Vera Misham

Vera Misham is the defendant in the murder of her father, Drew Misham. She is notable in that her trial was the first to employ the Jurist System. She is also the only known survivor of acute atroquinine poisoning.

Early life
Early in life, Vera Misham was almost kidnapped. This experience traumatized her to the point of being unwilling to go outside at all and never smiling or talking much. She learned instead to draw her emotions on a notepad. Drew even home-schooled Vera. One day, however, she insisted on going to see a show in which magician group Troupe Gramarye was performing, much to her father's surprise. This was the only instance in which she expressed such a desire to travel anywhere outside their home.

Vera's father, Drew, was a failing artist; her mother had left them because of this. Vera liked to copy Drew's drawings, and Drew eventually discovered that she was extremely talented at this, being able to create copies indistinguishable from the originals. In fact, she could copy just about anything given the necessary materials. Needing money, Drew gave Vera paintings to forge and sold them on the black market. He sold the works himself to protect his daughter. Vera never knew about the illegality of her actions.

One day, Kristoph Gavin asked Vera to fabricate a piece of Magnifi Gramarye's journal. Gavin was friendly to Vera, giving her a bottle of nail polish as a gift. He claimed that it was a "good luck charm" and that its magic would wear off if she told anyone about it.

Later, Gavin sent a letter to the Mishams along with a commemorative Troupe Gramarye stamp. The letter confirmed the payment for the forgery and told Drew to mail a receipt for the payment using the stamp.

Kristoph Gavin planted the journal page on defense attorney Phoenix Wright, who was defending Zak Gramarye in the murder of Magnifi Gramarye; not knowing it was fake, Wright presented the page as evidence, and the prosecutor, Kristoph's brother Klavier Gavin, called Drew to the stand, confirming that it was a forgery. However, Zak disappeared from the courtroom and never got his verdict. Wright was subsequently stripped of his badge and law career. Thus, Vera's forgery ironically removed the only person with the legal rights to the tricks of Troupe Gramarye, ending the career of the magicians she loved for seven years.

Meanwhile, Vera grew attached to the commemorative stamp and wanted to keep it, so Drew used a different stamp to send the receipt.

Wright later visited Drew Misham at his home; after figuring out that Vera was the real forger, he asked to see her. He talked about Troupe Gramarye to cheer her up and to get her to talk, but she would not tell him about her charm. Instead, Wright figured out that her charm was a bottle of nail polish that her client had given her, and that the client was Kristoph Gavin. Vera told Wright that she saw a glimpse of the Devil when she saw her client...

The only other time in which Vera went outside her home was to go to the Gramarye Museum.

Drew's death

 * Main article: Turnabout Succession

Seven years later, Drew wrote a letter to Kristoph Gavin; he used the Troupe Gramarye stamp, as he could find no other stamp to use. He later died during an interview with a reporter, leaving traces of atroquinine poison on his coffee mug; Vera served coffee to Drew every night at 9:00 p.m. This lead investigators to believe that Vera had poisoned the coffee, and thus Vera was arrested for her father's murder. Vera tried desperately to resist, saying she would die if she left the studio, but then she agreed to be taken outside with her "good luck charm".

Vera's trial
Vera was detained at the detention center, taking her nail polish with her. Phoenix Wright chose this case as a "simple" test trial for the newly devised Jurist System, a revival of the jury trial system from decades past. Wright chose his protégé, Apollo Justice, and Klavier Gavin as the lawyers. Like Wright before him, Justice struggled to get Vera to talk, and he investigated her home for clues.

In court, Drew's career as a forger came up, and Justice proved the atroquinine had come from the commemorative stamp and that Vera, not Drew, had been the real forger. Thus, Vera was called to testify about her life of crime. She was nervous and began to bite her nails, and she stared at Klavier during her testimony due to his likeness to Kristoph. The Troupe Gramarye stamp came up; shocked by the mention of "Gramarye", Klavier lost some of his composure and asked her to confirm that her first evidence forgery was Magnifi Gramarye's journal from seven years ago; Klavier told Justice that this was the fake evidence from Wright's final trial. Justice and Klavier kept pressing her for more information about the forged evidence and the client of the fake page, but Vera stared at Klavier again told them that "the Devil" had been the client, and suddenly fainted.

In the hospital, she was diagnosed with acute atroquinine poisoning.

Wright told Justice and the jury about the events that had transpired during the last seven years that led to Drew's death using the MASON System, and then court reconvened. Justice called Kristoph Gavin to the stand. Justice had figured out most of what Kristoph had done; he had planted atroquinine in Vera's nail polish and the stamp to keep the Mishams from talking. Kristoph, however, denied that he had any involvement in the forgery, and knew that neither Justice nor Klavier could substantiate their accusations.

At this point, Klavier informed Kristoph that the outcome of this particular trial would be decided, not by the judge, but by six average citizens, which put less emphasis on the need for decisive evidence. This changed the course of Kristoph's plan and left him enraged at the fact that the fate of Vera would be left to common citizens, under his belief that such "ignorant swine" had no place in the law. In the end, Vera was acquitted by a unanimous vote from the jury, thus defeating everything that Kristoph had plotted.

At the hospital, Vera recovered from the poison, which was a miraculous occurrence as no one else was ever known to have survived atroquinine poisoning. She thanked Apollo Justice and Trucy Wright for helping her. She also felt guilty for unknowingly causing Phoenix Wright's disbarment, and wanted to meet him again to apologize for what she had done. She decided she would give up being a forger and take up painting original works. She overcame her fear of the outside world, acknowledging that there were good people in the world, having met some of them.

Personality
Vera was very shy and withdrawn; Ema Skye described her as "sickly". She had a very closed and simple life before her father's murder and knew very little of the world outside of her home, similar in that respect to the lives of Pearl Fey, Regina Berry and Iris. The only known people with whom she had ever come into contact before her father's death were Kristoph Gavin and Spark Brushel.

As a young girl, she was shy, but could be cheerful and talkative when discussing a subject she was particularly interested in, as Phoenix Wright found out when visiting her. Her social skills deteriorated significantly over the following seven years, and by the time she first met Apollo Justice she only spoke in short, often fragmented sentences and rarely made any facial expressions, drawing how she felt on a notepad instead. She bit her nails when she became nervous. After her acquittal and recovery from the near-poising, however, she became more confident regained the more cheerful nature she had displayed when she was younger.

Vera is a fan of Ariadoney nail polish and the Troupe Gramarye group. She loves stage magic, and before her acquittal, she was known to open up when asked about it.

Name

 * Her surname in the Japanese version is "Ese" (絵瀬), which means "imitation".


 * "Makoto" (まこと) is normally a Japanese given name used for males, but is sometimes used as a first name for females. It roughly translates as "sincerity".


 * The name "Vera" comes from the Latin for "truth", or from the Russian word for "faith".


 * "Misham" comes from "sham".


 * "Mi sham" in Hebrew means "who's there?"


 * Her surname in the French localization ("Monin") may be a reference to the famous painter "Monet".

Development

 * If the player chooses "guilty" at the finale of Turnabout Succession, Vera's trial is suspended due to a hung jury with the verdict being delayed until the following day. Unfortunately, Vera's condition worsens overnight and she dies of atroquinine poisoning in her hospital bed, resulting in her trial ending with no verdict given.