“How ya doing?” I ask when we are alone.

He smiles and rubs his wrists, unshackled for a few hours. “Okay, I guess. Didn’t sleep much.” He didn’t shower either because he’s afraid to shower. He tries it occasionally but they won’t turn on the hot water. So Gardy reeks of stale sweat and dirty sheets, and I’m thankful he’s far enough away from the jury. The black dye is slowly leaving his hair and each day it gets lighter, and his skin gets paler. He’s changing colors in front of the jury, another clear sign of his animalistic capabilities and satanic bent.

“What’s gonna happen today?” he asks, with an almost childlike curiosity. He has an IQ of 70, just barely enough to be prosecuted and put to death.

“More of the same, Gardy, I’m afraid. Just more of the same.”

“Can’t you make them stop lying?”

“No, I cannot.”

The State has no physical evidence linking Gardy to the murders. Zero. So, instead of evaluating its lack of evidence and reconsidering its case, the State is doing what it often does. It’s plowing ahead with lies and fabricated testimony.

Gardy has spent two weeks in the courtroom, listening to the lies, closing his eyes while slowly shaking his head. He’s able to shake his head for hours at a time, and the jurors must think he’s crazy. I’ve told him to stop, to sit up, to take a pen and scribble something on a legal pad as if he has a brain and wants to fight back, to win. But he simply cannot do this and I cannot argue with my client in the courtroom. I’ve also told him to cover his arms and neck to hide the tattoos, but he’s proud of them. I’ve told him to lose the piercings, but he insists on being who he is. The bright folks who run the Milo jail forbid piercings of all types, unless, of course, you’re Gardy and you’re headed back to the courtroom. In that case, stick ’em all over your face. Look as sick and creepy and satanic as possible, Gardy, so that your peers will have no trouble with your guilt.

On a nail is a hanger with the same white shirt and khaki pants he’s worn every day. I paid for this cheap ensemble. He slowly unzips the orange jail jumpsuit and steps out of it. He does not wear underwear, something I noticed the first day of the trial and have tried to ignore since. He slowly gets dressed. “So much lying,” he says.

And he’s right. The State has called nineteen witnesses so far and not a single one resisted the temptation to embellish a bit, or to lie outright. The pathologist who did the autopsies at the state crime lab told the jury the two little victims had drowned, but he also added that “blunt force trauma” to their heads was a contributing factor. It’s a better story for the prosecution if the jury believes the girls were raped and beaten senseless before being tossed into the pond. There’s no physical proof they were in any way sexually molested, but that hasn’t stopped the prosecution from making this a part of its case. I haggled with the pathologist for three hours, but it’s tough arguing with an expert, even an incompetent one.

Since the State has no evidence, it is forced to manufacture some. The most outrageous testimony came from a jailhouse snitch they call Smut, an appropriate nickname. Smut is an accomplished courtroom liar who testifies all the time and will say whatever the prosecutors want him to say. In Gardy’s case, Smut was back in jail on a drug charge and looking at ten years in prison. The cops needed some testimony, and, not surprisingly, Smut was at their disposal. They fed him details of the crimes, then transferred Gardy from a regional jail to a county jail where Smut was locked up. Gardy had no idea why he was being transferred and had no clue that he was walking into a trap. (This happened before I got involved.) They threw Gardy into a small cell with Smut, who was anxious to talk and wanted to help in any way. He claimed to hate the cops and know some good lawyers. He’d also read about the murders of the two girls and had a hunch he knew who really killed them. Since Gardy knew nothing about the murders, he had nothing to add to the conversation. Nonetheless, within twenty-four hours Smut claimed he’d heard a full confession. The cops yanked him out of the cell and Gardy never saw him again, until trial. As a witness, Smut cleaned up nicely, wore a shirt and tie and short hair, and hid his tattoos from the jury. In amazing detail, he replayed Gardy’s account of how he stalked the two girls into the woods, knocked them off their bikes, gagged and bound them, then tortured, molested, and beat them before tossing them into the pond. In Smut’s version, Gardy was high on drugs and had been listening to heavy metal.

It was quite a performance. I knew it was all a lie, as did Gardy and Smut, along with the cops and prosecutors, and I suspect the judge had his doubts too. Nevertheless, the jurors swallowed it in disgust and glared with hatred at my client, who absorbed it with his eyes closed and his head shaking, no, no, no. Smut’s testimony was so breathtakingly gruesome and rich with details that it was hard to believe, at times, that he was really fabricating it. No one can lie like that!

I hammered at Smut for eight full hours, one long exhausting day. The judge was cranky and the jurors were bleary-eyed, but I could have kept going for a week. I asked Smut how many times he’d testified in criminal trials. He said maybe twice. I pulled out the records, refreshed his memory, and went through the nine other trials in which he’d performed the same miracle for our honest and fair-minded prosecutors. With his muddled memory somewhat restored, I asked him how many times he’d had his sentence reduced by the prosecutors after lying for them in court. He said never, so I went through each of the nine cases again. I produced the paperwork. I made it perfectly clear to everyone, especially the jurors, that Smut was a lying, serial snitch who swapped bogus testimony for leniency.

I confess—I get angry in court, and this is often detrimental. I blew my cool with Smut and hammered him so relentlessly that some of the jurors became sympathetic. The judge finally told me to move on, but I didn’t. I hate liars, especially those who swear to tell the truth and then fabricate testimony to convict my client. I yelled at Smut and the judge yelled at me, and at times it seemed as though everyone was yelling. This did not help Gardy’s cause.

You would think the prosecutor might break up his parade of liars with a credible witness, but this would require some intelligence. His next witness was another inmate, another druggie who testified he was in the hallway near Gardy’s cell and heard him confess to Smut.

Lies on top of lies.

“Please make them stop,” Gardy says.

“I’m trying, Gardy. I’m doing the best I can. We need to go.”

3.

A deputy leads us into the courtroom, which is again packed with people and heavy with a layer of tense apprehension. This is the tenth day of testimony, and I now believe there is absolutely nothing else happening in this backwater town. We are the entertainment! The courtroom is packed from gavel to gavel and they’re lined up against the walls. Thank God the weather is cool or we’d all be soaked with sweat.

Every capital murder trial requires the presence of at least two lawyers for the defense. My co-counsel, or “second chair,” is Trots, a thick, dull boy who ought to burn his law license and curse the day he ever dreamed of showing his face in a courtroom. He’s from a small town twenty miles away, far enough, he thought, to shield him from the unpleasantness of getting caught up in Gardy’s nightmare. Trots volunteered to handle the preliminary matters, intending to jump ship if a trial became a reality. His plans have not worked out to suit him. He screwed up the preliminaries as only a rookie can, then tried to extricate himself. No go, said the judge. Trots then thought it might be an acceptable idea to sit in the second chair, gain some experience, feel the pressure of a real trial, and so on, but after several death threats he stopped trying. Death threats are just part of the daily grind for me, like the morning coffee and lying cops.