Blood Land (7 page)

The team, led by Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., stopped American troops from further firing on unarmed civilians. Specialist Four Jimmy Pruett was a door gunner, and one of the team who were to receive the decoration—the highest award the Army gives for bravery not involved with direct enemy conflict.

James Pruett made history by choosing to become the only United States veteran ever to turn down the Army’s prestigious award. The story made national headlines, in large part because Pruett refused to communicate—publically or in private—his reasons for refusing to accept the honor. The act generated significant speculation that his refusal might represent a silent protest against a false tale of heroism; that perhaps the military was once again trying to spit shine an otherwise horrendous event by drumming up a handful of convenient heroes.

Pruett knew that wasn’t the case. It took a hard will to keep his reasons to himself. He knew that Thompson and the rest of his team acted just as bravely as suggested—more so, actually. Pruett could not guess how many innocent lives the men saved that day. Yet the only images in Jimmy Pruett’s mind—images that still burrowed their way into the nightmares of Sheriff James Pruett—were the ghosts of those innocents brutalized and murdered
before
they arrived; slaughtered by soldiers representing Pruett’s own country—his own chain of command.

For Pruett, the decision was simple: he could accept no award—no honor—for an event so heinous, carried out by his fellow compatriots. He never begrudged or dishonored those who accepted the medals. He loved them like brothers, though he knew his refusal forever cast a shadow across the glint of their heroism. But he also knew that, ultimately, orders begat action—and orders came from on high.

To James Pruett, there could be no honor salvaged from such a day.

The press, they’d wanted answers. And when they didn’t get them, they assumed there was a cover-up. They did not understand. No one did.

It also took the town of Wind River a long time to reconcile the reasoning behind Pruett’s silence. In truth, Pruett figured they never really did comprehend it better than anyone else did; the townspeople simply accepted him back into the community. Like a mother opens the door for a wayward son. Reasons become less important than the faith of family.

The deepest wedge driven, however, was between Pruett and his daughter.

“An innocent bystander

Somehow I got stuck

Between a rock

and a hard place

And I'm down on my luck”

Warren Zevon,

Lawyers, Guns and Money

THE HONORABLE Bridger C. Butler descended from western royalty and he intended that the network news crews know it. There were at least a half dozen national news organizations sent to Wind River, Wyoming, to cover the “Land Murder” case. Butler called a public briefing only an hour after learning of his selection; judges from Rock Springs served on a monthly judicial rotation to travel north one hundred miles to Wind River and it was Butler’s turn—through the randomness of arbitrary schedule pooling, Bridger Butler would adjudicate the trial of the decade; a true, Western, cowboy murder.

“My great grandmother was defeated only twice in a sharpshooting match, both times—narrowly, I will add—by none other than Annie Oakley,” Butler told the press. “A good-hearted, philanthropic woman by all accounts, my granny. She started a family that has now lived in this great state for three generations. That I have been given the opportunity to preside over a case that touches so close to the historical nerve of Wyoming is a privilege to me, an honor to my family, and will become a testament to my adoration for this great state.”

J.W. Hanson shrugged at the judge’s prepared remarks. No doubt Butler
did
love Wyoming. But murder cases like this one sprung up very rarely in such small western communities. And such trials made careers.

The national attention would make Hanson’s job both easier and much more difficult. He knew how to play big trials. It was a problem of media management—give them too little information and you lost a chance to play on public sentiment; give them too much and you might as well hang the client yourself. He’d also done his research on Butler: the man appeared to be a fair magistrate, concerned most with the meticulous application of law. Butler supported the death penalty but tended toward a more liberal view of the rights of the accused. Hanson also knew peripherally of his tendency to ride prosecuting attorneys. Butler made no secret that he saw the prosecution—with its myriad resources—as a bully in the making.

All other things being equal, Judge Butler tended to subscribe to the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. That would help the defense, but the McIntyre case promised to be an uphill struggle. Ty had motive to want to kill his father and brother. Not much financial gain in the killing, but revenge? Yes. And Ty was violent. His arrest record alone supported that. Never mind that every member of the jury would know it.

If he were to accept this case (as if he had not already agreed the first night he made love to Wendy Steele), Hanson needed a strategy. How to lay out his case for this defendant. Hanson smiled inwardly.

There was
always
a strategy.

Hanson needed to be alone. He drove westward out of Wind River, toward Jackson Hole, cruising along highway 191 until he reached Hoback Junction, where instead of going on to Jackson he veered left on highway 89 toward Star Valley. He’d taken the route before once with his family, traveling to Idaho Falls for some school shopping decades past. He remembered the road shadowed the great Snake River as it twisted and turned through a vast canyon leading eventually to the Wyoming-Idaho border.

The views did not disappoint him. Steep granite walls rose up on one side of the road, signs every few miles warning of falling rock—indeed Hanson saw chunks of the mountain resting scant few feet from the narrow shoulder of the road that would have crushed a car such as his. Twice he had to swerve to avoid smaller pieces of rock—smaller, but still a foot or two in circumference; enough to tear off a wheel or snap his axle and send him caroming into the raging Snake River to his left.

Such moments aside, the picturesque drive was exactly what the lawyer needed. He’d fallen so fast and so hard for Wendy that he was simply incapable of cogent thought in her presence. It bothered him. He did not like the lack of control he felt when with her, particularly since he was certain he already wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

He knew such feelings were likely akin to infatuation and perhaps not strong bedrock on which to build the foundation for the rest of his days, but he didn’t care. His life was over half past him and he’d spent too much of it conforming to standards, laws, ethics, methodologies, ideologies, and lesson plans. It was time to accept a bite from the apple, as egregious an act as it might represent. He longed for the lure of a life lived past the boundaries of conformity.

