When your ass is on the line and you’re staring at the remainder of your worthless life being spent behind the walls in an eight by eight cell, you’ll probably consider doing just about anything to avoid being found guilty and hearing the sound of the bars slamming shut behind you for good.
Just about anything, I would imagine. Still, when it comes to trial strategy, I find it difficult to believe that even somebody so reprehensible (and stupid) as Cesar Rodriguez, who is on trial for murder, isn’t trying to rein his attorney, Jeffrey Schwartz, in just a little bit. You see, while Rodriguez has given both videotaped and written statements about the abuse he heaped upon his dead stepdaughter, 7 year old Nixzmary Brown, Schwartz and Cesar Rodriguez are trying to portray the little girl, who weighed a pitiful 36 pounds at the time of her death, as being at least partially responsible for what happened to her.
Despite courtroom testimony that has often driven jurors to tears, in the face of physical evidence of the systematic torture perpetrated on the fragile little girl, despite admissions that Nixzmary was starved and forced to use a litter box, Schwartz is pushing ahead with a strategy of blaming the victim, as well as the girl’s mother, for her death.
I’m sure you’re with me in wondering, how the hell can you try to blame a 7 year old girl, who spent most of her brief life duct-taped or shackled to a chair, so malnourished that she weighed about as much as my beagle, for winding up dead. How do you think you can convince a Brooklyn jury that is emotionally moved each day of testimony related to the girl’s traumatic death that it was her own fault? Personally, I don’t think you can, but that is what Schwartz and Rodriguez are trying, and I can only hope the strategy blows up in their faces. Particularly Cesar Rodriguez , as he is the one on the hook for a one-way trip behind bars, although to be certain, if this legal strategy does result in a lifetime of incarceration, I can only hope Schwartz is involved in many such defenses to come, as morons like this helping to put murderers behind bars can only be a good thing.
Confronted with a photograph of Nixzmary at trial, and asked why the little girl had two black eyes at the time of her death, Rodriguez claimed that Nixzmary had managed to self-inflict the wounds. 36 pounds, 7 years old, killed by a blow to the head, but yet this same starved child supposedly battered both eyes black and blue on her own? Are you kidding me? You want a jury to swallow *that* line?
Schwartz has tried to spin negative comments about his legal strategy, claiming that he is not trying to blame the victim. But there he is, letting his client profess under oath that the girl blackened her own eyes just prior to her turning up dead. Schwartz has described Nixzmary as a violent and uncontrollable “little Houdini” suggesting she had a knack for escaping the restraints that his client applied to her. On the night she was murdered, Nixzmary was disciplined for taking a yogurt from the fridge and allegedly damaging a computer printer. Rodriguez’ story is that he never hit her for this, but instead ran her head under cold water in the bathtub. Medical experts seem to be of the belief that Nixzmary’s head just may have wound up in the tub, but probably got driven into the spigot a time or two. When prodded about his treatment of his stepdaughter, Rodriguez admitted that sometimes she made him so mad that he just threw her down on the floor. On the night in question, despite the girl lying mortally wounded and moaning, looking more pale than he had ever seen her before, Rodriguez did not call an ambulance. He did not seek help for her. He did not get her medical attention.
You tell me. Is a ten woman, two man jury going to swallow this load of horseshit? Is this out of work stepfather who’s admitted to systematically abusing the girl going to make hay on the stand by claiming she gave herself two black eyes and that he only wanted to punish her by running her head under cold water?
Let’s hope for once that the only morons in that Brooklyn courtroom are seated behind the defense table. For her complicity, the mother will also have her day in court. But for right now, if the bigger idiots remain Schwartz and his scumbag client, it’s my hope we can trust a Brooklyn jury a lot more than we could trust a Los Angeles jury to take care of O.J.
