved in criminal proceedings. For more information on Beyond Terror, log on to :

Visit my website www.RaoulDRevordEsq.com

About this title

About the Author

Raoul D. Revord, Esq. received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and a JD from the Michigan State University College of Law. He served as a trial lawyer for forty-eight years. Now retired, Revord lives in the Hiawatha National Forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Beyond Terror is his first novel.

Visit my website www.RaoulDRevordEsq.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Beyond Terror

A Battered Wife on Trial for the Alleged Murder of Her HusbandBy Ralph Thornton

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Ralph Thornton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4864-9

Contents

Dedication................................................................viiAcknowledgments...........................................................ixPrologue..................................................................xiChapter 1: An Interruption at Upper Twin Lake.............................1Chapter 2: Investigation at the Scene.....................................14Chapter 3: An Early Arraignment...........................................20Chapter 4: Private Investigator's Investigation...........................26Chapter 5: The Theories of the Case.......................................30Chapter 6: The Preliminary Examination....................................35Chapter 7: A Search for Experts...........................................54Chapter 8: Discovery......................................................59Chapter 9: Pretrial Motion Regarding Voir Dire............................66Chapter 10: Jury Selection................................................74Chapter 11: Opening Statements............................................89Chapter 12: The Prosecution's Case........................................101Chapter 13: The Case is with the Defense..................................105Chapter 14: Rebuttal Witnesses............................................170Chapter 15: Closing Argument for the Prosecution..........................173Chapter 16: Closing Argument for the Defense..............................181Chapter 17: Prosecution Rebuttal..........................................196Chapter 18: Judge Roode's Instructions to the Jury........................200Chapter 19: The Verdict...................................................213Chapter 20: Sentencing....................................................218Chapter 21: The Appeal and Court of Appeals Decision......................221Chapter 22: Jean's Release from Prison and Homecoming.....................224End Notes.................................................................227About the Author..........................................................229

Chapter One

An Interruption at Upper Twin Lake

Two hours later that evening, Ann called from the kitchen, "David, there is a client on the phone wanting to speak with you."

"Thank you," he replied, as he reached for the phone on the end table next to him in the living room of the cabin.

Ann was just about to clean up the table on the porch, overlooking the Upper Twin Lake, and start washing dishes, while David had begun playing his guitar, sitting in his favorite chair, near a blazing fire in the stone fireplace, his father-in-law singing "Old Shep." The family was just beginning to relax with music and song after a dinner of grilled steaks, baked potatoes, salad, and corn-on-the-cob. In addition to David and his wife, both their parents, and their three children, were at the cabin. David expected that the telephone caller might be a client who wanted to talk to him about drafting a will, or perhaps a drunken-driving arrest or some mundane real estate matter.

"This is Attorney David Chartier, who is calling?"

In a barely audible, but highly distressed voice, a woman replied, "This is Jean Davis ... I'm ... (sobbing) at the State Police Post, I had to shoot that son of a bitch (sobbing loudly), he was going to kill us."

"What ... John? Is he alive?" David inquired.

"No!" she stated.

"I've been arrested for murder."

David paused for a moment, not knowing what to say. What a shock! He finally got command of his thoughts and his voice and he barked over the phone. "Jean, I'll be right down; don't speak to the officers, except to tell them that you do not want to be questioned further, and that you want counsel. Do you understand?" David asked.

"Yes," she said.

David grabbed a pen and a yellow pad that was on the end table near the phone, leaving his guitar, the cabin, and his family, amid questions about who and what the telephone call was about, telling them only, "I have to see a client who has been arrested for murder."

"Do you have to go now?" inquired Ann.

"Yes, Ann ... my client is being held by the Michigan State Police for murder; she has asked for me, as her attorney," David replied, really feeling badly about leaving the whole family, when he had been looking forward to spending the entire evening with them.

David had defended several clients facing the charge of domestic violence. With this call, however, the tables have turned. He thought about that phrase—domestic violence—and did not recall ever hearing those two words used together, prior to ten years ago. It is not that there was not such a thing as domestic violence, but the label—domestic violence—just did not seem to David to have been a familiar phrase to describe Dick kicking the shit out of Jane, during the 1970s. It must have been when the abused wives and domestic partners began standing up for themselves, refusing to live in a hostile home environment.

