With Prejudice
- eBook
- Paperback
- Audiobook
- Hardcover
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
No one knows what happened that night. Seven strangers must decide.
Earl Thomas, a straight-laced taxman with his fair share of police encounters, is the begrudging foreperson in a high-stakes trial in Miami. Laura Hurtado-Perez is a physician whose unassuming manner conceals a private pain. Joseph Cole is the founder of his local neighborhood watch, unduly obsessed with the families around him.
Along with four others, these jurors of varying ages and walks of life whose paths would likely never have otherwise crossed must come together to make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
On the night Melina Mora, a free-spirited woman both proud and kind, was murdered, she was seen with a young man of Gabriel Soto’s description. Two strands of her hair were found in his bedroom. Sandy Grunwald, a young prosecutor whose political ambitions depend on securing a conviction, finds herself pitted against Jordan Whipple, a preening public defender armed with a freshly discovered, dynamite piece of evidence on the eve of the trial—if the Honorable Darla Tackett will admit it.
What Sandy, Jordan, and Judge Tackett all know, however, is that the criminal justice system is complicated, and everyone has a story—especially the jury. And it’s their experiences, biases, and beliefs that will ultimately shape the verdict.
With striking originality and expert storytelling, Robin Peguero’s debut novel explores the prejudice that hangs over every trial in America. You’ve never read a legal thriller quite like this. There’s never been a thriller writer quite like Peguero. And you will not be able to predict how it all ends.
Release date: May 17, 2022
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Author updates
With Prejudice
Robin Peguero
The five men and two women of the jury sat in silence. The air-conditioning rattled and hummed, blowing frigid air their way. Juror number eight hugged herself. The soundtrack from the city below—wailing sirens, honking horns, and screeching tires—floated in past a closed window. Juror number one added to the cacophony by rapping his fingers against the top of the oblong, mahogany table that swallowed the space with its grandeur. Carved into its side, within eyesight of only juror number sixteen, were the words “Set me free.” He fingered the grooves with his thumb.
“What do you do?” juror number one asked juror number three. The speaker was white, in his fifties, and portly. He smiled broadly and nodded compulsively as others spoke, whether he agreed with them or not.
“I’m a tax collector,” said number three. The responder was black, of the same age, but heavier in build. He sat with his arms resting on the rolls of fat collecting at his stomach. He wore tiny glasses that all but disappeared on the enormity of his round face.
“Wow,” said number one with a chortle. “You’re hated as much as defense attorneys.”
Number three raised his eyebrows.
“Or, depending on your politics, as much as prosecutors.”
Number one cut his laughter short. Discomfort flashed noticeably in his eyes. But he smiled through it and bobbed his head in polite agreement.
The strangers eventually ran out of meaningless things to say. The sound of the long hand on the outdated clock on the wall rifled through the air, a click every minute. The seconds between—at first, a breezy sixty—grew longer as time and patience wore thin.
“We all know he’s guilty.”
The declaration came from juror number six, loud enough to carry to all of the room’s occupants. A significant number of them shuffled uneasily in their seats.
“The judge instructed us not to talk about the case yet,” number three shot back.
Defensively, number six looked down at her rose-painted fingernails. “I’m just trying to save us time. Get us home at a reasonable hour. If we can get a feel for where we’re at now, we can shorten our deliberation.”
Juror number eight extended her right hand to number six—shoulders now sagging, chest deflated—and laid it over her forearm. The fingers were chilled, but the gesture was warm. Number eight had a daughter of similar age.
“She was just trying to help,” number eight said, tight-lipped, her eyes locked with the girl’s. “It wouldn’t hurt to get an early count.”
Juror number seventeen cleared his throat. He was a lawyer, a fact he had mentioned several times. His conspicuous cough redirected their attention. He answered with self-effacing diligence. “Before we begin deliberations in earnest, the judge will ask us to elect a foreperson. We can just do that now and save time that way.”
No one dared make eye contact with him again, lest he take it as an indication that he ought to nominate himself. Instead, most eyes moved to number one: the oldest, a man, and a white, old man at that. Even the progressives in the room tapped into muscle memory, turning instinctively for leadership to the one who most looked the part.
Number one smiled, acknowledging the vote of confidence. But his grin soon faded as anxiety took root.
“I don’t know,” he stammered.
He looked to the side. “How about my friend over here?” he said, placing a plump hand on the shoulder of number three. “He’s awfully professional.”
Number three’s eyes softened behind their spectacles. The compliment was both surprising and flattering.
