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FIVE: THE COURTROOM
- University Press of Mississippi
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- Additional Information
95 FIVE THE COURTROOM All week, ever since the homicide on Monday night, Tiffani has run into people on the street who said they saw her at the crime scene. They were among the restless crowd in the Addison Terrace projects, and they saw her working, wearing the badge. Tiffani knew this would happen. She knows too many people on the Hill to have escaped unrecognized. On Tuesday night, homicide detectives in the case came to the coroner’s office to get an arrest warrant. They had a suspect’s name—Ernest Harris, a.k.a.“Pickles,” age thirty-one—but they hadn’t caught him. Pickles! Tiffani knew Pickles. A friendly, outgoing guy, but the thing about Pickles was, you never knew what he was going to do. You always heard about him carrying a gun, being involved in shootings. Now this. The cops wanted Pickles, but they didn’t know where to find him. All week they looked, until tonight, Saturday, when the phone rings, and it’s the police, saying they have Pickles and they’re bringing him over for his arraignment. Tiffani just happens to be working that shift when the call comes in. Earlier that afternoon, someone called the police and gave them the tip-off: Pickles was holed up in a third-floor apartment on Bentley Drive, right down the street from the homicide, in the same project. The tipster didn’t give a name, but the cops went there anyway and surrounded the place. Not eager to break in and arrest him by force, the police first tried calling the apartment. It worked. They got Pickles on the line and convinced him to give himself up. 96 THE COURTROOM Now they’re on their way over to the coroner’s office, the detectives and Pickles. Mike DeRosa is working too, but Tiffani knows DeRosa hates doing arraignments for some reason. He’s done only one in five years at the office. So she agrees to do it. It’s her job, whether or not she knows the guy. So Tiffani heads up to the third-floor courtroom. The coroner’s office courtroom is about twice as big as an average high school classroom, and like the rest of the coroner’s office, it is built in generous , turn-of-the-century fashion: thick brass doorknobs and hinges and a long judge’s dais made of dark, heavy wood. Two tables face the dais. During inquests, the defendant and his lawyer sit at one table and the prosecutor sits, often alone, at the other. This courtroom is where the legal phase of homicide cases begins.Arraignments and inquests take place here—sometimes one a week, sometimes four or five. During inquests, an attorney who works for the coroner’s office acts like a magistrate judge does in other kinds of criminal cases. He hears evidence and decides whether the case is strong enough to be tried at the courthouse a block up Ross Street. If not, the accused killer will go free. Either way, some spectators usually leave the coroner’s office in torment. Before inquests begin, two strapping deputy sheriffs search the spectators, sweeping handheld metal detectors up and down each person. They confiscate anything that could be a weapon, even removing a sewing needle from one woman’s purse before an inquest last month. They have found razors, knives and guns. (The previous fall, a key prosecution witness came to court carrying a licensed handgun. He refused to go to the witness seat and testify against two accused killers without his weapon. He was ordered off the coroner’s office premises, a blow to the prosecution’s case.) After spectators mount the two flights of stairs, deputy coroners usher them to their seats, trying to find room for everybody. In some inquests, spectators pack every row of wooden seats all the way to the rear of the courtroom, where listeners must crane their necks to hear over the rattle of the air conditioner in the window. Like guests at a wedding ceremony, the victim’s family tends to choose seats [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:40 GMT) THE COURTROOM 97 behind the prosecutor and the defendant’s family behind the defense table. Victims’ relatives sometimes carry framed photographs of the deceased, propping them on their laps as if to remind the officials that a real person died...