Page 64 of Courtroom Drama
D.A. Stern moves to the jury box and rests his hands atop it. He taps his pen on the wood. “And are there additional tests that could have been run on Mr. Kitsch to look further into the cause of his sudden death?”
“Yes. Additional testing can be done at the request of family members.”
“Did Mrs. Kitsch request additional testing? To find out the cause of death of her husband of twenty-four years?”
“No, she did not.”
“No, she did not,” D.A. Stern echoes. He circles the defense table, then ambles back to the witness stand. “And Mrs. Kitsch actually took claim of the body as soon as the autopsy was complete, is that correct?”
“That’s right.”
I think of the argument the D.A. made during opening statements, pointing to his theory that Margot rushed to cremate Joe’s body to hideany evidence of foul play, and how Jackie Kitsch raised questions about the nature of Joe’s death onlyafterthe cremation had taken place.
“Tell me, Dr. Jessel, have you ever testified in any cases where additional toxicology reportingwasrequested and it helped to determine a cause of death?”
“Yes.”
“What were the details of that case?”
Durrant Hammerstead objects, citing relevance, and after a long pause, Judge Gillespy allows Dr. Jessel to continue.
“Well, standard tox reporting doesn’t screen for everything. But in a case I had a few years back, the widow requested additional reporting. An extended drug panel, poison and toxic agent testing, advanced metabolic testing, she did it all. She wanted to be thorough because her husband had been otherwise healthy. Because of that additional reporting, we were able to identify subsequent traces of tetrahydrozoline in his system. This finding ultimately played a key role in determining the events that led to her husband’s death.”
“Tetrahydrozoline?” D.A. Stern asks.
“The active ingredient commonly found in eye drops,” she explains.
The gallery expresses one collective murmur. I guess we know why Dr. Jessel is the medical examiner of choice to testify on behalf of the prosecution. My legs grow restless as I await the expected outcome here.
“And what were those events? In that case?” D.A. Stern asks.
“The teenage son had placed eye drops into his father’s morning coffee after an argument about a scratch on the family car’s front bumper. The boy thought it would give his father diarrhea, not kill him. A common misbelief.”
Margot blots at her nose with a frayed tissue.
“Tragic,” D.A. Stern says after evaluating Margot. “But that testing wasn’t done in this case because Mrs. Kitsch didn’t request it. And by the time we came to pretrial testing?”
Dr. Jessel answers the implied question. “Any remnants of said chemicals would no longer appear in the testing after so many months.And since the body was cremated, we could only rely on the samples retained from the initial autopsy.”
D.A. Stern nods. “No further questions.”
Damon shifts in his seat, casts his eyes toward me briefly. A bead of sweat trickles down the small of my back. It all feels like information I shouldn’t know. My head is spinning. I used to want to know everything possible about Margot Kitsch and the people in her life. Now, I wish I could go back to only knowing what she wanted me to. I wish I could undo the growing doubt that scrapes at my thoughts with each new witness.
Durrant Hammerstead’s turn with the witness comes quickly and so does the shift in questioning. “You said that when you examined Mr. Kitsch’s toxicology results, there were no indications of foreign substances?”
“Mr. Kitsch died from sudden cardiac arrest. I ruled it undetermined because of his otherwise good health.”
“Undetermined? So, to reiterate your earlier testimony, your belief is that Mr. Kitsch likely died of natural causes?”
Dr. Jessel swivels her head in a figure eight. “I found nothing in my evaluation of the body or the toxicology results that would indicate anything other than natural causes.”
Durrant Hammerstead turns to the jury box and grins laxly, sure to impress upon us the importance of this statement.
Finally, something in Margot’s favor. I can’t help but think, though, that it’s nowhere near enough after the prosecution’s time with this witness.
31.
Trial Attorney (n., phrase)