In Wendy he had certainly found that. But the case—the forthcoming trial—that was no playground for him to rediscover opportunities lost along the way. Ty McIntyre’s life hung in the balance, not to mention justice for Wendy and Sheriff Pruett.

Hell
, he thought.
The entire town deserves some kind of resolution.

But those truths were part of what gave him trepidation. Yes, there was indeed the conflict of Wendy’s relation to the defendant—Hanson was still weighing the implications and possibilities inherent therein—but decades spent thundering in courtrooms taught him that rarely did such cases deliver a balancing of Lady Justice’s scales.

Too often families and communities walked from the hallowed courtroom jaws agape at the travesty of the legal system, stunned to be leaving with far more questions than answers.

Hanson wasn’t sure he could bear returning to the brutal fight, at least not then, when it would mean—win or lose—the inevitable tearing of family bonds and the excruciating, palpable rile as the true law—the law Hanson and every other seasoned attorney knew intimately, with its weaknesses and insufficiencies and outright unfairness—spun through the courtroom like a twister, napalming innocent, law-abiding  people with the ferocity of its inadequacy, crushing optimism wherever it was found, and, worst of all, jading the hearts of those who believed in it the most.

But who else, then? This was the itch he could not scratch. The trial was going forward whether Hanson stayed and fought on behalf of Wendy’s uncle or he tucked his tail and retreated in cowardice to the comfort of his benign faculty existence. Wendy, Sheriff Pruett, Ty, and the rest of the community were going to be dragged through the glory of the legal process he so many years ago denounced, whether he stood with them or not.

So he would stand. Of course he would.

And as he had so many times before, even after countless months on end roiling in the belly of the broken system, he would believe once more.

Believe that he could make a difference.

The jury selection process began two weeks later.

Voir Dire
: “to give a true verdict”, or in the case of jury selection,
to tell the truth.

Hanson was wary of the prosecutor in the case, Town Attorney Beulah Jorgensen, having done due research on his opponent. Jorgensen was a congenitally dislikable woman the professor had not met himself but about whom there seemed no shortage of stories or public opinion. The unmarried woman spent much of her childhood henpecked by the girls of Wind River and ignored or ridiculed by most of the boys. Her position as Town Attorney afforded her, it seemed, the chance to readjust the balance of the scales. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) her demeanor, Jorgensen had a near-perfect record. The woman had not lost a case in well over a decade.

Jorgensen was also seeking the death penalty. A charge of first-degree murder was the only crime in Wyoming punishable by death, and there had not been an execution in the state in over thirty years. Aggravating circumstances were a requirement. Hanson read the relevant portion of the charges levied by the State of Wyoming:

“In planning the shooting, Ty McIntyre, the defendant, did show the premeditative forethought commensurate with first-degree murder and in shooting toward a house with multiple occupants, any of which (or any combination of which) would be put at risk of imminent death by his own hand, did knowingly create a grave risk for the victim of the crime as well as additional persons.”

Voir dire was less about getting at the truth and more about a study of human reactions: expressions, tone and timbre of voice, directional glances—the indicators were myriad and since the balance of the case was about the jury, expertise in reading people was requisite to choosing twelve men and women that would deliver the desired verdict.

And the
last
thing the accused wanted was a jury of his peers. Hanson learned just a few trials into his defense career that true peers were less likely to sympathize, more apt to convict. He taught it this way:

“Look at your coworkers. They may like you, but there is always that underlying sense of competition, of ‘who’s getting the next promotion?’ Peers tend to have
too much
affiliation. They are biased and don’t even know it.”

Why should
he
get away with murder?

Why should
she
get rich quick?

The thought between the lines was always the same:

Instead of ME?

A good defense lawyer wanted a person who, though obviously
not
from the same background or race or employment, could put themselves in the shoes of the other. The perfect juror had what Hanson referred to as “transferrable sympathy”; the tendency to have pity on those whose lives seemed worse off than their own. And it was
that
propensity he sought. No peer conflict, just the innate ability to
imagine
themselves in the other’s predicament. Hanson, and all good trial lawyers, knew that imagination offered jurors wide latitude in thinking about what a person might do under such circumstances. Too often, a jury of peers was likely to deliver a guilty verdict—it was too much like self-judgment. That is why prosecutors loved jurors who looked, talked, acted, worked, and played just like the accused. Twelve perfect peers would convict every time.

Hanson liked to use an approach where he created a scenario, tried to put the entire prospective panel in a moment; one they could
feel
. Then he would ask them to imagine the answer to a particular question—many times one that contradicted the constructed scenario.

For example, he might ask them to close their eyes, place their minds in a nursery: two walnut cribs, walls painted neutral green, identical twins—boys; strawberry blonde hair, only a few months old. Perhaps there was a mobile hanging from the ceiling, a littering of stuffed animals, a changing table with diapers, ointments, and wipes stacked on the shelves. Then Hanson would ask the jurors to imagine large swaths of blood marking the walls; the babies, not breathing, death all around and the parents accused.

He’d watch the individual reactions. Horror, surprise, shock, anger. And almost always, there were those who appeared less jolted; not exactly unaffected, but willing to see the process through to the end. In these instances, the prosecutors often succumbed to the moment, as shocked by his “antics” as much as many in the jury pool. But in such reactions, Hanson learned what he needed to know, while his adversaries missed the crucial cues. The selection process was akin to a speed match of chess. One could not afford to miss the smallest potential disadvantage or the tiniest breach in the front line of the opponent.

Another favorite technique involved Hanson regularly eliminating jurors without a single question or conversation from or with either attorney. He would call on a juror only to thank them for their service and excuse them. The strategy was again fairly simple—it required Hanson only to dismiss a juror outright, one who already mismatched his profile. The reaction of the other jurors, however, could be telling.