attention to a hazard, without intent to damage; and that the Commonwealth's witnesses were, to a
remarkable degree, a family and its court. The jury seated by mid-afternoon was twelve citizens of
Marlowe County, one of whom had once been fined by her own association and said so, cheerfully,
in voir dire, and was seated anyway, Judge Osei remarking that experience of a thing was not
disqualification from judging it.
Nolan's opening was short: a former public defender's inventory, not a prosecutor's thunder. The
case was not, she said, about a homeowners association, into which the Commonwealth had not
charged and did not propose to intrude; the indictment had been drawn narrow on purpose, and she
would try it narrow. It was about a Saturday morning, a steel garden edger, and a mirror that cost
seven thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars to make whole. They would see the morning twice,
through two cameras that had never met, and hear the defendant, in his own voice, within a minute
of the glass falling, advance the explanation the defense would advance today — and they might
ask themselves how a man comes to have his explanation ready before the sweeping is done. "The
Commonwealth's case," she said, "is not that Mr. Pruitt governed badly. The Commonwealth takes
no position on his governance. The Commonwealth's case is that on the seventeenth of May, in
front of his neighbors, the defendant picked up a tool of steel, walked to a car the law had that
morning placed beyond his authority, and struck it twice — the second time after the first had
shown him, in glass, exactly what the tool did. Destruction is a word with a shape, ladies and
gentlemen. By Friday, you will have seen its shape twice, from two angles, in the defendant's own
hand." Lasky, opening, was silkier and longer, and landed, as he had been retained to land, on the
word accident — an unfortunate contact, in a morning of lawful duties, with a mirror already
fractured and already, in the defendant's professional judgment, a danger to the children of the
court. He spoke of nine years of service. He spoke of the improbability — he let the jury savor the
word — that a man would commit a felony, openly, at his place of work, in front of the sheriff. He
did not say, in opening, what Gordon had said to him in Richmond, and what he had said once, in
return, about ratification and juries; the clubhouse had now said it for him, and forty-nine votes
were not a jury either, a fact he contemplated, at the defense table, with the folder squared before
his client and the whole long week ahead.
Priya Shah testified first, because she had seen it first and filmed it from the one angle the law
prefers: her own porch, at number seven, with a beagle pulling, in the opening seconds of her
footage, at the edge of the frame, in a detail no staging would have kept. She described the
compliance drive, the stop at number nine, the defendant's walk up the driveway with the edger out
of the tool tube — "not carrying it the way you carry a tool to use it," she said, "carrying it the way
you carry a — an argument" — and the two blows, and the silence right after, in which Sam
Rowan's question about the box reached her porch. Lasky, on cross, was gentle and thorough about
the Reading Group, the ledger, the proxies, the election — the whole architecture of June — and
Priya answered each question in the same level voice: yes, she had organized; yes, she had carried
the bookkeeper's figures house to house; yes, she had been elected to the board three weeks after
she filmed a crime. "And the film, Ms. Shah — you sent it, I think, to three places." "Logs should
be kept in more than one location," Priya said. "It's the first rule of my profession." "And of
campaigns." "Mr. Lasky," Judge Osei said, mildly, from the bench, "the witness has answered the
question you asked. Ask another, or sit down." He sat down, having made the point he came for and
having watched it, on the jury's faces, cost very nearly what it earned. Harold Abernathy followed,
eighty-two years old, in a jacket and tie, and testified to the hedge he had been trimming and the
edger he had watched come out of the tube; and he distinguished the second blow from the first
with a schoolteacher's care for the difference between an act and a decision. "The first blow, a man
might explain. Heat, surprise, the tool slipping — I have marked essays more charitable. The
second blow was taken with a step back and a look at what the first had done. In my classroom we
called that revision. A man revises when he means it." On cross, Lasky asked whether he had not
stood for office against the defendant's slate, and Harold said that he had, and won, and that none of
it had been visible from his hedge on the seventeenth of May, which was the morning he was here
to describe.
Maya Okafor took the stand on Wednesday morning with her mother in the front row and her
phone, sealed in its evidence sleeve since May, produced and identified like a relic. She was
seventeen. She had been filming a skateboard video at the end of the cul-de-sac — the