“And I think it would look better.”
The sharp but fleeting pain of a microaggression sliced through the black man like lightning. His heart rate accelerated, his breathing came short and staccato, and the hairs on his arms stood at attention. But seconds later, his vitals returned to stasis. He said nothing. It was forgotten.
A wave of nods surged down the table. By murmured assent, number three became the black face of the jury.
Earl Thomas bought his first car at age twenty-eight. It was foreign. Its black steel gleamed in the South Florida sun. That was by design. Earl washed it just about every day. He had kept his focus trained in high school, his nose buried in boring books filled with technobabble in college, and his head down thereafter as he inconspicuously ascended the ladder at his nondescript job working for nondescript bosses. All for that car. He loved that car. It was his status symbol.
Ten thousand miles later, he kept it pristine. It looked just like new.
Officer Lance Hollister noticed.
He flipped on the blues and reds, triggering their accompanying wail. Unsurprising to Earl, but nonetheless startling. The routine was frequent enough that he ought to have grown used to it. But he never did. The same physiological response of the heart, lungs, and nerves in a fritz seized him. It made him seem nervous, and therefore suspicious, which in turn escalated his nerves and aura of suspicion.
Officer Hollister lingered in his car. A favorite song of his was a minute from ending on the radio. He was pre-filling tickets: one for no seat belt, the other for a malfunctioning taillight. He had initiated this streetside confrontation, but he, too, felt tightness in his chest, his overworked vital organs reeling with adrenaline.
The slow walk to the suspect’s window—punctuated by the deliberate beat of boot on asphalt—marked a tense countdown. The early seconds of the interaction set the tone. Earl had no way of knowing which side of the heavy hand of the law would greet him: the rough, calloused back hand or the smooth, soft palm. Officer Hollister was similarly at an informational deficit. He spent the walk, and indeed the whole of his working day, wondering if he was marching to his death.
Officer Hollister fingered his gun compulsively. Earl caught sight of the tic in his side-view mirror.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
The question was not condescending. It was strategic. An answer might include crimes unknown to the patrolman. I’m sorry, Officer. I know my license is suspended. Or, There’s only a baggie of weed in the center console. Nothing more. Better yet, the officer gets to quote the admission in his report as a so-called spontaneous statement. Merely delete mention of the opening inquiry. No Miranda rights necessary; admissible at trial.
Earl had a caustic answer at the ready, one he was prepared but failed to bury deep in his belly: “Not an earthly clue, sir.” The words discharged from his lips with unexpected defiance. Even as his grip trembled on the steering wheel, Earl’s voice took on a steely resolve.
Officer Hollister whipped back as if physically struck. He grew visibly annoyed.
“Get out of the car, son.”
Earl sneered, sucking at his teeth in disbelief. Noisily, he unfastened his belt, flipped up the lock, and swung open his car door. The imposition was aggravating, but not more than being called “son.” At twenty-five and fresh-faced, Officer Hollister was three years his junior and looked it.
“Up against the car.”
Earl turned grudgingly in a half circle, laying the side of his face and the front of his pressed suit against hot metal. Officer Hollister dug his elbow painfully into his upper back.
“Spread your legs.”
Earl obeyed. Methodically, the officer patted him down, sliding his hands haltingly along the outline of his body. Passersby in cars and on foot slowed down to peer at the suspect—all white faces and rapt, wide eyes. I wonder what that man did. His eyes locked with theirs. It was humiliating.
Turning up nothing, the officer flipped him by the shoulder, bringing their faces inches apart.
“You don’t have any weapons or drugs in your car, do you?”
Ever so slightly, subtle enough to go unperceived, the defeated man shook his head in the wind.
“You’d have no problem letting me search, then?”
Earl found his voice.
“Are you asking for my consent?”
“Are you making me ask for your consent?”
With a tight, pained smile, Earl relented. “No.”
He watched from the curb as the officer rifled through his car. He snapped open the glove compartment. He popped open the trunk. He had Earl input the combination to his briefcase—09, 11, 47—to find nothing but papers with equations and numbers scrawled on them. Satisfied, or perhaps ultimately not, the officer culminated the affair forty-eight minutes after it began by handing Earl the two previously filled tickets.
“False alarm,” Officer Hollister explained. “But inconvenience is a small price to pay for safety. You understand.”
Earl’s silence was intentional. He inspected the two citations.
“Have a good evening, son.”
Officer Hollister walked away, past Earl’s car and halfway to his own, but the suspect’s final quip cut him short, midstride. Earl had finished reading his tickets.
