I got into watching trials by way of true crime. Once you've watched Forensic Files and Cold Case Files all the way through, and segued into YouTube's hours of actual police interrogations, you're gonna discover you can also watch entire trials. Every mind-numbing, paint-drying minute.
There's a dedicated worldwide community of virtual trial watchers, all hooked on the Law & Crime Channel's live feed. And it was during a lull in one of these forgettable cases that someone in chat mentioned the Yazeed Essa trial and I promptly Googled it and began watching.
It is 57 hours long. It is riveting. But also sometimes relaxingly boring (the supply chain of vitamin supplements from factory to CVS is hours of testimony). I've watched the entire thing twice and, in the way we now reach for comfort food and familiar shows, I have started watching it again.
It took me a few days. I was buffeted around by the self-improvement-industrial complex for a bit there. My streams were full of links to virtual concerts and museum tours and seminars and now this or that person was going to stream a fitness class or a support hangout or teach me how to cook. It was massively anxiety producing. I was favoriting that shit like I was actually gonna go back and do all those things.
Then I thought, who are you, actually. What has always brought you solace? What has always soothed your mind?
Sidebars. Objections. Cross-examinations. Rules of evidence. Hearsay arcana. Jury instructions.
The Essa trial has it all.
It's is a 2010 murder trial out of Ohio. A poisoning. And it encompasses the breadth of human triumph and tragedy, the arc of character from pinnacle of success to hubris to disgrace. It's suburban and it's international. The Secret Service testifies. The FBI.
It's on Court TV's (free) trial archive, which means all the down-time and jury coming in and out stuff is edited out and it's chunked into watchable segments. The sound quality is great for a live trial, and both the prosecution and defense are on their game with great elocution and rhetorical flourishes. The judge is extremely good. She keeps things moving, she's decisive, she's fair.
The Essa trial is a window onto the American immigrant experience. Rosemary Issa, the victim, is from a large, close-knit Italian-American Catholic family. She was a nurse. At work she met and then married Dr. Yazeed Essa, who is from a large, close-knit Palestinian-American Muslim family of more recent immigration vintage.
The cast of characters in this trial is second to none. Essa's extended family of cousins and uncles and his unforgettable, damned-by-loyalty brother, bring to life a substrata of immigrant entrepreneurial striving that shades at times into organized crime. You'd think, since Essa is an emergency room doctor and had multiple dalliances with nurses this would be a medical soap opera. But no.
The locus of most of the action is the Essa brothers' side business, first a pager store and then a satellite dish company. We learn about the complex, interwoven lives of the pager store employees and the Essa family, of the honeymoon hideaway on the second floor above the offices. The defense offers up one of these employees, one of Yazeed's long-time on-again-off-again mistresses, as an alternate suspect, and maximum legal hijinx ensue.
Some of the cast of nefarious rakes and chiselers who testify bring their own lawyers, who make impassioned motions in a game of 3-D chess. Some of those lawyers formerly represented witnesses whose interests conflict with their new clients'. A couple should probably be on trial themselves.
The legal stuff itself is fascinating. The way both the prosecution and defense manipulate the witnesses to bring forth the version of reality that most supports their argument, and the way this places Yazeed's brother and both of his mistresses in a mirror hall of Catch-22's. Everyone has complex reasons for lying about their feelings and thoughts. The prosecution needs one love affair to be the primary motive; the defense needs the other. Both prosecution and defense gamble on some big reveals and gotcha moments that backfire spectacularly.
There are also multiple Easter eggs, like that both of the mistresses have the initials MM. There are so many characters the prosecutor has a photo board and just asks each witness how many people on the board they recognize.
The Essa trial is ideal watching in our troubled times. Because it is already done and settled and has a clear and compelling arc and satisfying resolution. Because it immerses you back into that pre-crisis world where a bad snowstorm was the most disruption that could befall the American bureaucratic state. Because the defense opening is so long-winded and hypnotic you can tune in and out without missing anything. Because it's broken into segments like a tv show, but bingeable in the background.
Because some of the testimony is pin-drop suspenseful and some is slapstick comedy and some is pure heartbreak and because there's so much love and so much betrayal and there was so much possibility of a sort of sublime melting pot fairy tale and then generations of multiple families were ripped asunder, multiple lives ruined, by the outward ripples of one much-loved woman's death. (And, let's face it, by the prosecutor's ambition. The naked power of the state is on full display.)
The Essa trial will be there for you when you need it. You can dip in and out. You can turn to it in times of overwhelm and when the walls are closing in and when your watch list of prestige television and your to-do list of enriching activities crushes your soul.
Watch it at your own pace, but watch till the end when the judge invokes Edgar Allen Poe and the telltale heart.
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