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Below is an excerpt from The Silver State (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 320 pages, $29), the recently released crime thriller from Gabriel Urza, a former public defender and professor at Portland State University.
As a public defender I learned early on that jury selection is often the most critical moment of an entire trial. It’s here that you, juror—the final arbiter of truth, the ultimate adjudicator of life and death—are chosen, along with all of your bias and compassion, your weakness and strength, your ignorance and wisdom. And it’s here, as well, that you meet me for the first time. That you begin to form your judgments.
But even before we first meet in the courtroom, I’ve convinced myself that I know you. A week earlier the court will mail a questionnaire to a list of sixty-five prospective jurors pulled from DMV and voter registration records.
Who are you? this questionnaire asks, in so many words. What is your age, your profession? How far did you get in school? Are you related to a member of law enforcement? Have you ever been arrested? Have you or someone you know ever been the victim of a crime?
By the time we come together for jury selection a week later, my investigator has checked your social media accounts, has run your record, has reviewed your employment history. I know what music you like, who you are married to, what part of town you live in. I tell myself that I know you.
But there’s always that rush when you’re brought into the courtroom that first morning of the trial, your names drawn at random from an old-fashioned raffle tumbler by the court clerk, the prospective jurors stepping forward from the courtroom gallery when your names are read aloud. You are sunburned, or hungover, or happy to be here—to not be at work, or at school, or at home. You come in your Sunday best, or with a quiver of excuses why you shouldn’t be asked to serve on this jury. Illness. Children. All of this I make note of on my little cards, the grimace when your name is called, your attention to the judge’s instructions. I put pluses or minuses next to your names, amend the score on your stat card. It’s pseudo-science, something barely more than assumption and stereotype. But I make these notes because I need to feel like there’s a logic to it all, like there’s a process. If there is process, there is control.
After the judge has welcomed you to the courtroom and asked a few stock questions, it’s the prosecutor’s turn. She’ll go into her usual speech about reasonable doubt and following the law and indirect evidence. She’s boring because it’s her job to be boring. We’re all here to make sure this defendant has a fair trial, she’ll say, which is a lie, of course. She may ask if you understand that circumstantial evidence is admissible to prove a defendant’s guilt, a clear indication that she was unable to find a single direct witness to the crime. To illustrate the concept of circumstantial evidence, she will invariably present the following scenario: One night, you go to sleep and there’s no snow on the ground. And when you wake up, the driveway is covered in snow. Is it reasonable to assume, she will ask, that it snowed the night before? And you nod, of course. This is what she’s saying: that my client’s guilt is as obvious as a snowy driveway.
Finally, when the prosecutor’s done with her questions, it’s the defense attorney’s turn. We get—at last—to speak.
I stand at the edge of the gallery, a low wooden rail the only thing separating me from the sixty prospective jurors who bothered to show up today. Somewhere hidden in this group are twelve people who will be asked to stand in judgment of my client, to decide guilt or innocence.
I consult my little score cards, but the words on them are suddenly just words, the future seemingly unknown, unpredictable. Who are you? I wonder. I try to peer into your mind, but you’ve become illegible. Are you really willing to listen to my version of events, to give my client the benefit of the doubt?
The letter arrives in my office mail on a frigid afternoon in February, layered between a new case file and a Violation Report from the Division of Parole and Probation. The envelope is bent at the corners, slightly off-color, as if it was in circulation for a while before being mailed. My name is written in smudged graphite above the address of the Washoe County Public Defender’s Office in downtown Reno. In the top left corner are the sender’s name and inmate number, care of the Northern Nevada Correctional Center.
The letter is from a man whose name I am afraid to say out loud, even after all this time. He had a name once, of course: Michael Keith Atwood, aka My Former Client. But he became a ghost a long time ago—through all the years of post-conviction hearings and petitions for habeas corpus. Now, when the name Michael Atwood surfaces in infrequent news articles or notices of appeal, my mind reflexively redacts the words.
I remember him now as words on a criminal complaint read by a court clerk on the first day of a trial that began eight years ago. He is Murder in the First Degree, and he is Sexual Assault. He is Battery Causing Substantial Bodily Harm, and he is Kidnapping in the First Degree. Or I remember him as a series of autopsy photographs, as a ripped T-shirt sealed shut in an evidence locker, as the smell of old blood fused into cotton and polyester. He is nameless and faceless, because to consider his name or to remember his face would mean to remember that an innocent man is in prison.
“If he dies in there, it’s not because of anything he did,” C.J. said once, a few weeks before Michael’s trial was to begin. We had been working late on a Friday, the office quiet and empty, the conference table strewn with police reports, investigative memos, and forensic photos marked to be entered into evidence. I had begun to pack up my things for the night, but C.J. had insisted on staying. “You know the facts as well as I do. If he dies in there, it’s because of what we didn’t do.”
I thumb the letter, unable to bring myself to open it. I place it on the corner of my desk, next to a reading lamp. On a bookshelf across the room sits the yellowing plaster bust of a man’s head—an old trial exhibit that I inherited with the office. The eyes of the bust are fixed upon the letter. The cracking plaster lips seem almost to move, to demand that I remember Michael Atwood and everything that comes with him: The dead woman. Judge Bartos. C.J., wherever she is now.
The Nevada desert is said to be filled with old ghosts, the dry basins overflowing with the dead, stacked like layers of sediment on the valley floors. Past lives ended unjustly or prematurely, in anguish or in panic or in rage. But what are we supposed to call the living ghosts—the ones like Michael Keith Atwood—entombed in prison walls, capable of reaching out to us through telephone lines and pencil-addressed envelopes?
Excerpted from The Silver State. Copyright © 2025 by Gabriel Urza. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
GO: Gabriel Urza in conversation with Willy Vlautin at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., 503-228-4651, powells.com. 7 pm Wednesday, July 16. Free.