The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (20 page)

“I also teach science.”

Fair enough
.

“I mean, if the judge told me that all the evidence led to one verdict, I would have to follow it. But I couldn’t follow it, you know? You know what I mean, counselor?”

I still don’t
.

“I also have hemorrhoids.”

Good times
.

“Let them fry like hot butter.”

I’m laughing at you now
.

“With hemorrhoids, if I sit in one place for longer than forty-five minutes, I’ll have a bulging pain in my rectum, so I can’t be on this jury.”

That sounds fair to me
.

“I’m getting married next week.”

Vaya con dios
.

“You see what I mean, judge. I mean, with my hemorrhoids, it would literally be a pain in my ass to be on this jury.”

Hilarious
.

“Okay, so I could follow the law, yes. If the law says the death penalty is okay, then it’s okay. But would I believe that? I don’t know. I don’t. No, I couldn’t. Yes, yes I do. It’s okay. I could. I could follow the law. Yes. Yes, I would follow the law.”

Too pliable. Sorry, defense
.

“I’m a member of the Church of the Savior of our Father. We do not believe in executions.”

Good-bye
.

“No, I’m sorry, counselor. I don’t think I could follow the law after all. Is that okay?”

No
.

“I used to be a sniper for the military.”

Yikes
.

“My mother is sick and I take care of her every afternoon.”

Impressive. And excused
.

“I’m going to India next week on vacation. I’ll lose a lot of money if I can’t go.”

I don’t feel sorry for you one bit
.

“Please, I … I … have a heart condition. And I recognize the prosecutor from Wawa yesterday. And I think I went to school with the court reporter. Kindergarten, fifty years ago, maybe in West Philadelphia. And I’m Mormon. We don’t believe in the death penalty. Well, that was twelve years ago. Now I’m a Catholic. No, I’m a Jew. An Orthodox Jew. You understand, right? There’s no way I can be impartial.”

Of course. Of course, it’s perfectly clear
.

Judge?

I watched from the defendant’s table during every clumsy excuse. Melodious sacraments to my dissonant entr’acte, perpetuating a system that works more often than it does not.

The final few left us with a jury that seemed less like my peers than I could have anticipated. Their names stay with me, even today: Ronaldo Martinez, forty-five at the time. Construction worker. Originally from Kansas. Moved to Philadelphia one year earlier to start anew after his bitter divorce. Beverly DeBeers, forty-three, no relation to the jewelry company. Stay-at-home mom of, like, six humanoids. Wants to move back to the Main Line, especially after being summoned for this case. Nancy Garmond, fifty. Said she was allergic to peanuts during
voir dire
. Owns a company producing jelly preserves and marmalade. No joke. Charlie Levi, sixty-two. Retired schoolteacher. Taught physics, poetry, and pottery to inner-city kids. Amir Ansari, thirty-five. Taxi driver from Turkey. Came to America seven years ago and became a citizen only two. Lakeisha Fontaine, forty-two. Works for the DMV. I could have sworn that I’d seen her before. She might have been the one who let me take my license photo over a few times until my smile wasn’t crooked, but I can’t be certain (and clearly she couldn’t either). Russell Bryan, twenty-one. Recent college graduate. Drexel. Isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life. Has a cool ambidextrous name. Lavonne Owens, thirty-eight, corporate lawyer. Loves her job. Likes to wear the glistening fruits of her labors around her neck, fingers, and wrists. Shanaya Portsmith, twenty-six, hairdresser. Wears a different style almost every day. Was blonde, redheaded, and back to blonde during the course of my trial. Vincent Hanger, fifty-eight. Artist. Teacher. Sold a few paintings in a gallery in New Hope recently. Felipe Almuerzo, forty-three, kindergarten teacher. Entirely too happy to be on a jury. Melissa Silva, thirty-six, journalist, hungry for blood. She later wrote a self-published memoir
about her experience on this case that made it to the top ten thousand books on Amazon. And of course Samuel Stahl, seventy-four, our trusty alternate. Devastatingly old to be on a jury, particularly one for which he would never even have a vote.

