The second and final trial day of Solomon Starbuck for the murder of Clay Terran occurred on December 20, 2027. With the previous proceedings having been abruptly terminated by a bomb detonation, the rest of the trial was postponed by four days, during which a separate hearing was held to determine the one responsible for the destruction of Courtroom No. 4. Starbuck's trial was then held in Courtroom No. 5, with Phoenix Wright filling in as defense team lead in place of Apollo Justice, who had left the Wright Anything Agency to investigate the case on his own. The trial would end with the sudden introduction of conclusive evidence, but the story would be far from over.
Preliminaries[]
- 10:15 a.m.
The trial began and Yuri Cosmos was called to the stand. He testified that he and Candice Arme had entered Boarding Lounge 1 from the control room and had seen the killer. When pressed for more details, Cosmos admitted that the lighter that the figure was holding had been lowered, so that he could identify Clay Terran's body, but not the killer. Cosmos also said that Arme had fired two warning shots at the mysterious figure, who had then vanished. Phoenix Wright pointed out that he had found only one bullet hole at the scene, but Simon Blackquill retorted that Terran's oxygen tank had been ruptured by the second bullet, which he proceeded to submit as evidence. Wright then revealed that he had found a different bullet from a .10-caliber gun, much smaller than Arme's .38-caliber.
"Cross-Examining Cosmos"[]
Cosmos admitted that the figure had fired upon them before Arme's warning shots. In fact, the bullet had miraculously hit Cosmos's medal and bounced right off. Nonetheless, considering the relative positions of the figure and where Cosmos claimed to be, the grate inside which the bullet had been found was nearly in the opposite direction of its supposed trajectory. Blackquill supposed that Arme and Cosmos had really entered the room from the southern door to the elevators, cutting off any possible escape for Wright's theorized third person.
In response, Wright asserted that Cosmos had arrived at the scene first. He had then fired the .10-caliber shot at Arme when she entered, causing her to return fire. However, the medal had saved Cosmos's life. Blackquill had the medal analyzed and confirmed that the bullet dent matched that of a .38-caliber bullet.
"What Cosmos Actually Saw"[]
Arme shooting at Cosmos.
Cosmos admitted that most of what Wright said was true. He had made it to the lounge before Arme, but then somebody had shot at him. He had hidden to avoid getting shot, but upon looking back into the room, he had only seen the two astronauts, and the shooter had vanished. None of the doors were a plausible escape route. He had entered the room to investigate, and that was when Arme had shot at him. He had escaped into the control room and doubled back through the elevators to where Arme had been, in order to divert suspicion away from himself.
Cykes sensed that Cosmos was still hiding something, and she opened up the Mood Matrix to help Wright with his cross-examination. Wright noticed that Cosmos seemed uneasy when he mentioned the launch pad door, and that he did not register any shock when talking about the shooter's disappearance. Wright concluded that the shooter had escaped through the launch pad corridor, and that Cosmos was hiding something about a possible escape route. He pointed out that the shooter could have used Starbuck's fingerprints to gain access to the corridor. When Cosmos talked about Arme, Wright wondered why he had been more surprised by her arrival than by her shooting.
Wright looked at the video footage again and saw that the knob beside the hand scanner had been horizontal on the night of the murder, while it had been vertical during the investigation. Cosmos explained that the knob was a safety lock to hold the launch pads in place, and he had turned it to move Launch Pad 1, fearing that there would be more explosions. However, the Mood Matrix detected some amount of joy when Cosmos talked about disengaging the safety lock. Blackquill pointed out that Launch Pad 1 was still where it was supposed to be.
A cross-section diagram of the Space Center showing the circular rail used to switch Launch Pad 1 with the Space Museum.
In light of this, Wright revealed Cosmos's final secret: Launch Pad 1 had been switched with the Space Museum. The astronauts had really boarded the replica rocket in the Space Museum, while the killer had gone into the real Launch Pad 1 to set the bomb. Thus, during the "rescue", Terran had simply taken the elevator. The killer had then waited in Boarding Lounge 1 until the two astronauts came out, and then killed Clay Terran. He had then escaped into the Space Museum, taking advantage of the fact that Cosmos would switch the two launch pads back into their original positions. The scanner wasn't required to open the door from that side due to the incident happening during the museum's opening hours. As proof of all this, Wright noted that the floors of the launch pad corridors were labeled "1" and "2", and the security footage showed that the astronauts really had emerged from the corridor labeled "2".
Cornered, Yuri Cosmos punched his scooter in his rage, which caused it to go out of control. After that was settled, he admitted to moving the launch pads and faking the launch to protect the astronauts, but he refused to explain any further. Meanwhile, Blackquill still refused to let Starbuck off the hook, insisting that there was no evidence that the killer had even used the escape route that Wright had proposed.
"Conclusive Evidence"[]
Suddenly, Bobby Fulbright entered the courtroom with decisive evidence: the killer's lighter. He said that it had been found in the Space Museum and did not have Starbuck's fingerprints, which meant that it was impossible for Starbuck to have possessed it in the boarding lounge. As the judge rendered his not guilty verdict, Blackquill insisted that something had gone terribly wrong. He demanded that Fulbright give the results of the fingerprint analysis of the lighter. It revealed that the fingerprints belonged to Athena Cykes. The courtroom exploded into an uproar as Wright tried to find where everything had gone wrong.