The prosecutor spoke in a voice heavy with sarcasm, that made Jenna flinch. She was feeling uneasy, the mood of the courtroom was hushed with attention and (it seemed to her) respect for the ex-priest’s position, as for the stammer and warmth of his words that were like raw cries from the heart.
“If—if you saw someone about to murder an infant, for instance with a knife, you would be obliged to attack him, wouldn’t you, to save the infant; it is your moral duty to try to prevent the infant being killed.”
“Even in violation of the law?”
“That’s the secular law. The law passed by the legislature of Ohio in the wake of Roe v. Wade of 1973. But there is a higher law. There is always a law higher than the secular—as in Nazi Germany in the time of the death camps and experimentation on human beings, there was a higher law in defiance of the secular law.”
“But the State of Ohio isn’t Nazi Germany, Mr. Stockard! And the Muskegee Falls Women’s Center is not the Holocaust.”
“Where innocent lives are destroyed, there is a Holocaust. The abortion in the mother’s womb is the Holocaust.”
“Mr. Stockard, did you advise parishioners and young people to break the law when you were a priest in Lincoln?”
“No.”
“Really—no?”
“Not nearly as much as I should have.”
“That’s a clear-cut answer, Father! Thank you.”
“But I did not advise anyone to break the law. Only to follow their conscience. They will tell you.”
“Yet, you claim that you have not actively conspired in murdering an abortion doctor.”
“I have not . . .”
“And why have you not?”
“I am not proud of my prudence. My cowardice.”
Stockard was trembling now. His voice quavered, he was barely audible.
There came a ripple of emotion through the courtroom, like a current of water. Jenna could not help but feel it herself. The former priest with his tormented face had made a strong impression on all who’d heard him speak, including even the elderly judge whose expression was usually opaque, impassive.
Belatedly, the prosecutor realized this. He sensed the jurors’ sympathies, and abruptly ceased his cross-examination. But now it was the defense attorney’s turn, and his questions were respectful, drawing from Stockard such protracted admiration for Luther Dunphy, and such passion for the Right-to-Life movement, as well as vilification of the Pro-Choice movement, that the prosecutor was forced to object several times. Like an attorney in a TV show he leapt to his feet. He spoke sharply. He spoke with an edge of sarcasm. This was not strategic. This was an error. In dismay Jenna could feel a shift in the atmosphere of the courtroom subtle as a heartbeat.
So many times the term defending the defenseless had been uttered, it hung in the air of the courtroom like a bad smell. There was no way to ignore it, and it would not be possible to forget it.
At last the ordeal was over. Stockard had been questioned for more than an hour. But he was defiant, he had triumphed. His eyes shone with tears.
And now, as he returned to his seat in the courtroom, he dared to look at Luther Dunphy who had been listening to his testimony with something like wonder, and yearning. Jenna steeled herself.
The priest will take his hand now. He will bless him!
But this didn’t happen. Stockard passed close by Luther Dunphy unsteady on his feet as if exhausted.
SOON AFTER THIS, the trial ended.
The defense called few witnesses, and all of these were individuals attesting to Luther Dunphy’s “character”—the most persuasive was the minister of Dunphy’s church who claimed that Luther Dunphy was the “most devout Christian” he knew, and that Luther Dunphy would not have “willingly” done any harm to any living thing.
How was it possible, then, the prosecutor asked him, that Luther Dunphy had shot two unarmed men, in cold blood, without warning?—and Reverend Kuhn said humbly that he did not know.
He’d visited Luther Dunphy in the detention house, he said. They prayed together but they didn’t talk much about what had happened—“Mostly we just pray to God for the strength to understand. We are waiting for that strength to suffuse us.”
THE TRIAL ENDED. The jury deliberated. She waited.
In the Muskegee Falls Inn, in her room on the fourth, top floor she waited.
Alone she waited. In terror of the jury’s decision she waited.
The prosecutor had assured her, there could be no verdict other than guilty. Under the law, jurors had to convict. The argument that Luther Dunphy had committed two murders as a kind of “self-defense” was unacceptable.
On the fourth morning of waiting she wakened before dawn with the sudden wish to see where Gus had died.
She had not seen the Broome County Women’s Center which was (she’d been told) a ten-minute walk from the hotel. She had not been driven past the Center. She had not requested this, and no one had offered.