There they were—twenty-six eyes serrating my every blink, the rising cadence of my chest, the unconscious flinch in my face when I unexpectedly sneezed. Thirteen individuals, marinating in the enclosed jury box like a carton of dried-out fruit.

By the time we finally made it to trial, I had been in jail for nearly sixteen months. My roots were halfway down my raggedy mane, and I had no more access to contact lenses. Madison McCall managed to procure an old suit from a thrift store for the trial, and consequently, I looked like a fashion victim caught in the mid-80s. I’m fairly certain I lost a vote or two based purely on the way I looked. Perhaps Lavonne and Felipe would have focused on me and the facts of the case a little more if I looked better. Or perhaps not. The coquettish concern they displayed with the details of each other’s bashful smiles reached me all the way on the other side of the courtroom. (I can’t resent them, though. They did thank me later by sending me a wedding photo, which is now taped to my wall.)

But regardless of how I see it, these were the people looking at me. Sitting in judgment of me. Watching me hour upon hour upon hour. Asked repeatedly by Madison McCall and Tom Davies if they could actually stand in judgment of another person—of this woman, Noa P. Singleton. Every single one of them hesitated through their response: yes, yes they could. They thought they could. Of course they could. Yes, really, it would be their duty. Their civic duty. And then they were sworn in.

T
OM
D
AVIES WAS A SUAVE
A
USTRALIAN FROM
S
YDNEY WHO
had tried at least three other capital cases before landing mine.

The first was a felony murder. Twenty-three-year-old Dean Johnson robbed a liquor store down by Penn’s Landing, shooting the clerk between the eyes three times, just before grabbing two hundred dollars from the cash register and a pocket-sized bottle of whiskey and jumping into the Delaware River. When the cops arrived, they found a trio of bullets connecting the liquor store clerk’s unibrow from eye to eye so that he looked like a dead Cyclops instead of the former chief of medicine of Mumbai’s third-largest hospital. They found Dean dog-paddling from Philadelphia to Jersey on a gimp leg, leaving a fluorescent trail of blood adulterating the water on the way. He confessed that night and almost pled guilty to avoid a trial. At the last minute, he got a newly appointed lawyer who persuaded him to fight the charge, only to meet the needle eight short years to the date of his guilty verdict. His jury deliberated for only twenty minutes.

The second capital case for Mr. Tom Davies was a quadruple homicide plucked from a B-rated Hollywood movie editing floor. Three dead-end guys, construction workers, decided to free their boss of a few ounces of cocaine while he was out screwing his wife’s sister. No harm to a quality guy, they thought. So they waited until his car was missing from its spot at his office in North Philly, presumed him gone, and then proceeded to knock on the door. (I never said that they
were bright, which is part of what made the case so easy for Tom Davies to win.) A random answered the door with his wife or girlfriend or hooker (quite frankly, I’m not sure who), and the three dead-end guys forced their way in on him, turning the apartment every which way to find the coke. Unfortunately, one of the guns accidently went off in the process, injuring said random’s girlfriend or wife or hooker. Shortly thereafter, their boss and his mistress and wife came home, and having no choice but to eliminate all witnesses, they shot each individual point-blank with a 35 mm handgun (but not before the wife cracked a bottle of Corona over the girlfriend’s head, leaving her as the only surviving witness of the bunch). The recoil flipped the gun out of one of their hands and was left like a glimmering pot of gold (along with the unconscious but very much alive boss’s girlfriend) when the police answered an anonymous call less than an hour later. The three guys were apprehended somewhere on I-76 trying to head to Altoona. Tom Davies tried dead-end guy #1, who is still waiting on a decent lawyer to help with his fifth appeal. Dead-end guy #2 got life. Dead-end guy #3 killed himself awaiting trial.

