Grant said he wanted the jury "to hear from me and maybe see I'm not this bad person that they probably think I am. I know what happened with Fay and what I did and didn't do. But I won't get to tell my story in there. It's Juan's courtroom, and the judge is going to let him run it."
Michael Ratcliff
A crush of national and local media await the Grant trial verdict outside the courthouse in downtown Phoenix.
Jack Kurtz/Pool
Doug Grant looks over at his lawyer, Mel McDonald, during trial testimony.
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Doug Grant was right to be scared about the manslaughter instruction.
After nearly three grueling weeks of deliberation, his jury returned its verdict on March 24.
Grant looked wan and shrunken in a glen plaid suit as he walked into court with his wife of seven-plus years, Hilary. Several members of his family were in attendance as a show of support. An equal number of Faylene Eaves Grant's family awaited anxiously on the other side of the courtroom.
Grant had been out on bond since shortly after his July 2005 arrest outside his vitamin-supplement operation in tiny Pima, about 3 1/2 hours east of Phoenix. If the jurors were to convict him, sheriff's deputies would probably take him into custody.
The Grants had spent the weekend at their home, hunkered down with their kids: Doug's 18-year-old son Bowen, from his first marriage, their sons Braven and Marley (Faylene's birth children), and his and Hilary's 5-year-old daughter, Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards).
First, Judge Mahoney's clerk announced that jurors had been unable to reach a verdict on either first- or second-degree murder.
Next was the manslaughter count, the elephant in the room and the product of Juan Martinez's clever last-minute legal strategy
"Guilty," the clerk said.
Heeding Judge Mahoney's admonition, no one so much as gasped in the courtroom.
Looking lost, Grant turned briefly back to Hilary, who was holding onto her brother Hunter for dear life.
The jury hadn't returned a guilty verdict of first- or second-degree murder, but Martinez's little smile trumpeted that he had won.
Though Doug Grant is eligible for probation, Judge Mahoney's ordering him immediately incarcerated means prison definitely will follow. (Mahoney set sentencing for May 1.) Because of a subsequent decision by the jury, Grant could receive up to 12 1/2 years in prison, of which he must serve more than 10. The midrange sentence for manslaughter is five years.
Just like that, it was over.
Doug Grant's older brother, Vaughn, an LDS bishop and an insurance agent, hung back and tried to avoid the media crush on the plaza outside the central court building. The elder Grant, who had sat through most of the trial and testified for the defense, could only manage this:
"Tell me, where was the evidence? Where was the evidence?"
A criminal trial is not often a place the truth is found.
Witnesses, including defendants, don't get to tell their stories as if they're chatting in a coffee shop or a pub. Rules governing "hearsay" and "leading" questions usually crimp each side, and jurors don't get to hear much of what really happened.
In the Grant case, innuendo and rank speculation by both sides were rampant. The judge's rulings on the admission of testimony and evidence (which far more often favored the prosecution) surely had impact on the outcome.
By the end of the trial, more questions than answers had emerged.
For sure, no gun was smoking in this twisted case.
The bottom line in State of Arizona vs. Douglas Dewey Grant, according to juror Matt Percifield: "We pretty much felt he was a scuzzbag."
Most of the jurors, six of whom voted at one point to render a first-degree murder verdict, couldn't stand the guy.
Percifield, who says he never did believe the prosecution's premeditation theory, definitely was one of them.
But did Grant actually kill his wife?
"I think he contributed to it," says Percifield, a Chandler resident who is chief of security at a DUI facility. "Just a gut feeling. Nothing was proven."
Nothing proven?
The consensus of the jurors, Percifield said, was that Faylene may have come up with the idea of her impending premature death but that the defendant had "played on it. He didn't stop it . . . We believed he participated in this fantasy that Faylene had."
Juror Pam Somerville goes one step further, saying she still believes that Grant intentionally killed his wife so he could get back with his girlfriend Hilary.
"It's wrong to say that we convicted him because of his bad character, because we didn't," Somerville insists to New Times. "We convicted him because he was guilty of a crime, and we worked really hard to get to that conclusion. I think he just didn't want Faylene around anymore."
However, Somerville and several jurors interviewed by New Times say the panel ultimately rejected Juan Martinez's theory that Faylene never made it into the bathtub that morning, and that Grant had dunked her into the water and held her down. Then, according to the prosecutor, Grant had placed his comatose wife on their bed and waited minutes before calling the physician's assistant instead of 911.
The jurors agreed afterward that they would have been hung if the judge hadn't given them the manslaughter option. They also unanimously concluded that the devout Faylene hadn't committed suicide, despite the existence of her "farewell" letters and other writings that predicted her demise.