“What’s wrong with my taillight?”
The officer gritted his teeth. His muscles tensed. He turned and walked back. Upon reaching the trunk of Earl’s car, he paused, drew his baton from his belt, and—in one swift, forceful motion—slammed its black body into the light. It shrieked as it shattered. Red glass rained down onto the pavement.
“It’s busted,” Officer Hollister said, then left.
Earl recounted the experience to his wife later that day with verve and indignation. She waited until he was done to respond.
“It’s always cat and mouse with these white folk. A modern game of master and slave.”
Earl said nothing. He purposely didn’t correct her. He didn’t tell her that Officer Hollister was black.
Mr. Earl Thomas, the foreperson, tore a blank sheet of paper into sevenths.
“We’ll gauge the temperature of the room, but it’ll have to be by secret ballot, so none of us are influenced one way or the other,” he directed. “Write guilty or not guilty, fold once over, and hand it back.”
Solemnly, they jotted down another man’s fate. Mr. Thomas collected the slips of paper and tallied the vote, sans pomp or circumstance. Five guilty. Two not.
“Well,” juror number one sang, making eye contact with both Mr. Thomas and juror number eleven. “We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?”
He had directed his words to the panel’s two black jurors.
Number eleven openly sighed, eyes rolled to the ceiling. Mr. Thomas smiled emptily.
Number one had been only half right. Mr. Thomas had, in fact, been a guilty vote. It was juror number seventeen, the white lawyer, who represented the second not guilty.
“One of us is the alternate,” number seventeen volunteered. “There can’t be an odd number of us. When it’s actually time to deliberate, they’ll cut one of us loose.”
When Mr. Thomas next spoke, the deep bass of his voice commanded the room’s attention. “I’m a numbers guy,” Mr. Thomas began. “For now, it’s seven. We get to seven, we go home. Let’s get to work.”
01 | THE STATE WEARS HEELS
Sandy Grunwald is always in a hurry. It’s pure affect. She finds that men take her more seriously that way.
“A made man always has somewhere to be,” the most important man in her life once told her. “Have somewhere to be, Sandy.”
Rumor has it the Honorable Jack Grunwald, ferociously protective of his only daughter, instilled this idiosyncrasy in her merely so that prospective suitors could not—literally—keep up. True to form, at twenty-nine, Sandy remains conspicuously single, singularly wed to her work as a prosecutor.
She bolts down the slick sidewalk made wet by a seconds-long sun shower, leaving an intern struggling to keep up with her and the trail of words she slings over her shoulder.
Sandy speaks in a perennial hurry, too. This quirk, conversely, has not paid professional dividends. In meetings, she has often sprinted through brilliant proposals to little fanfare from her colleagues, only to hear those same ideas immediately parroted back by slow-speaking, faux-contemplative male counterparts to a roaring reception.
“I won’t apologize for having thoughts and expressions that aren’t tempered by the general malaise that seems to afflict the male sex,” she complains, but never too loudly, and only to other women.
On this day—the day the man she sought to condemn to prison for life met the six arbiters of that decision—she doesn’t seek the company of women. At least, not too many of them.
“Women are liberal. Women have sympathy, compassion, feelings—all virtues in the real world that are of absolutely no use to us in the gallows of that jury room,” she instructs. “Men have no heart. You want your father on that panel. Better yet, you want your grandfather. The older, the better. You want to see gray.”
Her breathless protégé scribbles away—capitalizing and then circling the word gray five times over—as she avoids bumping shoulders with the slow-moving crowd in Sandy’s wake.
“But what of the sexual assault charge? Won’t we want women for that?” the girl offers.
Sandy sneers. As a novice prosecutor, Sandy had once ecstatically chosen a jury of all women to sit in judgment of a college freshman who had held down a girl against her will and ejaculated on her back. The six girls returned a verdict of not guilty. Her insides had wilted at having to call and tell the victim—who had broken down in violent sobs on the stand—that the jury had simply disbelieved her. Her howling on the other end of the line sounded like that of an injured animal. Never again, she told herself. At least one man would serve on every one of her juries.
Cocooned in the company of women, the jurors had felt safe reprimanding a girl who had naively invited her attacker into her dorm room in the first place. All it would have taken was one man, she was convinced, to have made an off-color remark, and the women would have rallied together, reminded of the injustices of womanhood.
“OK. So we remove women,” the intern concludes.
Sandy whips around, leaning down and into the girl with stern eyes and a hushed voice.