In my trial, Tom Davies spared no props or theatricality. An Aussie to the core, he spoke with that impeccable fusion of the Queen’s English and enough country swagger to make him feel approachable, middle-class, friendly (to which Stewart Harris actually objected on the basis of jury bias). He wore a three-piece suit almost every day, and flip-flopped between chunky plastic lenses, square around the eyes, frameless eyewear, and nothing at all. When he wore his contacts, his face was as naked as cadaver. You couldn’t help but stare at him when his thick black lashes closed in around his salty-blue eyes. I’m pretty sure he knew I had a crush on him, from jury selection to verdict.

It was May and blisteringly hot in Philadelphia the day my trial began. It’s possible that the air-conditioning was broken in the courthouse, but I know that’s just my memory embellishing history. Humidity puffed out of Tom Davies’s mouth along with each of his words, so much so that you could see the sweat slipping from his
pores from ten feet away. Hell, you could see the sweat dripping from the pores of the wooden desk behind which I was shackled. (The shackling, of course, was another point of contention that my attorneys lost. But I digress.)

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Tom Davies began, as I’m sure he began every trial—from driving while intoxicated to double homicide. He could have had a second career reading Charles Dickens to the blind, he was so charismatic with such banality of daily life. “It is New Year’s Day. Snow is on the ground and covering the rooftops. On this special day across the globe, lovers are kissing one another, parents are hugging their children, and in one apartment in Center City, a young woman in the prime of her life is being murdered, slowly and meticulously, according to a plan designed by a woman with lies, revenge, and jealousy on her mind.”

The last time I played in the snow was four years earlier on South Street during an unexpected nor’easter. The time before that was when Persephone and I pretended it was snowing in the ice skating rink at a mall in the San Fernando Valley when we were twelve. But Tom Davies didn’t know that. He didn’t know a lot about me, but he continued with his little story anyway.

“Sarah Dixon had fallen in love with a local entrepreneur, a man a few years her senior, who proudly owned a small restaurant in North Philadelphia. They dated for months, taking trips around the city, visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and even skiing in Vermont one weekend. Soon, Sarah learned that she was pregnant. This exceptional news was one of the greatest moments of her life. Unfortunately for her, it was also the reason she was targeted by the defendant. You see, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll hear testimony that these two women had something in common. Sarah Dixon’s boyfriend and the father of her unborn child was also the father of the defendant. And that is not the only similarity you’ll see in this trial. You’ll see how the defendant and the victim were also classmates at the University of Pennsylvania. You’ll learn that as soon as the defendant discovered what her father was doing with Sarah Dixon, she
became jealous and envious. You see, ladies and gentlemen, Sarah Dixon came from a family in which she had two loving parents. The defendant was raised by only her mother. You’ll hear evidence of how she came to Philadelphia not just to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but also to find that missing piece in her life: her father. And as soon as she found him, the minute she established a relationship with the one man she longed for, she lost him to Sarah Dixon.” Tom Davies was on fire. Tom Davies was a feverish storyteller. Tom Davies was, after all, a modern-day Dickens. “When Sarah Dixon became pregnant, the defendant knew she had lost her father forever. And she snapped.”

Tom Davies pulled a remote control from his jacket pocket and punched its red button, demonstrably presenting Sarah to the jury: a woman he couldn’t properly describe with words. It was his visual sucker punch, his beloved bushwhack, and it worked better than I could have imaged.

“This is Sarah Dixon,” he announced, as all twelve jurors turned their attention to a life-sized photograph of Sarah that appeared on a screen just between the jury and the witness box. “Just twenty-five years old. Trusting, bright, with her entire future ahead of her. Perhaps you know someone like her. Perhaps you yourself remember that time when anything and everything seemed possible. You can see the joy so clearly.”

Sarah was smiling a gargantuan jack-o’-lantern smile so wide that you could see the pink flesh residing rather unattractively above her teeth. Her hair was pulled back into two braids, each cascading down her bony shoulders, wisps flying out from the bands like unyielding weeds. She was wearing, as usual, her Penn T-shirt and was holding out a bottle of water to the camera—to my father, actually—though I know neither Tom Davies nor Marlene Dixon knew that when Marlene gave him the photograph. I knew that, of course, because I saw him take it when they were running circles around each other on a track two miles from Rittenhouse.