With Lyann Goudie, what you see is what you get. And what you get is intensity.
By CHASE SQUIRES
Published March 14, 2004
[Times photo: Fraser Hale]
Attorney Lyann Goudie: "I fell in love with criminal prosecution. I want cases where everything is on the line."
TAMPA - Dade City is a long way from Dade County, but defense attorney Lyann Goudie said no matter where she goes, she takes along two lessons she learned years ago from a job in South Florida.
The first, she said, she learned from Janet Reno. The second, from a judge in a routine case years ago.
Goudie, 44, has become a fixture in Tampa courtrooms after years as a prosecutor, and later a public defender, put her in front of juries in big criminal cases. But as a newcomer to east Pasco, working for big-gun defense attorney Barry Cohen's firm, she has made a splash defending a murder suspect in an emotional, long-running and high-profile case.
Representing Kristina Gaime - a 39-year-old Land O'Lakes mother of two accused of killing one of her children and trying to kill the other - Goudie has made her presence felt in less than a year.
Investigators who were called to Gaime's house the morning of April 12, 1999, found Gaime's son, Mathew Rotell, 6, dead in her minivan. He had been drugged. Her other son, Adam Rotell, then 8, was alive in the home but had also been drugged, according to detectives. And Gaime was inside, incoherent and suffering from mysterious injuries on her body and a possible drug overdose. She was hospitalized.
Authorities claim the evidence shows a failed murder-suicide attempt.
Four years passed as doctors examined Gaime and attorneys argued her mental state and questioned witnesses. In March 2003, Gaime's family hired Goudie to move the case forward. Goudie said she was overwhelmed with the boxes of accumulated evidence, with so many transcripts and papers that she had to get them scanned into a computer to organize the file.
In November, Goudie was ready to go. She sparred with a judge over procedure, then successfully had him remove himself from the case. In February, she took a big chunk out of the prosecution's evidence in a courtroom showdown. And on Tuesday, she is looking to knock another hole in the state's case, bidding to keep a jury from hearing what Pasco County Sheriff's Office detectives say Gaime's surviving son told them.
For a follow-up, Goudie wants Gaime's case yanked out of Pasco County, where it has been big news since 1999. The trial is set for April 12, exactly five years after detectives were called to Gaime's home.
Goudie flatly rejects efforts by Gaime's first defense team to plead insanity.
That, she said, is because she plans to win and send Gaime home. Like every case, Goudie said, it's personal.
Time-tested lessons
Looking at Gaime's case, Goudie said she remembers lessons she learned in her first job, working for then-state attorney Reno.
"Janet Reno told me the way to avoid looking at a case as a file is to associate every victim with their family members," she said.
When she looks at Gaime's parents, Gary and Kathleen McDuffie, she said she sees the love they have for their daughter.
"You deal with people's parents," she said. "Their passion about their child is big for me."
Goudie worked as assistant state attorney for about a year with Reno, who went on to serve two terms as U.S. Attorney General for President Bill Clinton. Goudie went to work in the Dade County prosecutor's office in 1989 after graduating from the University of Miami law school.
She had just completed an internship with a law firm that dealt in the paper arena of corporate law, and it hit her:
"I thought, "I've just wasted a lot of money and three years of my life,' " she said. "I hated it."
She found happiness in the courtroom.
"I fell in love with criminal prosecution," she said. "I want cases where everything is on the line."
Goudie said it was while working for Reno that she learned the second big lesson: Be yourself.
She recalled a female prosecutor she admired. But the successful prosecutor's style was different from her own. Where Goudie is direct and aggressive, she said the other woman was mannered and genteel. She tried to adopt the style.
"After the trial, the judge took me aside. He said "You've got to be yourself,' " Goudie said. "I never did it again. I've always been myself."
Aggressive representation
Nowadays, Goudie said what you see is what you get. She doesn't dye her silver hair. She shuns makeup. She doesn't sugarcoat things.
"I'm a bull in a china store," she said.
In April 2000, while a jury deliberated the fate of teenage client Valessa Robinson, accused of killing her mother in a high-profile Tampa case, Goudie bristled at a judge's decision to answer jurors' questions.
