Marie grabbed a sandwich from the courthouse cafe and ate it nervously, her stomach tying itself in knots. It didn't help that she was utterly sick of the three varieties of sandwich the cafe offered. It wasn't wise to go anywhere outside the courthouse because of the swarms of media that jumped on her and Skyler any time they left the building, so Marie had been to the courthouse cafe far more times than she would've liked or would've agreed to do under any normal circumstance. She ate all of their salad offerings multiple times, got sick of them and moved on to the sandwiches, and got sick of those even more quickly. Skyler didn't seem to have been in there nearly as often. Marie suspected she wasn't even eating.
Marie wanted to speak to her, but she didn't think it was wise now, right after the Prosecution's summary arguments. She'd probably say something unkind.
Marie leapt out of her seat when she saw Kim sweep briskly into the cafe, grab a sandwich and line up for a coffee. "Hi!" Marie said loudly.
Kim turned. "Hi, Marie."
"How are things going?"
"Probably too soon to tell. And this is not the place to be speculating."
"Oh yeah. Alright. Any news on the other thing?"
"Not sure what you're talking about there."
Marie's face fell. "Alright." She nodded. "Alright."
"It's almost over, one way or the other. Then you and the rest of your family can have your lives back." Kim reached the front of the queue. "Just this and a coffee please," she said to the waitress. "To go."
"I don't know about that," said Marie solemnly.
Kim accepted her change and cup and walked briskly to the coffee station.
"I don't know about that at all."
...
"Skyler White did not choose any of this. An appropriate metaphor to use would be that of boiling a lobster. You start with a cool temperature in the water, and gradually increase it. The lobster doesn't resist because it doesn't understand what's happening until it's too late. When Skyler first found out that her husband was a criminal, she thought that he was dealing marijuana. This is illegal and dangerous, and if you pay off your mortgage using funds gained from that you do run the risk that the government will take your house. But I think most people in this room would agree that dealing marijuana is not nearly as bad as making methamphetamine, building an empire out of it and killing people. That is something I think most of us would report to the police if we discovered that it was happening, however if we discovered that someone close to us was selling marijuana, some of us would report that to the police but others wouldn't. We would take into account our loved one's reasons for doing it, and we would also take a check of ourselves and our families, and figure out whether this loved one being arrested for dealing marijuana would cause more harm than it would prevent.
"Skyler was horrified when she found out that her husband was dealing marijuana. He wasn't, but that's what she thought he was doing. She was so horrified that she kicked him out of their house and commenced divorce proceedings. Her moral standing as a person is pretty clear from that. But she judged that telling her family the reason that she was divorcing him would cause more harm than it would prevent. Walter then took direct control over Skyler's choices for the first time, moving back into the house without her permission. It was the first time, because Walter White wasn't always a bad person. He changed - I don't know why he changed, I believe many psychologists are studying that with great interest right now. The rest of us in this room, those of us who only ever heard of him after he hit the news as a methamphetamine kingpin and multiple murderer, cannot understand why anyone would ever want to protect him or help him. But Skyler didn't marry a methamphetamine kingpin and multiple murderer. She married a school teacher. Well, actually he was a chemist when they met; he was working for a laboratory, so he was a bit of a geek. He became a school teacher a few years after that, and she knew him as a loving husband and father, along the lines as their son Flynn described him in the television interview we saw presented about the fundraising website. The family knew him as a man worth saving. When he became a criminal, he deliberately hid it from all of them, and he lived a double life for more than eighteen months before the day that he entered our news screens as a violent and terrifying drug kingpin.
"For Skyler, the knowledge of what her husband had become came very gradually. At first, as I said, she thought he was dealing marijuana. He admitted to her a short time after that that he was actually making methamphetamine. He specified to her that he was not a dealer but a manufacturer, and that he was working for someone else. She ended her relationship with him at that point, so she didn't need to know anything more about it. We could criticise her for turning a blind eye, but turning a blind eye is not illegal.
"Without her knowledge, Walter had been using his illegal money to pay their mortgage and other bills for many months before Skyler found out what he was doing. That meant that if the police ever found out, the federal government would seize their house and Skyler and her children would be homeless. Which is what ended up happening. Skyler was also very frightened of the people Walter was working with, knowing that drug criminals are dangerous and unpredictable, and that if Walter's working relationship with those criminals deteriorated, which also did end up happening multiple times, that she and her children could easily become collateral damage. So the more she thought about it, the more firm Skyler became in her decision that it was better for her and for her family if nobody found out what her husband was doing. Again, I must stress that she did not know that he was a murderer and drug dealer. He had told her that he was working in a lab for somebody else. Again, this is certainly a very illegal and very bad thing to do, and those of you in this room who thought that if you found out that someone you loved was dealing marijuana you maybe wouldn't turn them in to police, some more of you probably would if you found out that they were manufacturing methamphetamine. But it's still not nearly as bad as being a kingpin and multiple murderer. Remember the lobster in the pot. At this point, the heat is rising, but the lobster doesn't know it yet. The lobster feels the heat, but because it's rising so gradually, it doesn't perceive the danger.
