Puit's attorney, Craig Donner, built his strategy around the uncertainty he believed still remained. The footage proved that Puit had made demands and raised a baton, but it did not provide a complete picture of everything happening inside his mind. Donner intended to argue that Raymond's refusal to identify himself, combined with his imposing physical presence and professional command voice, had caused the officer to perceive danger where the jury now saw none. The defense did not need the jury to admire Puit. It needed reasonable doubt about the most serious criminal allegations.
Puit listened to the strategy in Donner's office, sitting beneath a framed diploma and looking at the traffic beyond the window. "He set me up," he said for the fourth time. Donner leaned back. "Whether he intended to test you or not, you need to stop using that phrase unless you can tell me what law he broke." Puit's face hardened.
"He knew what I was thinking." Donner shook his head. "The jury is going to care about what you did. I suggest you begin doing the same."
The morning jury selection began, television crews filled the courthouse plaza. The story had traveled well beyond Garland because its central image was difficult to forget: a homeowner washing his restored car, a white patrol officer assuming he did not belong, and a badge reveal that transformed the entire encounter. Some reporters treated the case as a spectacle. Others interviewed the earlier complainants and discovered that the spectacle had grown from a history of quieter failures.
Raymond arrived with Sandra and took his place in the gallery when court opened. He wore his dress uniform because he was still a serving detective sergeant, though he had already begun the process of retiring. The decision had not been made lightly. He had spent twenty-two years building a career inside the institution that now required him to testify against one of its members, and there were mornings when the idea of giving up his desk and investigations felt like surrendering part of himself.
Sandra could see that grief beneath his composure. As the bailiff instructed everyone to rise, she rested her fingers briefly against the back of Raymond's hand. He turned toward her, and she gave him the small smile she had used when he first started patrol and came home from shifts that left him wordless. The message had not changed in thirty years: he did not have to carry the whole weight of the day alone.
District Attorney Webb opened for the state without elaborate theatrics. He described the drive into Maplewood Court, the absence of a reported crime, the unremarkable conduct of a man washing his automobile, and the series of increasingly unsupported justifications Puit offered. He told jurors that police officers sometimes must make rapid decisions in uncertain circumstances. Then he asked them to consider what happens when the circumstances are not uncertain but an officer keeps inventing reasons to treat them that way.