"At this point, we should all just go home," said Goudie, who at that time was working in the Office of the Public Defender.
Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett heard the remark and threatened to hold her in contempt of court. She later apologized, and Padgett accepted.
Goudie still speaks highly of Padgett, and the judge said that while he would be uncomfortable commenting on an attorney who still appears before him, the moment of tension four years ago is behind him.
"She's aggressive," Padgett said this week. "She's good on her feet."
Reno, now retired and living in Miami-Dade County, recalled the young Goudie she hired.
"I think she had great potential," Reno said. "She was a good lawyer, and she learned quickly."
Reno remembered the advice she gave her young prosecutors, when the endless flow of criminal cases threatened to dehumanize the process, when it would be easy to stop caring and start shuffling papers.
"What I remember saying is, with victims, treat each victim the way you would want your family to be treated," Reno said.
It's a lesson Goudie said she took to heart.
Working with Gaime and her parents, Goudie said she has thrown her heart into the case.
Divorced, with one grown son, Goudie said she knows what it's like to worry about a child. Her son has been on the frontline in the Army in Iraq.
"I would not be able to sleep at night if I felt I had not represented them the same way I would want someone to represent my son," she said.
Goudie stumps for Gaime
As a prosecutor for the late State Attorney Harry Lee Coe, Goudie gained a reputation for toughness.
A St. Petersburg Times columnist once remarked on her "intense, look-the-jury-in-the-eyes methods." And in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court reversed a murder case she prosecuted, criticizing Goudie for ridiculing a defendant by questioning his credibility on the witness stand and calling him "Pinocchio."
The justices asked the Florida Bar to review her courtroom style. The bar found she did nothing wrong.
She left Coe's office under strange circumstances in 1997 and joined the Office of the Public Defender after a few months in private practice. Coe at the time denied he fired Goudie, one of his top guns, but she maintains that she was fired. Coe's actions were never explained.
"I think the guy was nuts, may he rest in peace," she said.
Coe, awash in gambling debts, committed suicide in 2000.
As a public defender, Goudie's no-holds-barred style made news again when she sent a letter to a grand jury foreman, letting him know her client was willing to testify, with no protection, at the secretive grand jury proceedings.
It was an unusual move. Her client was indicted, but two months later, a jury cleared him.
"If you don't go down swinging, there's something wrong with you," she said.
Goudie said she is as passionate about her defense of Gaime as she has been in other cases. She said she has no question the intense news coverage has removed any chance of seating an impartial jury. She applauded Circuit Judge Lynn Tepper for looking at the case with an unbiased eye before agreeing last month that sheriff's deputies overstepped their bounds in searching Gaime's Land O'Lakes rented townhouse.
Tepper ruled prosecutors can't show the jury most of what investigators found in the searches, including letters Gaime wrote that prosecutors say show she planned to kill herself and her children.
Goudie said she thinks prosecutors and even the reporters covering the story are convinced Gaime is guilty. It comes through in the news stories, she said, and that reaches potential jurors before they can see the evidence and hear the arguments.
Goudie has in court referenced some secret evidence or theories, and she still declines to discuss what those elements could be. At trial, they may never surface, she said.
Legal covenants keep Goudie from talking about her discussions with Gaime, who has been in a Pasco County jail since her arrest in May 1999. But Goudie said the two get along, and she feels for Gaime.
"Imagine how you would feel if you had never committed a crime in your life. You've never been in jail. You have two children," Goudie said. "All of a sudden, you wake up one day, you're in a hospital, and law enforcement is looking at you like you're a suspect. How unbelieveable is that?"
If a neutral jury can hear the case, Goudie said the state won't be able to get a conviction.
"Let us all start off at the same spot, where the state doesn't put me 200 yards behind in a 100-yard dash," Goudie said. "I want to start off fair."
"I look at the evidence, and I don't see it the same way the prosecutors do. The obvious thing is not always what it seems to be," she said. "I can tell you right now, no way in hell am I going to go with an insanity defense. She did not commit this crime."
- Chase Squires covers east Pasco courts. He can be reached at 352 521-6518 or toll-free 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6518. His e-mail address is squires@sptimes.com
