Like hell is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. Tom Payne wrote that in a pamphlet that helped rally Americans to the cause of liberty in those dark days of December 1776. We again face dark days. Our founding forefathers fashioned a government based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, instead of life, we have a job. We have sometimes two jobs. Instead of liberty, we have crushing debt and happiness. See, we work hard, husbands and wives, 10, 12 hours a day. We work weekends. And at the end of the week, we have less. We have less real income, less benefits, less time with our kids. The American dream used to be each generation was better off than the previous one. I mean, are you better off than your parents? Will your children be better off than you? We believe that our government has been sold to global corporations that are sucking the blood and the life out of this country. I mean, it's all right there in the newspapers what they're doing. Uh NAFTA, illegal campaign contributions by foreign businessmen, the sale of foreign policy. I mean, these people don't care about us. They don't care about Americans. They they they care about their bottom line. We are not common criminals. We are we are ordinary people like you with jobs and mortgages who are willing to lay it all on the line because we are afraid of losing our freedom. But today you have a chance to tell the government what you think. Seize that opportunity. We the defendants are not the only ones on trial here. You are on trial here. I mean, the state tells you to follow its laws, but who lends the state its power. Who can take it back? The judge, Mr. McCoy? No, you do. You are the state. You have the power. Freedom starts with a no. Will you turn to the state and say no? Okay. This country began as an experiment in freedom. The foundation of that freedom is equality before the law. Everyone, whoever they are, whatever they may believe, must be equally accountable. Mr. Christie hopes you will ignore the evidence and nullify a power he says derives from a higher law. I agree that such a higher law exists. And each of you as members of the jury bound yourselves to it when you swore on your conscience before God and as a citizen that you would decide this case on the facts. You are asked to judge one thing. Were the defendants, whatever their reasons, whatever their beliefs, part of a criminal conspiracy to commit armed robbery and murder. These guys did a great job of memorization. Too bad they didn't learn from it. We all remember that phrase from the Declaration of Independence about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. the unalienable rights of everyone. Notice that life comes first. You can forget everything else about this case if you remember one thing. These defendants, these conspirators targeted an ordinary citizen, someone just like yourselves, a guy with a job and in the private sector with bills to pay and a family to take care of. And they took his life. They took his life. If it's okay for them to shoot him, it's okay for them to shoot anyone, including any one of you. Without the law, there can be no freedom. And without justice, there can be no law. The events following the Puerto Rican Day parade shocked and horrified us. We watched young men engage in brutal and beastial behavior and we felt correctly that they must be punished. We in the Puerto Rican community felt this no less than anyone else. We felt a particular sense of revulsion and dread because we knew it would be held against all Puerto Ricans. We knew that our parade or joyful expression of our culture and our pride would forever be linked to events that had nothing to do with it. Now, the prosecution has worked very hard to establish a link between those events and the crime for which the defendant is charged. It would only be too happy to turn your shock and your horror into a blind reflex of vengeance directed at the defendant. And I'm going to be quite honest with you, that's a very hard thing to resist. But it's also the very essence of your responsibility as jurors to do so. There is no question that this young man did something very wrong that day. This woman's death is a tragedy and it must be answered for, but it was not manslaughter. Neestor Salasar acted foolishly and impulsively and negligently, but he did not commit manslaughter, and your sworn oath requires that you find them not guilty of that. The defense would like you to see Nester Salazar as a follower, a hangar on, a timid, polite boy who was compelled to commit this horrible crime by the stronger personalities of his friends. They were the ones robbing the vendors and sexually assaulting the women, egging him on to commit an act of violence wholly uncharacteristic of him and accidental in nature. Well, there's no question that what we saw in the park that day was the behavior of a mob. Not an Hispanic mob, not a Puerto Rican mob, just a mob with all the false bravado and anonymity that provides. But a mob is made up of people and we hold people responsible for the consequences of their actions. The consequence of the defendant's action is that a woman is dead. We can dispense with a discussion of who in this group was less of a bad person or more of a bad person. We can focus, we must focus on what was done, on what he did. What happened that Sunday afternoon in Central Park in June was the suspension of civilization. This is when civilization gets restored. This is how it gets restored. Find him guilty of manslaughter. Nine