had to get
category4
had to get the court’s permission to represent Mr. Johnson instead of the usual public defender.
The jury is 4 white women, 3 white men, 3 black women, and 2 black men.
The judge is Byron Stevenson, white, mid-fifties, on the bench for fourteen years.
See you tomorrow night…
Gwen
Sarah reaches up, turns on the overhead light, and closes the air vent. She takes out her yellow highlighter and skims through the first part of the transcript, skipping over the opening remarks by the judge and other court formalities, until she reaches the place where the Solicitor begins his opening statement.
ARMAND: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. My name is Richard Armand, and I am Solicitor for the 13th Judicial Circuit.
I don’t usually try criminal cases myself. But this case is different. This case is going to set a precedent for the rest of the country; and it’s high time we took a strong stand on this issue, because we will prove to you that the defendant – Tyree Johnson, seated right over there – murdered an innocent teenage girl, Beth Ann Brooks, just as surely as if he had taken a gun and shot her in the head.
In this case, however, it wasn’t a gun that Mr. Johnson used. It was a deadly virus called HIV, the virus we know causes AIDS. Mr. Johnson knew he carried this lethal virus in his blood, knew that he could infect any women he slept with and give them HIV as well, and knew that they could get sick and die from AIDS. And yet he didn’t tell Beth Ann Brooks that he was HIV-Positive, didn’t give her the chance to refuse to have sex with him, didn’t warn her that she could get a fatal disease from him if she did. And he didn’t use a condom, either.
This is nothing short of premeditated murder – murder in the first degree.
Beth Ann Brooks had been the Homecoming Queen in her senior year at Riverside High School. She was a cheerleader, a Merit Scholar, and president of the Central Spirit