Blood Royal (7 page)

Anthony Trent smiled, exposing thousands of dollars’ worth of caps and a bleached-white smile. “Well, we are a bit curious about you, I must admit. As you know, Her Highness did not consult with us prior to hiring you. Frankly, we found out about it from the media.” He didn’t have to spell out what a breach of protocol
that
was.

“I was a bit surprised myself, to say the least. A friend of hers married to an American had read about the cases I’ve handled and recommended me.”

“We understand you recently tried a case in Savannah, Georgia, in which you applied your defense theory. Something called the slow trigger,” Sir Fredic said. Despite what he probably thought was a neutral tone, Marlowe easily picked up a negative attitude underlining it.

“Slow trigger is what the American news media has come to call it. I don’t have a name for it, but it seems to commonly pop up in the cases I’ve handled where abused women killed their husbands. Rather than a legal theory, it’s a fact pattern that arises from the cases.”

“You’ll have to familiarize us with the theory,” Trent said. “I’m afraid those of us in the justice business in the old country are not as progressive as you Americans are.”

Trent’s tone again was neutral, but she knew he was being both condescending and deceitful. He was a good attorney, handling one of the most famous legal cases in history—and his client had reached across the ocean to hire another attorney. He had to be shitting bricks since the news broke that the princess had hired an infamous American trial attorney. What did the princess tell him? Did she make it clear that Marlowe was lead counsel? Marlowe didn’t need a crystal ball to realize that the princess had certainly not told Trent that he was to be second chair. If she had, Philip Hall would not have referred to Trent as lead counsel.

She also didn’t need a fortune-teller to realize that from the moment the news broke that the princess had hired her, Trent and his team had been frantically researching her, that they already knew everything about her, from her bra size to the color of her toenail paint. They not only already knew her trial strategy, but no doubt had been playing a game of devil’s advocate to see how many holes they could punch in it.

She played along with the charade, knowing also that she had been hustled from the airport so they could talk to her before she had a chance to express her theories to the press: Trent and his cohorts wanted to make sure they censored out anything that did not please them.

“I understand Britain and America have similar laws concerning homicide defenses and mitigation,” she said.

Lord Finfall snorted. “Of course we do. You Americans got your legal system from Britain. Most of the present foundation of the laws on homicide are centuries old, many even go back to Roman times.”

Marlowe smiled and nodded. What an old ass he was. “And as you all know, I’m sure better than me, a mitigating defense for murder, to reduce it to manslaughter, is what we call heat of passion, not really in reference to romantic passion, but used in the sense of a sudden, violent anger. The law understands that some people are reasonably provoked into reacting violently to an emotional situation. One issue always present is the reasonableness of the provocation—was the victim’s actions such that we can understand the defendant’s reaction to it? Traditionally, the real key to the defense is not whether the provocation itself was of a nature to justify—juries often find the provocation justified when it involves emotional responses to situations like spousal abuse, infidelity, cruel insults, and the like.”

As she spoke, it occurred to her that not only were the judge and attorneys already well briefed on the defense—it had to be on their minds from the moment they were hired—but that even the two members of the team who were not attorneys had to be knowledgeable about mitigating premeditated murder down to the lesser charge of manslaughter. Marriages were hotbeds of emotion and it would be a rare spousal killing where mitigating murder down to manslaughter was not at least considered. Often, instead of mitigation, juries had found the abused defendant not guilty. So why the pretense at ignorance and the hostility not only toward her but the concept that the princess was an abused spouse? She went on.

“We all understand that if you step into your bedroom and find your spouse in bed with another person, a jury would probably find that a reasonable person could fly into a murderous rage, grab a gun, and pull the trigger. Back home, we call this a Texas divorce.”

Hall was the only one who smiled. He looked the stuffiest, but Marlowe decided he was definitely the nicest.

“In my experience, the real key to the defense is the time between the provocation and the lethal blow. The law says that the deadly blow must be delivered in close time proximity to the provocation, hence the expression a
sudden
heat of passion. There are no precise time limits, each case is judged on its own merits, but the courts have universally tried to limit the time between the provocation and the killing, with many courts getting offended if it’s more than a matter of a few minutes. The easy cases are those with provocation and almost instantaneous reaction—you walk into the bedroom, find your spouse in bed with someone, and you grab a gun, or you’re in a bar and someone says something insulting to your companion and you swing a beer bottle.

“The tough cases are those in which there is a greater length of time between the provocation and the killing. You find your spouse in bed with another person, you leave the house, go to a gun shop, buy a gun, and come back and start shooting. To find heat of passion, the courts prefer that you react at the moment of the provocation. If you run into the kitchen and grab a knife, or to the den for a shotgun, those cases are also often winnable. But if you go for a drive to think about it, if you have time to cool off, or leave to buy a weapon, the courts say you are no longer reacting under heat of passion.

“So the
amount of time
between the provocation and pulling the trigger—or the stabbing, bludgeoning, choking, or however the lethal blow is delivered—is crucial. That’s where the cases that even have adequate provocation are commonly lost—you have to be provoked, you have to pull the trigger while you’re still in the grip of powerful emotions from the incident.”

All seven faces were blank. She had no doubt at all that the subject of provocation for a heat of passion defense had been discussed by the group until each of them had it down pat and could repeat it by rote.

“As I’m sure you all know, if there is time to premeditate, it’s murder and not manslaughter. Murder in general requires malice, and malice usually comes from premeditation in which the killer has thought about the crime. Thus to mitigate the crime down to manslaughter, there must first be provocation and second, delivery of the fatal blow immediately thereafter. The phrase ‘slow trigger’ has arisen in my cases because I’ve managed to stretch out the time period from the provocation to the reaction.”

“How much time have you managed to stretch?” Trent asked.

“Years.”

