“Your Honor,” she continues, “I beg you to please put this to rest.”
The clock on the wall ticks forward. Judge Gray looks at her. He takes in, he must, how carefully she’s dressed, the bags that must be under her eyes, how dignified she is holding herself erect in the small room. Maybe he considers that word she’s said, “mercy.” It must sound so strange, so lofty, in this room. They have been talking about hearing dates. They have been talking about filing deadlines. The procedural bureaucracies of the law. Not mercy. Gently, Gray says, “Believe me, ma’am, I take no pleasure in trying this case.”
For a minute the only sound is the tap of the court reporter’s fingers on her keyboard. The words must sound hollow even to Gray. The room waits. He tries again. “I can tell you, on the record, it doesn’t matter to me if the DA knows it, if everybody knows it—I don’t believe in the death penalty. I take no pleasure in five or six years from now, or ten years from now, looking at the television and Mr. Langley is placed in the chair and being executed and I know I signed the death warrant. I don’t know how I’d react to that, if that happens. Fortunately for me it hasn’t happened yet. But I know it happened to one judge in the court a couple of weeks ago and he caught—I mean he feels it. He feels it. It’s something.”
Oh, Gray should be careful. He should watch what he says. Patricia Hicks, the court reporter, is sitting to his right and she is touch-typing her way through every word that he utters, recording it in shorthand she will transcribe later. When it has been transcribed it will become a document, and that document, years from now, when Clive is trying again to get yet another trial for Ricky, will be excerpted and entered into evidence. Gray shouldn’t, as he soon will, tell the jurors that he doesn’t believe in the death penalty. A judge is supposed to be neutral. A judge is not supposed to influence the jury. He shouldn’t tell the jury, as he will, that the trial is driving him to drink. That his wife is angry at him for coming home so worked up, from what he has to watch, from what he has to learn, from looking at Ricky day after day and knowing that they are voting on this young man’s life but also that this young man strangled a boy. Gray is fifty-five years old. He used to be a lawyer. At least once, he was the defense attorney in a death penalty trial. He fought for a man’s life.
Gray tried to get off this case. Ten years ago, he succeeded. But this time he lost the judicial lottery. It’s his case now. His courtroom. He is the one who must preside over the evidence—but today, as Lorilei stands in front of him and makes her plea, something inside him begins to break. When the lawyers talk about Ricky’s hands on Jeremy’s neck, he will comment that this case is tormenting him. When the lawyers question prospective jurors about whether they’ll be able to listen to testimony about pedophilia and keep an open mind, Gray will get up and leave. And then again, during closing arguments, as the lawyers talk about Ricky’s semen on Jeremy’s shirt, Gray will stand in his long black robe, lay the gavel carefully on its side, and walk out.
Later, some will speculate that his behavior is a sign of early dementia. His mother has Alzheimer’s; maybe the disease is beginning in Gray. Maybe he just has no judgment—though he’s had a long, distinguished career until now, a career that has required him to rise above what people expected of him, and there’s never been an issue like this. Maybe it’s just that growing up where he did, growing up black where he did, he has a deep respect for struggle. His father was in the Army and his mother was a maid and it took him nine years to finish college. He is on the bench now in a state that at this time has few black lawyers and fewer black judges, he knows what it’s like to be discounted and dismissed the way Ricky has been, but the grief he feels when he considers Lorilei’s son is real, and this case is killing him from the inside.
The humanity that leaks out of Gray and spills into words all over the transcripts—it will be the reason the verdict from this trial is overturned. Gray will be the reason Lorilei has to suffer not only through this trial but another. He’ll die an early death just a few years from now, this trial the last major event in his judicial career. Before he does, he’ll recuse himself from all death penalty cases.
People think the robe protects you. It doesn’t protect you. Not from the stories.
“I can tell you you’re not alone,” Gray says to Lorilei now. “But I can’t help you. It’s the prosecutors’ decision.”
The way Lorilei looks at Frey right now, she is drowning.
“We will pursue our seeking of the death penalty in this case,” Frey says.
*
In the file box, after the transcript, there’s a contract. I stop short to see it, a contract amid the Miranda forms, search consents, subpoena receipts—documents you’d expect to see in a criminal court record. But the language is unmistakable: “Waiver & Agreement,” signed by both Ricky and Lorilei. Ricky, through Clive, indicates his understanding that Lorilei would like him held not in a mental institution (as would happen with an insanity verdict) but in a prison, and states that, having caused her such pain, he “wishes to do as she wishes.” He promises never to seek commutation or lessening of any life sentence—something an insanity verdict would allow—and never to seek release from confinement. In return, Lorilei promises to visit him in prison. The contract makes it sound as if Ricky, through Clive, is promising not to seek an insanity verdict.
But an insanity verdict is exactly what Clive will push for.
Lorilei, after the hearing, as she sits on the hard hallway bench of her future, can’t know this yet. She has a chance to lay this story to rest. She signs. She met Ricky once when she came to the door of the Lawson house, when he let her in to use the phone. Her boy was upstairs dead and she never knew. According to at least one account, she met him again that night as the searchers combed the woods. He brought her a drink and she took it from his hands, never knowing what those hands had done. Now she’ll meet him once more. And this time, she’ll know.
But though Lorilei either doesn’t remember or never realized, she and Ricky met long ago. Long before he killed her son.
Twenty-Six
My second morning in Louisiana I wake to the sound of the air conditioner’s dull buzz. The motel room is stiflingly hot, the air trapped by the heavy drapes. My eyes still closed, I can feel sweat bead on my skin, the scratchy dampness of the sheets. In the parking lot below, a man and a woman call out to each other while cars pass on the highway. Some must be pulling into the old Fuel Stop, the drivers getting out to pump gas and buy their morning coffee. I can picture the blue sky above, with its clear blaze of light. It’s morning; the world is fresh; I should get up and start my day.