The Trial of Shada King (ePub)

Shada King, a district attorney in Hartford, Connecticut, is charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of Santos Delgado, who had raped her ten days before he died. Shada claims the shooting was in self-defense, and since she was wearing a recording device at the time of the shooting, her claim of self-defense seems to be valid.

But why was she wearing the recording device? And why did Shada use a gun to force her way into Santos's house? The prosecuting attorney, Naomi Campbell, is convinced the crime scene was an elaborate stage production that was intended to deceive those who would be listening to the tape and that Santos was murdered in retaliation for the rape.

In her closing argument at the trial, Naomi outlines the case against Shada:

"Let's go back and look at this crime a little bit differently by trying to place ourselves in Ms. King's shoes. It's obvious that she was determined to exact revenge on Mr. Delgado. We have no way of really knowing what he had done to her in the past because we have only Ms. King's say-so in regards to the history of the relationship that she had with Mr. Delgado. But let's grant, for the sake of argument, that he did rape her and threaten her life, and because of that, she determined that her only defense was to murder Mr. Delgado.

"However, being a lawyer, she must have immediately run into the problem of how she could escape punishment for her actions. So she began to devise a plan, and a most diabolical plan it was. In this plan, Mr. Delgado would be shot to death but not before he admitted to having raped her because that admission would at least give her some cover for her actions. Even so, she needed something more than that because although a jury will sympathize with a woman who has been raped, no group of twelve men and woman is going to free a person who kills another out of revenge.

"That's when Ms. King came up with the idea that she would make the killing of Mr. Delgado look like self-defense. What could be better? First, we have a woman who has been raped, and then we have a woman who shoots her rapist in self-defense. It's almost like a perfect crime, isn't it? And then, somewhere around this point in her planning of the crime, she must have hit upon the idea of taping the whole thing. The really beautiful thing about this arrangement was that if the tape didn't back up her desired version of events, she could have just flushed it down the toilet before she phoned 911 to report that Mr. Delgado had been shot.
"Please remember that everything on that tape is essentially scripted. Ms. King was the one who dreamed this murder up, and she knew that if she wanted to avoid being prosecuted, certain things had to be said on that tape, and they had to be said at exactly the right moment. We can only imagine how happy she must have been when Mr. Delgado demanded that she give the tape to him. This was exactly the moment that she had been hoping and waiting for because without him saying something like that, she knew it was going to be impossible to make a plausible case for self-defense. But as soon as he said the magic words, Ms. King was more than ready to dramatically yell out, 'Back up.' It was, I have to admit, a great performance by her, but it's important to remember that when all is said and done, it's still just a performance, a performance that cost a man his life.

So what really happened inside Santos's house that day? Was it murder or self-defense? I'll let you be the judge and the jury.