"Unfortunately for Skyler, the whole situation snowballed from there. Her brother-in-law was badly injured and her sister was struggling to pay his medical bills. Skyler wanted to help, and Walter realised that she could also help him by laundering his money. He brought her in on meetings with his lawyer, Saul Goodman, who was running an illegal business himself brokering deals on money laundries and many other things as well, but Skyler didn't know that. She was only ever allowed to know the bare minimum of what was happening. Saul Goodman and Walter White brought her into the very edge of their web of illegal activity, and showed her just enough of it to convince her to launder the money. Walter wanted her to launder the money because he knew that she could do it well. He knew her very well, he knew what her training was, he knew what her experience was, and he knew how meticulous she is. When he took her to his meetings with Saul Goodman about money laundering, she thought that he was being honest with her. She came to know more than she had previously known, and she had no idea that it was just the tip of the iceberg. She didn't know he had killed multiple people, she didn't know he was at that time not a kingpin but a linchpin in an enormous methamphetamine enterprise covering five states and run by a very dangerous man called Gustavo Fring. Without a money laundry, Walter knew that his crimes would be discovered, and he knew that Skyler would be the perfect solution to that problem, so he shared with her just enough information about it to draw her into the fold. And that was how Walter White operated - it was the sort of thing he did all the time. He was a master of manipulation, as has been described by Skyler, her son Flynn, her sister Marie and also by DEA ASAC Hoffman, whom we met very early in the trial. ASAC Hoffman described a man who was friendly and affable and seemed to be a genuinely good guy, and he said that none of the DEA agents even questioned why this man repeatedly visited his brother-in-law Hank Schrader at work. He manipulated them all into thinking he was just there to have a friendly talk, and ASAC Hoffman said that he only realised later that Walter must actually have been there to try and get information on the Heisenberg case.
"To go back to our lobster analogy, Walt's manipulation kept turning the heat up on the water in the pot, but it was still so gradual that Skyler didn't perceive the danger, primarily because she still trusted him. She thought, as did ASAC Hoffman, that he was an affable and good guy. He was doing the wrong thing, but he told her over and over that he was only doing it so that his family would not be indebted by the cost of his cancer treatment. She still thought that he was a school teacher, a gentle and not at all dangerous person, who had a part-time job working in a lab making methamphetamine for somebody else. I am not saying that that is not a bad thing to do. I am not saying that someone who has knowledge of such a crime should not report it. But I am saying that the punishment for hiding knowledge of a crime like that would not be nearly as severe as what Mrs White is now facing. I'm saying that you should judge her and punish her based on what she thought she was doing, and on what she knew at the time when she was doing it, not on what we all found out afterwards.
"Getting back to the story, the water in the pot was about to get really hot. Another lab chemist, Gail Boetticher, was murdered, and Gustavo Fring threatened the lives of every single one of Skyler's family, even her infant daughter. She and her children fled to her sister and brother-in-law's house. She spent three days there absolutely petrified and unable to say a thing to either her family or the DEA, because criminals had threatened to kill her entire family and if she told the DEA who those criminals were, that threat would increase markedly. If she had told a single soul then, her children and her whole family could have been killed. In fact, she believed they would be. The safest thing for all of them was if she kept her mouth shut.
"This is the point when the lobster realised that the water was now so hot it was being cooked alive. The lobster realises this too late; its body has already begun to shut down and it cannot escape. For Skyler, the water got still hotter from there. She was shocked and terrified when, three days later, Gustavo Fring was blown up in a nursing home with two other men, and Skyler realised that the person who had done this was her husband. This was a shock to her because she still thought he was a misguided school teacher up until that point. So when you think to yourself why would anyone, even if they did love the person, why would anyone knowingly help and protect a man who could build a bomb to blow up three people in a nursing home, just remember that she didn't know he could do that until she was already being cooked alive in the water and she had no way out.
"From there, the water got hotter still. Walter became a kingpin, he killed many more people, he raped Skyler, he controlled her in every way, he put her children in danger and made her live in fear. All so that she would launder his money for him because she had no other choice.