“Absolutely not. That’s illegal,” she reproaches, peering around for eavesdroppers. “We listen to their words. What they say. We strike jurors based on that. Make sense?”
The girl nods, the doublespeak unresolved in her mind.
Sandy reengages her power stride, flashing her badge and waltzing past security at the attorneys’ entrance to the courthouse. The intern wrestles with her purse and fumbles with producing her own, less glamorous identification. Sandy keeps talking.
“You’ll see how the defense will jump up and down and holler every time we propose to strike a black juror. ‘Batson! Batson!’ they’ll yell. Some of my colleagues get offended. ‘I’m not racist!’ they whine. I don’t get offended. I always tell them, ‘You are racist. We’re all racist. There are very real, entrenched structural disadvantages that African Americans face in our society.’ I’m a good Democrat. I know the deal.
“But the Batson challenges are disingenuous, and I’ll tell you why. For one, African Americans are far more conservative when it comes to criminal justice than they’re given credit for. Christian judgment goes a long, long way. As a Jew, I wouldn’t know.
“And secondly, I am not striking jurors because they’re black. If a black panelist admits he does not believe a word any officer says, because he has undergone a lifetime of traffic stops for Driving While Black—and God knows that happens all the time—then I am striking him because he has plainly conceded to automatically disbelieving most, if not all, of my witnesses. A white man says the same, and he’s off. Conversely, a black man says he loves law enforcement, and he’s on. The true test of racist jury picking is if I were to strike a pro-State juror who is black. Now that would be a violation!”
Her scribe is catching only every other word. The girl crudely boils down her mentor’s speechifying to six words: Christian black = good. Angry black = bad.
Sandy sweeps open the courtroom door. High ceilings, painted stained-glass panels, and cold air greet them. She takes a seat at the table farthest from the empty jury box.
“Honestly, I could tell you the jury verdict from the moment the six of them are selected—before any evidence is presented, before any testimony. I’d only need to ask one question: ‘Who did you vote for in the last election?’ Except for maybe gun cases, acquaintance rape, or crimes against gay or trans victims, you just don’t want progressives like me on the jury. You want Republicans. In the end, it’s all tribal. For the next couple of hours, the defense attorney and I will ask them every question but that, all the while trying to figure out that one answer.”
Sandy has her hands and nose in her trial box, sifting through reams of paper, lecturing still.
“The jury is a crew of misfits. The scraps that neither side particularly wanted, those who end up saying nothing of importance or intelligence over the course of several hours of questioning. You don’t pick a jury. You’re left with a jury. If you’re too informed—you know, actually read about the world around you, pick up the newspaper now and again—then you might know too much. The court itself kicks you off. If you’re too opinionated—you know, actually have given thought to the prudence of this country’s drug policies or formed a well-reasoned conviction against the death penalty—then you might think for yourself too much. It’s a race to the bottom, and it’s unfortunate.”
She takes a breath to force a smile at opposing counsel as they enter, and reengages her pupil at a lower volume. The intern leans in as she furiously takes notes.
“This is how you play the game: I’ll find those who are just a wee bit biased in favor of the State, and then pressure them into sounding impartial. Not with the hopes of getting them on the jury. But, if a prosecutor can make a juror predisposed to lean her way sound fair, she makes the defense use one of their limited no-questions-asked vetoes on him, instead of getting that juror automatically kicked off for cause. It’s a game of burning your opponents’ vetoes before having to use up all your own.”
A panel of fifty prospective jurors enters the courtroom.
“All rise.”
Sandy spends the next fifteen minutes while the judge acclimates the hostile crowd to their new formal surroundings memorizing fifty surnames and assigning faces to them. Beal. Beal, Jaramillo. Beal, Jaramillo, Miller. Beal, Jaramillo, Miller, Gonzalez-Rincon. Beal, Jaramillo, Miller, Gonzalez-Rincon, Sierra. It’s a small gesture, addressing them by their names without having to look down at her list. But it reveals an invaluable tell of their reaction to her dogged preparedness. Keep those whose expressions betray flashes of admiration. Strike those who seem put off by the extra effort, those who might find her hard-nosed bravura symptomatic of a woman trying too hard, who might call her a “bitch” under their breaths. The second-smartest girl in class is almost always universally preferred to the first.
Hours later, a jury is sworn. The intern has run out of paper on her notepad.
“Do you feel good about this jury?” she asks.
“I do, but you never know in Miami. They will let a man walk for the most incredulous of reasons.”