years ago, Leon Vortgage heartlessly murdered five innocent people at a restaurant. Back then, the legislature had a chance to make sure that it never happened again. But they failed. They failed and he escaped and he went on to kill eight more innocent people. And once again, the state has failed to act. 13 innocent people slaughtered and our leaders are powerless to do anything but lock him up and hope he never escapes again. Ladies and gentlemen, the law did not protect our society from Leon Vortgage. It couldn't even grant justice to the families of his victims. And when Robert Purcell heard that after hearing the shot that killed his daughter, he went insane. Regardless of the law, regardless of the risk, regardless of the countless witnesses, Robert Purcell felt compelled to make sure that Leon Vortgage never killed again. Ladies and gentlemen, the state wouldn't take action, so Robert did. Now, does that make him a murderer? That makes him a man mentally undone. first by a heartless psychopath and second by an uncaring system. Ladies and gentlemen, that deserves your sympathy and also your vote of not guilty. Borgage was a monster. No one disputes that the world is a better place without him. But this is not about who Robert Purcell murdered. It's about the simple fact that he is a murderer. Mr. Purcell is not insane. He does not believe himself to be a judge, a jury or an executioner. And yet by killing Leon Vorgich, he chose to act as all three. He may have felt morally justified, but still he knew that what he did was wrong. So the question before you is not did Vorggage deserve to die. It's did Robert Purcell have the right to kill him? And the answer is no. Leon Vorgage was a danger to our society. But so is what the defense is asking of you today. They want you to look the other way. Even though Robert Purcell ignored our system of justice, took the law into his own hands, and committed murder in cold blood. They want you to give him a pass. If you let Robert Purcell get away with murder just because you hate the man he shot, you're telling everyone out there that it's okay to kill as long as the victim was a bad person. Judges, juries, who needs them? If you want to see insanity, let this murderer go. A child dies mysteriously in its crib. No cuts, no bruises, no signs of abuse. The district attorney says Emily was murdered. He says Eileen and Marty Willick were alone with her when it happened. We say there was somebody else in that apartment. God, fate, nature, call it what you will. In our attempts to understand what happened to Emily, we can only look to God, not to the parents who loved and cherished her. The requirement for criminal liability includes the omission to perform an act where a duty of performance is imposed by law. Sounds complicated, but it's really very simple. Emily Willick was suffocated with a pillow. Did her mother hold the pillow or did her father? It doesn't really matter because the one who watched, who didn't rip the pillow away, who didn't fight tooth and nail for Emily's life is equally guilty. On the freeway, a mother of four is cut off by another driver. She speeds up, swerves into the offender's lane, kills him. A businessman boards a plane to New York and brutally beats a flight attendant because she refuses his request for an upgrade. And here we have a 46-year-old family man, a man without any prior criminal record who savagely attacks the coach of his 16-year-old son's hockey team. Road rage, airport rage, sports rage. How do we make sense of all of it? And the truth is, we can't. But just because we don't understand something doesn't mean we should dismiss it. Battered wife syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of these took years for juries to accept, during which time people who shouldn't have been convicted were. Ray Taylor didn't appreciate what he was doing that morning because at that moment he was suffering from a mental defect, a rage which prevented him from doing so. And in our criminal justice system, we don't hold people responsible for conduct that they can't control, even if we don't understand it. [Applause] Road rage, airport rage, sports rage. Add to that parent rage, office rage, employee rage. It might be nice to think of all this as the result of some new mental illness, but the truth is this kind of behavior has become ordinary. And to ask you to excuse it through the fiction of a new mental illness is just that, a fiction, because it certainly is not the law. The law says your right to rage stops at the other guy's nose. The defendant's right to be angry stopped the moment he raised his fists. It stopped the moment he struck Mr. Krider. beat him and left him for dead. You've just seen the video of this defendant at one of his son's hockey games, heard testimony of incidents in which the defendant allowed his anger to explode into violence. Are we to hold him responsible for none of this? Are we really prepared to create a society in which no one is responsible for controlling their anger and teach those lessons to our children? The victim in this case worked with kids, devoted himself and his spare time to bettering their lives while the defendant lived his vicariously through his son and in his anger forgot a basic reality. the same reality his lawyer hopes you'll forget that he is an adult and we hold adults responsible for what they do no matter how angry they get. Don't let Mr. Taylor off the hook. Don't create an excuse where there is none. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]