"By the time her brother-in-law Hank Schrader found out what Walter was doing, Skyler herself had become connected to enough crimes to justify her facing this three week-long trial for second degree felony. Schrader didn't realise this, so when he met with her to ask her to help him put her husband in prison, he denied her legal representation. So she ran away from him because she was panicking and she didn't want him to arrest her. At this point, the water in the pot was so hot that she couldn't move at all. As Dr Murchison explained, in emotionally abusive relationships involving crime, the abused partner becomes literally unable to distinguish between their interests and their partner's interests. Completely unable to recognise that if they gave their partner up to the police, they would do a lot better than if they didn't. Skyler was so strongly controlled by her husband for so long that she lost her sense of self and was literally unable to realise this, and unable distinguish her needs from his. She fled her brother-in-law because he denied her legal representation, and then she went home to her husband and just stayed there. Paralysed. Unable to move.
"Her brother-in-law Hank Schrader went after Walter by himself, and he and his colleague Steve Gomez were tragically killed in the course of that. I asked Judge Stephens early on to rule out reference to that in this trial because Skyler had nothing to do with it. She was under Walter's complete control, and she never had anything to do with the violent criminals he associated with. One of the reasons so few of them have been identified and prosecuted is that Skyler didn't know anything about them. After her husband fled, she gave the DEA her full co-operation. She told them everything she knew. And as ASAC Hoffman testified, they discovered that that amounted to barely anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I have also requested wherever I could for Walter White's crimes to be left out of this trial because they were committed by him, not Skyler. His crimes were horrible - no-one is denying that. All Skyler did, however, was run a car wash, and she did that because she was manipulated into doing so by Walter. He controlled her in an emotionally abusive way, and in a literal way when he trapped her living in fear in their house having sent their children away to be safer elsewhere, and he raped her and forced her to continue working for him. And when she refused to go with him when he was discovered by police, he physically attacked her, threw her to the ground and pressed her into the floor with one hand while holding a knife in the other, as we heard her son Flynn describe in agonising detail, which caused Skyler to collapse to the floor of the courtroom, a small demonstration of the enormity of the trauma that she suffered at the hands of her husband.
"Walter White committed scores of horrible crimes, and many people are very angry about that, but Skyler is a victim, not a co-conspirator. In your consideration of a verdict, you must not consider your opinions on the horror of Walter's crimes, because Skyler didn't commit them, Walter did, and, like the lobster in the pot, she didn't know nearly the extent of what he was doing until it was far too late for her to intervene. If she had found out like we did that he was a methamphetamine kingpin and multiple murderer, of course she would've gone to the police. She desperately wishes she had, and she suffers from tremendous remorse, which has made her quite unwell. The vast majority of horrible things that Walter did, Skyler found out about at the same as we all did. She has stated many times that if she had known, she would not have helped him, but she didn't know. A geeky schoolteacher lured her in, then became a frightening criminal kingpin who trapped her and forced her to do his bidding.
"As jurors, it is your job to be as rational as you can in weighing up all the evidence to deliver justice as best you can. Think about what Skyler is responsible for, not what Walter is responsible for. She is on trial here, not him. Her life hangs in the balance; her punishment is what you are deciding, not his. I also want you to think about how different this scene might look, and how different this trial might have been, if Walter White was still alive and if he had been caught and prosecuted for his crimes. Do you think the media, the public and the DEA would've been more or less focused on Skyler if that were the case? Less. Certainly less. They might still have prosecuted her, but they would've been more lenient; their focus would've been entirely on him, and therefore so would the media's and the public's. They would be baying for the blood of Walter White, and through a fair prosecution and trial, they would get it. Unfortunately they can't because he's dead. So are they now baying for the blood of Skyler White because of what she did or just because they didn't get the chance to bay for the blood of Walter White? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is your job to deliver justice. Scapegoating is not justice.
"The final thing I want you to bear in mind is the phone call between Walter and Skyler that I presented as my final piece of evidence to this court. The Prosecution claimed that I had chosen to present it last in order to deny them the chance to ask Skyler any questions about it. Well she has been asked questions about it - she was asked very thoroughly about it by the DEA right after it happened and I've read that interview - the court can make it available for you to look at if you wish. I chose not to question Skyler on that in this trial and the Prosecution obviously chose not to either, because it doesn't add anything to the phone call. The phone call stands alone. I didn't present it at the end of the trial in order to deny anyone the chance to talk about it - you can talk about it as much as you like in the jury room, and you can read Skyler's interviews about it. I presented it last because it stands on its own, it doesn't need any explanation, it makes everything crystal clear, and it perfectly summarises this entire case. Walter White yells at her, threatens her, belittles her, swears at her, says he has taken her daughter to punish her. All things that a controlling and emotionally abusive husband will do. He also criticises her for, in his words, trying to 'bring him down' by telling him not to make money by breaking the law, and he says that he built his criminal enterprise alone without any help from her. It sums the whole situation up. That's why I presented it last, it is a crystal clear summary of everything that happened between Walter and Skyler White."