No. She was polite, she was courteous, but she did not glance around.
Inside the courtroom Jenna took her place each morning in the row behind the prosecutors’ table. The Broome County Courthouse was a very old building dating to the early 1900s but the interior had been renovated, “modernized.” There were windows with sharp clear panes and a hardwood floor, slightly warped, that had been sanded and polished; twenty-two rows of seats were new but hard against the buttocks of a slender person. Jenna felt a leap of eagerness, of hunger, seeing that Luther Dunphy was being escorted into the courtroom by Broome County sheriff’s deputies, his hands cuffed before him; as he was seated at the defense table with his two court-appointed attorneys, the handcuffs were removed. It was always startling to see how Dunphy loomed over the attorneys: he was well over six feet tall, he weighed over two hundred pounds. He was a strong man, if he wished to be. You could see how if he were enraged Luther Dunphy could be very dangerous.
She was waiting for him to turn to her. To seek her out. The widow of the man he had murdered.
Their eyes would lock. The murderer, and the widow of the murdered man. Are you ashamed, are you shattered in your soul? For what you have done?
Dunphy had denied that he’d had anything to do with the death of Timothy Barron, the fifty-eight-year-old volunteer whom he’d shot after he’d shot Gus Voorhees. He would not discuss this second death (it was said) even with his lawyer. Though witness after witness recounted the shootings, describing how he had shot both men, and forensic evidence unquestioningly identified the single shotgun used, yet Dunphy refused to acknowledge Barron’s death; he could not accept that he’d killed a longtime resident of Muskegee Falls who was not an “abortion doctor.”
Jenna thought it preposterous, the man had readily, even proudly confessed that he’d shot the “abortion doctor” for reasons of “self-defense” but he refused to acknowledge his second victim.
Insane! Or very cunning.
There was no defense—obviously. The defendant did not deny having killed at least one of his victims and he had been seen by numerous witnesses including even law enforcement officers.
Yet, the plea was “not guilty.” The trial had been postponed several times. The defense’s strategy was to postpone as long as possible—this was a typical defense ploy, when guilt was so clear-cut. At first, Dunphy’s attorney was going to argue that his client was “not guilty” for reasons of extenuating circumstances; then, strategy shifted, and Dunphy’s attorney argued that he was “mentally unfit” to participate in his trial. Predictably, psychiatrists for the defense reported that Luther Dunphy was “delusional”—“borderline schizophrenic”—“bipolar” while psychiatrists for the prosecution reported that Luther Dunphy was “of reasonably sound mind”—“capable of understanding that he had broken the law” and “capable of participating in his own defense.” After months of delay and prevarication the Broome County judge had ruled that Dunphy was not delusional to the degree that he couldn’t participate in the trial, thus the trial would proceed.
Did Jenna think that Luther Dunphy was insane? All that she’d read about him, all that she’d been told by prosecutors, led her to think yes, the man was insane; he heard voices, he’d claimed; he believed he was fulfilling the will of God in shooting two unarmed men. Yet, there were many for whom this wasn’t “insanity”—in the context of religious belief, it was certainly not “insanity.”
There were many more religious persons in the United States than there were secular persons; of these, the great majority were Christians. A serious Christian would have to accept that, if God so willed, God might speak directly to him; it would be illogical to be a believing Christian and deny that God, or Christ, could have such a power. In this way, Luther Dunphy was not insane in his beliefs; in his actions, he had violated the law, but not as an insane person.
The defense’s argument was a shrewd one: Luther Dunphy had not committed any crime in “defending” the “defenseless”—that is, unborn babies scheduled to be aborted that very morning in the Broome County Women’s Center; under the law, one is allowed to commit an act of homicide in order to defend oneself or others. By presenting this act as idealistic, altruistic, and motivated by Christian charity, and in no way self-aggrandizing, the defense attorney was claiming that the defendant had acted selflessly. He had also suggested that his client, though seemingly “of sound mind and body” at the present time, had been “in a state of extreme mental duress” at the time of the shootings.