“My God!”

The exclamation came from Lord Finfall. And Marlowe recognized immediately that it was not astonishment at her amazing feats, but something akin to horror that anyone had perverted a legal theory that probably went back to antiquity.

“Years between the provocation and the killing. For a killing in a
sudden
heat of passion.” The hair on the back of the neck of Lord Finfall’s fifty years of legal training was standing straight up.

Marlowe smothered a grin. “The killing still remains a sudden event, though I’ve stretched the decision to kill from minutes to hours,” she said smoothly. “What has been stretched out is how long the provocation has existed. To understand why provocation can take place over a period of years, we have to look at the unique relationship between husband and wife, and the differences between men and women.

“Spouses are not feuding neighbors who come into occasional contact with each other, dancing with someone else’s wife at the local bar, a couple guys rubbing each other the wrong way on the street, or a hundred other possible situations. People in a marriage are bound together—and sometimes a marriage can be turned into a
prison.
I don’t want this to come across as sexist, but in most marriages that have turned into prisons, the man is the jailer and the wife the inmate because the man commonly controls the family finances and has greater physical strength.”

“You will not find that that theory plays as well here as it does across the pond,” Helen Catters, the divorce lawyer, said. “Britain is behind many countries in terms of the advances of women in society. Male jurors are apt to get offended if you start characterizing them as prison wardens. You need to know, too, that the battered-woman theory has not yet been accepted as a separate diagnosis by either our courts or our medical profession.”

Marlowe smiled.
Dumb bitch.
“The idea isn’t to antagonize male jurors, but to get them on the defendant’s side by showing the bad things other men do, things that they wouldn’t do in their own marriage and would offend them.”

“Do you find male or female jurors more sympathetic to your theories?” McMann, the psychiatrist, asked.

“Generally men are more sympathetic to a woman’s plight, female jurors are more critical. But it’s an issue that will have to be studied when we start considering the unique social and political elements of this case.”

“I’d like to hear more about your theory,” Trent said.

Marlowe nodded. “This may sound like a simplistic model in a society in which so many women work outside the home, but statistics show the aggressive dictators of family life are more likely to be the husbands than the wives. And that a large number of the heat of passion killings by women of their husbands arise out of marriages in which the woman is a financial and physical prisoner. Most of the killings also involve the woman having suffered physical abuse from her boyfriend or husband. Mental abuse can come from either side, but again, the cases turning violent are much more likely to involve physical abuse of the female by the male, if for no other reason than men are physically stronger and more likely to inflict serious injuries on the other person. Thus most killings by women commonly arise out of situations in which the women are trapped in relationships with physically abusive and financially dominant men. It seems to be the nature of human beings that with power comes the abuse of power.”

“So your strategy rather vilifies the male,” McMann said.

“No, my strategy is to get the jurors to understand what the perpetrator went through that caused them to lash out violently. If it’s a wife who was beaten and humiliated, and if it makes the deceased husband look bad, then the man had vilified himself without any help from me.”

“But there is a focus on showing bad acts by the deceased?” Trent asked.

“Yes. Obviously, most heat-of-passion cases arising from marital relationships involve wives who have suffered physical and mental abuse over a period of years, and who are—or feel they are—trapped in a relationship with a physically and financially stronger male. At some point the trapped, beaten animal strikes back.”

Lord Finfall scoffed. “Such tripe.”

Marlowe smiled, but her eyes were stone cold as she turned to the retired jurist. “Perhaps if you were beaten and raped repeatedly by a dominant male in a prison setting, you might have more understanding and empathy for what a battered spouse endures.”

Lord Finfall turned red and Trent hastily interjected, “I’m sure Miss Marlowe is just trying to give us an example. Not necessarily one I would agree with, of course. Perhaps you can enlighten us on how you’ve, uh, slowed down the process, this so-called slow-trigger theory.”

“To lay a little more groundwork, again, as we know, the easy cases are those in which there is a lethal blow delivered during provocation. A blow is struck, one not giving rise to a self-defense plea, when a spouse is discovered in another’s arms. The cases that I’ve handled that give rise to the slow-trigger theory are those in which the killing was planned as opposed to arising in the heat of the moment.”

Lord Finfall shook his head in disgust. “Madam, it is fundamentally impossible to plan a killing and have it arise in a heat of passion. If you had come before me with your theory when I sat on the bench—”

“You would have found in my favor after you had given careful consideration to the law and facts,” Marlowe said, giving him a smooth smile. “What it comes down to is that judges and juries have to revisit the concept of
time.
It’s easy for us to understand that some things happen in a flash—an insult is given, a face slapped, a loved one is engaged in sex with another—these are all short-fused situations. There is sudden provocation and instant reaction. But there are situations that are provocative but don’t arise suddenly. Let’s go back to the prison analogy I used a moment ago—it’s one I frequently use so men can get a better idea of what a woman endures in an abusive relationship. If a male prisoner was abused, humiliated, and raped repeatedly over a period of time by a cell mate and one night, while the tormentor was asleep, the battered prisoner stabbed him—or burned him in his bunk—we would probably judge the battered prisoner the same way we would judge a whipped dog who one day bit the master who beat it.

“There are people trapped in marriages that are every bit as abusive as the situation I described and almost as confined as in a prison cell. In cases where people are trapped in a marriage with an abusive spouse, the battering and humiliation are rarely sudden provocations. Instead, they arise over time, getting more and more brutal over the years.

“And that is why the ‘sudden’ heat of passion doesn’t fit the situation. It’s not a sudden event, a fight or observed infidelity, it’s a slow, spiraling, long-term series of many events, in which a person’s dignity is taken from them and they are beaten and degraded like the proverbial whipped dog.”

Lord Finfall made a strangling noise. Obviously, he was having a hard time swallowing her remarks.