“But these jurors seem particularly fair, don’t they?”
“Fair? What’s fair? We pretend the chosen six are blank slates, but we all have biases. Theirs were just harder to ferret out. You can drop in another random six from ten years ago, and it wouldn’t make a difference. The forces at play are the same.
“One thing I do know: Although the heavy lifting is about to begin, the most consequential part of our work is already over. The evidence will shift those six minds very little. The verdict is more or less written in stone. Take the Rodney King beatings. Those were recorded! And yet the very same images meant two very different things for different people. Take climate change. The facts don’t matter. All that matters are the lenses with which people view those facts. And that isn’t shaped here in the courtroom. That was shaped long ago, over the course of a lifetime of experiences. We don’t know exactly what it will be, and those six might not know it yet, either. But the fate of this defendant is—as of today—already decided.”
“Isn’t that awful?”
“Horrifying.”
Sandy follows an oak tree of a man—tall and wide, with roots for legs—across a yard of wild, untended grass and up to the door of a shack obscured in the brush. Lead Detective Samuel Sterling is dressed inappropriately in slacks, long sleeves, and a tie. The soles of his Italian-leather, size-fourteen shoes sink into the muck as his giant hand slaps at his sweaty neck, trapping and killing a pest. Sam played Division I college football, but he couldn’t go pro, and chose instead a career in law enforcement, given his size and stature. The former lineman was far more sensitive, pensive, and analytical than his colleagues, so he rose in the ranks precipitously. He noisily pulls a pair of latex gloves over his hands and offers the same to Sandy.
“They’re triple XL. Sorry.”
Sandy is more sensibly dressed for the late-night excursion. Her hair is pulled back into a tail and set off by a headband. She wears sneakers, running tights, and no makeup. She adds baggy, blue, sterile gloves to the ensemble.
Sam sweeps aside the caution tape shaped into an X on the door.
The two step into the black. Sam gropes the air until he catches a dangling metal chain, which he pulls. A bulb flickers on, sending a cascade of yellow to the far stretches of that one room. The air is heavy. It still smells of must—that common, lived-in, stale but not necessarily foul odor that pervades the quarters of bachelors. It’s wood all over, floor to wall to ceiling, interrupted by a single diminutive window facing west. No irksome sunrise for late mornings in.
Sandy shuts her eyes as she crosses the threshold. Her heart drums in her chest.
“In a dim, dingy room—out in a farm in Homestead, Florida, where the defendant lives a hermetic—”
“Ten-dollar word,” Sam warns. Sandy nods.
“In a dim, dingy room—out in a farm in Homestead, Florida, where the defendant lives a lonely, shut-off life; where no one could hear her scream—that man, sitting right there before you, abducted, raped, and killed a young woman.”
Sandy places her body up against the doorway, head against the post.
“Grab my wrists.”
Sam cocks his head to the left and squints in hesitation.
“Don’t question my preparation, Sterling. You did your job. Now help me do mine. Grab my wrists.”
Standing opposite the small prosecutor, he wraps his hands around her slight arms, so thin his fingers fold over themselves.
“He slammed her—hard—against the doorframe as he forced her inside,” she intones. Her eyes shoot open. “We know that because that’s where we found her hair. Isn’t that right, Sterling?”
The large man nods, but the question was largely rhetorical. Sandy knows exactly where every piece of evidence was found over two years ago.
“Two strands of her long, brown hair got caught on a doornail. A DNA analyst—who knows exactly zero about the facts of this case or the people involved—will tell you with a remarkable degree of scientific certainty that that hair belonged to the victim. He will testify that the odds of it belonging to anyone else are one in nine octillion. There are only seven billion people on planet Earth. Melina was in that room. She didn’t leave alive.
“Without letting go of my arms, take me to the table,” she commands. Her breath begins to quicken. Panic floods her irises. The slightest tremor accosts her mouth. It unnerves Sam. Nonetheless, gingerly and mutely, he leads her the few feet to a wooden table—four legs, coarse surface, benches flanking its sides. She kicks the nearest bench over and away, tossing herself supine on the table’s face.
“He threw her on top of a cold, hard table in that room. He pinned her down. He climbed her. She fought to get free—to no avail.
“Put your weight on me.”
“No,” Sam finally objects.
He has long been forewarned of Ms. Grunwald’s intensity. It draws high praise and high criticism. He has, over the course of their professional relationship, largely acquiesced to her requests, however left field. This is the first he openly flouts.
Resistance is short-lived.
“Detective, just keep me from moving. If . . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...