"Domestic violence" was in recent times on the front pages of newspapers every other day, it seemed; the public sees it on the television and they read books about it. People who did not live with violence in the home did not hear much about it. People, who did live with violence in the home, did not talk about it. It is like an elephant in the living room—everyone knows it is there, but no one wants to talk about it.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan (U.P.) has vast regions of total forest and lakes with only a sprinkling of small towns, bordering the north shore of Lake Michigan and the south shore of Lake Superior. Most of the U.P. towns are separated by about twenty-five to forty miles distance from its nearest neighboring town. Many old-timers say that was about the distance a horse could travel in a day. Persons born and raised in the U.P. are sometimes referred to as Yoopers, while people from downstate coming to the U.P. are referred to as Trolls—living in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, below the Mackinac bridge, at the Straits of Mackinac, the connecting waters between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. David and Ann's cabin, built in the early 1930s from hand-hewn pine logs—having a small kitchen, with a wood-burning cook stove, living room with a stone fireplace, two bedrooms, and a glassed-in porch, overlooked the Upper Twin Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's Hiawatha National Forest. The cabin had neither running water, nor an indoor toilet—it had a picture pump in the kitchen and there was an old outhouse, just fifty feet east of the cabin—it was David's favorite place to be, offering a real repose from the stress of a busy law practice. It had been a perfect autumn day, sunny; all of the trees—except the evergreen—were in full color.

David left the cabin knowing that Ann would be upset at his leaving, his heart palpating, driving down the sandy drive, through the mixed red and white pines, to the Buckhorn Road, and on to Federal Forest Highway 13, heading north toward the Michigan State Police Post, in the city of Pictured Rocks, Michigan. That evening, David did not look much like a trial lawyer; he was wearing shorts, a sweatshirt, and sandals.

Pictured Rocks is a small town—approximately 3500 people—situated on the southern shore of Lake Superior, in the North Central part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The town is surrounded on the east, south, and west by tall hills completely covered with mature hardwood—beach, maple, oak, and a sprinkling of evergreen trees throughout—displaying a beautiful scene of small town and forest. To the north is Lake Superior, vast, blue, and beautiful, with Grand Island, just three miles north of the town—forty-five square miles of forest and natural beauty—in Lake Superior, and the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore—with its 200-foot cliffs of breathtaking colored sandstone—to the northeast, a favorite tourist attraction.

David was driving through the beautiful pristine forest that lined both sides of Highway 13, the late afternoon sun was blazing through the trees, illuminating the fall colors of the leaves of the maple, oak, and beach trees, the tamarack displaying their golden yellow needles, soon to be dropped, in preparation for the long winter ahead. His mind wondering, he thought it odd, that when looking at the fall colors of the forest, the mixture of the colors did not seem to clash, but imagined that placing the same mixture of colors in an unnatural setting, might seem unsettling.

It was David's twelfth year as a practicing attorney in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, handling a considerable caseload representing a wide variety of legal matters for many clients. Over the years, this variety of law cases included corporate, criminal, probate, real estate, personal injury, wrongful death, products liability, medical malpractice, workers disability, social security disability, bankruptcy, and contract matters, but never a murder case, a fact that now left David feeling somewhat insecure as a criminal defense attorney. What would a good criminal defense attorney do next?

First, thought David, the client must retain him, as trial counsel. Next, meet the client, get the basic story, and insure that she does not make any further admissions to the police and learn what admissions, if any, she had already made to the police and the circumstances under which they were made. David knew that he needed to get to the scene where the shooting occurred and hopefully talk to someone who might have witnessed it, record as much of the event as possible, have the witness tell of his or her observations in minute detail, minimizing the possibility that the story might change with time.

Many of the lawyers in the remote communities of the U.P. are general practitioners, handling a great variety of legal matters, whereas lawyers from the more metropolitan downstate communities often are specialists, handling a very narrow aspect of the law.

Ann and David had married in 1960, while he was a freshman in undergraduate school. They had worked hard and saved to finance his way through college. David's father had given him twenty dollars once and a pair of new tires for his car upon graduation from Michigan State University with his bachelor degree, cum laude, in industrial security administration. He worked in management for a number of corporations, prior to beginning law school; his first position was supervisor of security for a defense contractor at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. He was not able to attend law school right after getting his BS degree, as he and Ann then had a child—their son Jerome was born in David's senior year at MSU—and he had to get a full-time position to support the family and repay his educational debts.

Five years after getting his bachelor's degree, he was working for another defense contractor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he was able to attend the Detroit College of Law in Detroit—now Michigan State University College of Law—in the evenings, while working in full-time security management positions for companies in Ann Arbor and later in Detroit.

David's work in defense industrial security management for research laboratories at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and later at the Aerospace Corporation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were both extremely important positions, requiring the highest level of security clearance and good management skills. David developed his management skills early in his career between the ages of twenty-three to twenty-eight, supervising many people in the classified document accountability sections, keeping track of hundreds of thousands of highly classified documents, writing security manuals, conducting security education programs and investigations. David has never talked much about his work during those years, although he enjoyed his work very much and developed very patriotic feelings for the United States of America, while protecting research and development (R & D) secrets, believed to be extremely important to the national defense of the U.S. and its allies. David did not have to go to Viet Nam; he was married with children—and was working where it was necessary that he have access to highly classified information, documents, equipment, and missiles—and he was taken off the list for the draft, for the duration of the war.

