Donner cross-examined Cole about the recording's length and the surrounding conversation. She acknowledged the clip did not contain everything said in the locker room and that she had recorded it without announcing she was doing so. She also acknowledged that she had stayed silent at first. "I was afraid of what would happen to me if I reported it," she said. "And I was wrong to let that fear stop me for as long as it did."
"You don't like Officer Puit," Donner suggested. Cole looked at him.
"I don't like what he said. I don't like what he did. That is different from wishing something bad would happen to him." She paused. "I became a police officer to help people. I should not have had to choose between that and being accepted by other officers."
Judge Odum instructed the jury that the recording could be considered only for the specific disputed issues permitted by the court and was not a substitute for proof of every element of every charge. Webb accepted the instruction. The evidence mattered not because it allowed jurors to dislike Puit, but because it challenged the explanation he had offered for targeting a particular homeowner and claiming fear after escalating the encounter himself.
The closing arguments lasted most of the following morning. Donner argued that Puit's behavior had been arrogant and possibly deserving of dismissal but that the jury should not allow outrage to substitute for the criminal burden of proof. Webb responded by taking the jurors through the documented sequence once more. "At every point where a trained officer could have corrected himself," he said, "this defendant chose a new pretext. And when he was required to explain those choices, he put claims on paper that the recording contradicted."
Raymond watched the jurors take their notes into deliberations. He knew that no recording could return the ordinary Saturday that had been interrupted, no conviction could give Henry and Malik and Jerome back the years they spent wondering why nobody believed them, and no verdict could guarantee that another officer would not make a similar mistake. He also knew that law depended on people being willing to do this work even when the result remained uncertain. He had spent twenty-two years asking victims and witnesses to endure that uncertainty. Now he was living inside it.
The jury deliberated for three hours and forty-one minutes. When the bailiff announced that a verdict had been reached, Sandra took Raymond's hand without looking at him. The courtroom filled again, and Puit stood beside Donner with his shoulders curved forward. Carol Reyes, the jury foreperson, rose holding the signed form.
The first count was read. Guilty. The second followed, then the third, the findings covering unlawful restraint, aggravated misconduct involving the threatened use of force, and the civil-rights offense submitted to the jury under the applicable criminal provisions. The verdicts did not turn on Raymond's rank. They rested on evidence of what Puit had done and what the law required the state to prove.