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believed Crump was being conveniently scapegoated. Justice itself was on trial; and if the cause of justice was to be served, then everything in its way had to be confronted and overcome.
    The prosecution’s “declaration of war” on Ray Crump would unleash a righteous power for justice. Roundtree was ready to “act boldly,” perhaps more so than ever before. Ray Crump couldn’t pay his legal fees, so Roundtree committed her own resources to his defense. It was a terrific gamble, but one that Roundtree and her team considered supremely worthwhile. She would employ every skill she possessed to confront and defeat the government’s case against her client, of whose innocence she was categorically convinced. As her friend and fellow attorney George Peter Lamb once remarked, “Dovey Roundtree was the world’s greatest cross-examiner.” A courtroom full of people would soon understand why.
    The government, however, was still stonewalling Ray Crump’s defense.
    Four months after the murder itself, Roundtree still hadn’t been able to get a clear statement from the government’s lawyers, and therefore she wasn’t sure whether a murder weapon had even been recovered. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Duncan, the young black prosecutor initially assigned to the case by senior U.S. attorney David Acheson, was normally an ebullient man and quite friendly with Dovey. But he wasn’t being helpful or cooperative when she ran into him on the elevator in the courthouse one day before Christmas.
    “I’ve called you a couple of times,” she remembered saying to him. “I wanted to come and talk to you about this case. I’m uneasy about this. A million eyes are on this case, and we’re the ones that don’t know what’s really going on.” But Duncan had been evasive and put her off. “It’s just a straight case,” she recalled him saying. “They caught him. He was down there.”
    “So were a lot of other people down there [on the C & O Canal towpath] that day,” Dovey recalled saying. Duncan had shrugged his shoulders, saidsomething to the effect that he didn’t know whether he was going to continue with the case, and proceeded to walk away. How odd was this, Dovey recalled in 1991. 1 In fact, Dovey didn’t know Charles Duncan had been offered a job as general counsel to the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). 2
    Meanwhile, Dovey Roundtree and her legal team had lost the battle for a permanent injunction that would have restrained the government from forcing Ray Crump to give samples of his hair. In early February, Crump was taken to the police captain’s office to give a hair sample. He refused, and was then forcibly held down by several officers while hair was cut from his head. This infuriated Dovey. In mid-March, she filed a motion to suppress evidence—not only her client’s hair, but any chemical analysis from the hair, as well as his shoes, and the cap and jacket (alleged to have been Crump’s), all of which she argued had been taken either against his will or without his consent, violating his Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.
    Roundtree was being stonewalled from every direction. Determined to establish exactly what evidence the prosecution had in its possession, she filed a motion for a complete bill of particulars. The motion would compel the prosecution to list everything or be held in contempt. In addition, they would have to turn over all evidence collected in connection with the murder, including eyewitness accounts, the murder weapon, the FBI Crime Lab report, items taken from Crump’s home, and everything that Crump had used or worn on the day of the crime.
    Finally, in early March, five months after the murder itself, the prosecution was forced to cough up what it had. No murder weapon had been found, but the two.38-caliber lead bullets taken from Mary Meyer’s corpse would be entered into evidence, as well as Ray Crump’s