My worst testimony experience was not a capital murder. It was not testifying against a crooked cop. My worst testimony experience came very early in my career and was in JP Court. It involved a petty vandalism.
Several teenaged boys had climbed the fence to get into a private park in a creek bottom late one night. The park was closed and locked. There was a swimming pool for club members only. The boys stripped down and went swimming but had tripped a silent alarm in the process.
Patrol officers arrived. The boys fled. The officers chased them on foot through the dark park down toward the creek bottom. All of the boys made it through the creek and up the hill to escape except one.
A particularly obese boy, while trying to wade through the creek to escape, had gotten bogged down thigh deep and stuck in the muddy creek bottom. A couple of the cops had to wade in and, one cop grabbing each arm, pull the fat kid out of the mud and back up onto dry ground, where they placed him under arrest and handcuffed him.
A concrete bench next to the pool had been pushed off into the deep end. It had chipped the gunite on the pool bottom. I was on call for crime scene response and went to the club to take photos.
The boy the cops had rescued from the mud was charged with criminal trespass and vandalism. The dollar damage made it a low-level misdemeanor. The case was filed in Justice Court and went to trial there.
The officers who had dragged the kid out of the creek bottom testified first. I was the last prosecution witness. I introduced photos of the light-colored spots where the bench’s legs had stood, of the drag marks across the edge of the pool, and of the bench at the bottom of the pool.
The kid’s defense attorney asked how I knew the bench at the bottom of the pool was the bench that had stood at the place I had testified to, how I knew the drag marks were made by the bench, and what evidence did I have that the defendant had been the one to move the bench.
I answered that all I could testify to was what the photos showed – the unweathered marks where the bench legs had been, the drag marks, and the bench at the bottom of the pool. The defense attorney started to ask more questions, but the judge cut him off and took over questioning me from the bench. The judge was brand new, having just been elected Justice of the Peace. Prior to that, he had been a defense attorney himself and he was not satisfied with the way the kid’s defense attorney was handling my cross-examination. He took it upon himself to teach the defense attorney how to cross-examine a witness and launched into a scathing series of sarcastic questions from the bench.
I don’t think I have ever been so demeaned, belittled, and insulted in court. I kept looking to the two junior county attorney prosecutors for help, but they had both folded their arms on their table and put their heads down the way we used to nap in elementary school. They never objected to what the judge was doing. They weren’t even watching. I was being thrown under the bus!
After the judge was through berating me, he found the kid “Not Guilty.” The case was over. Thank goodness, I’ve never had another experience quite like that in court!