Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ follows the eponymous character who is known for working out of his car and his unorthodox ways to get his clients a not guilty verdict in court. Mickey Haller’s winning streak has turned him into the hottest defense attorney in Los Angeles, and the show focuses on all the work he puts into maintaining that reputation. In the second season, Haller takes the case of a woman named Lisa Trammell. He meets her at her restaurant, and they have a brief fling before she is accused of murdering Mitchell Bondurant.
Haller agrees to help Lisa out of personal concerns, but over the course of the trial, he discovers that he only scratched the surface of her personality during their first meeting. There is much more to her, and she has a few dark secrets that can unravel everything. Does being a murderer count as one of those things? Is she guilty of the crime she was accused of? Let’s find out. SPOILERS AHEAD
Alibi and Doubts: Lisa’s Presence at the Crime Scene
Lisa Trammell and Mitchell Bondurant had been at odds with each other ever since Bondurant arrived in her neighborhood, intending to buy the whole place and tear it down to build something else in its place. Like many other people in the community, Lisa was against this idea. She didn’t support gentrification and refused to be pushed out of the restaurant, which also served as her home, which she had given her life to build. It made sense then that she appeared at every rally and protest against Bondurant and his company and wholeheartedly objected to every step he took to push her and others out of the neighborhood. But was that enough for murder?
When Lisa is charged with killing Bondurant, she maintains her innocence. She accepts that she hated the man and wanted him gone but would have never resorted to murder. Still, the cops find one piece of evidence after another that points suspicion toward her. The more she looks good as the culprit, the more the cops focus on her rather than looking at other suspects. They know Lisa had a solid motive for wanting Bondurant gone. They also find out evidence to suggest that she was the kind of person who could get violent enough to kill someone.
In one of the protests, Lisa was photographed assaulting Bondurant. Following this, he filed a restraining order against her. However, during the trial, it turns out that she did not initiate the assault. Bondurant attacked her, and she acted in self-defense. Haller also shows that while Lisa had a temper, she never actually hurt anyone. But that wasn’t enough. During the investigation, cops found her garden gloves in the garage. They were stained with Bondurant’s blood. Moreover, the hammer, the murder weapon, belonged to Lisa’s tool kit and had been missing since the beginning of the investigation.
In addition, Lisa was also known to have been in the vicinity of the building in which Bondurant was murdered around the same time the murder took place. Lisa admits she was near the building but claims she had nothing to do with the murder. She doesn’t know how the blood got on her gloves and claims the hammer had been missing for a while. All of this makes Haller wonder if she really did it, but he also knows that her responsibility as her lawyer is to protect her, whether she did it or not.
Eventually, Haller gets a not-guilty verdict for her, but the question remains: who killed Mitchell Bondurant? It turns out that the real killer was Walter Kim, the inspection officer who clicked the picture showing Lisa assaulting Bondurant. He was involved in the corrupt practices of Alex Grant and couldn’t afford to be exposed by Bondurant. He didn’t have the money or the connections to protect himself, so he decided to get Bondurant out of the way after the man threatened to go to the Feds.
Soon after his testimony at the trial, Walter Kim goes missing, but the cops find enough evidence to prove he was the killer. The broken mirror on the crime scene matches the broken mirror in Kim’s car. They also find blood on his shoes, which places him on the crime scene. Moreover, Rene, an employee at Elysian, reveals that Kim had been in the garage, which means he had the opportunity to steal the gloves and the hammer and frame Lisa. With the killer’s identity revealed, it is confirmed that Lisa did not kill Mitchell Bondurant.