After four and a half years in law school, David graduated and received his Juris Doctor degree in law and began studying for the bar exam. He was able to pass the exam on the first attempt and was admitted to the practice of law in all the Michigan courts, as well as the federal courts within the state, soon after.

His practice began in the city of Detroit, handling mostly federal criminal court appointments, representing defendants charged with a variety of drug offenses. It was not much of a practice; he did not have a real law office. All of his law clients lived in dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit, and David was not about to visit them on their turf—while dressed in his three-piece suit and tie—but would arrange to meet them in the lobby of the federal building, downtown Detroit—although not very private—a much safer place to meet and discuss their particular cases.

In the spring of the year following his admission to the Michigan bar, he and his family—Ann and he then had three children, their son Jerome, their two daughters Mae and Jeanine—moved back to their hometown of Pictured Rocks, in the U.P. He joined a friend of his who had a very active law practice, and for the next ten years, he immersed himself in the law. Ann was never very happy about moving back to the U.P. David and Ann had a new three-bedroom tri-level home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in a new subdivision. Ann liked the school system where son Jerome and daughter Mae were attending. Ann believed that moving back to the U.P. would result in the loss of their independence, their privacy, and the security of corporate employers, who paid David well. After living away from parents and other close family members, one experiences a new adult identity consistent with the level of responsibilities of becoming parents, having a home, demanding employment, and education pursuits. Moving back to one's hometown where parents and other senior family members still reside frequently causes a sense of instant age regression and a loss of the once separate adult identities that gave David and Ann that great feeling of independence, responsibility, and privacy. Although David experienced those feelings too, he did not experience them to the extent that Ann did, David being active in the practice of law. Ann being at home with the children was subjected to recurring unannounced visits from parents and other family members, with their carefully pointed criticisms and their seeming obsession at attempting to take control of just about every adult decision that arose in her or the children's lives.

As David continued to drive, he was thinking about the elements of the crime of murder—the burden of proof that a prosecutor would need to overcome to prove a defendant guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt—and, thinking also, about possible theories of defense, of a wife killing her husband—was she insane ... was it self-defense ... an accident, or was it murder?

David was acquainted with both Jean and John Davis. He had represented both of them in different civil cases involving automobile-related personal injuries in the past. John was a forty-nine-year-old former ironworker, injured in a head-on car collision—the oncoming vehicle had crossed the centerline and collided with John's car—causing extensive serious injuries that prevented him from ever returning to work. David represented John in litigation against his own Auto No-Fault Insurance Company, as well as against the wrongful driver and owner of the offending vehicle. The cases settled, but David left the door open for future medical claims, for the balance of John's life.

John was a high school dropout who had worked hard to become an ironworker, and he provided for his wife and three children with his hard-earned wages, less of course what he and Jean spent on their weekend drunks in the local bars.

John's whole sense of worth and masculinity seemed associated with his pride of being an ironworker. In David's dealings with him, John always seemed to be a big but gentle man, with a silly little grin on his face, as if he were hiding some small secret that he really wanted to tell David. David had heard that in recent times, however, that John had become very violent with Jean and his kids when drunk—which was most of the time. John must have felt quite desperate after finding that his injuries were likely to permanently disable him from returning to work as an ironworker. Confined to the house most every day and night would have been unbearable for any man accustomed to iron working at considerable heights in the larger cities of Marquette, Escanaba, Sault Ste. Marie, Iron Mountain, Menominee, and Green Bay. Physically healthy persons seem to suffer from mental and emotional depression in the U.P. at a greater rate per capita than in other parts of the state. It could be the sense of isolation felt by many living through the long winters with snow depths of two hundred fifty to three hundred inches of accumulated snowfall on average in the Pictured Rocks County area. At any rate, add to that problem soft tissue brain damage resulting from a head-on collision of two automobiles. The prognosis for a normal life is extremely challenging for the strongest and most conscientious of individuals. At the time of John's accident, there was very little medical support for the concept of "closed head injury." For some odd reason, doctors would not give much thought to changes in personality resulting from a head injury that did not fracture the skull. It took years of research and much litigation in personal injury cases to get the medical doctors to recognize and treat brain injuries in patients having soft tissue head injuries without skull fractures.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Beyond Terrorby Ralph Thornton Copyright © 2011 by Ralph Thornton. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1462048641
• ISBN 13: 9781462048649
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 244