Thirty-Six
The morning after I confronted my grandfather, I was home alone at my parents’ house, standing in the kitchen. Early summer light streamed in through the window over the sink. I could see the old tire swing, its rope now frayed and starting to rot.
The phone rang.
There were no words when I picked up, only his labored breathing. He’d done this before, calling the house and just breathing when he heard me pick up. “Hello?” I said. “Hello?” I was ready to hang up.
But this time he spoke. “I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m going to be dead soon. I need your forgiveness to go to heaven. Do you forgive me?”
I remember the phone ringing. I remember the light through the window and the black plastic receiver, smooth in my palm. I remember the sound of his voice, wavery and gruff and old, and the way my skin pricked and my heart thudded to hear it. I remember his question.
I have no memory of how I answered him.
*
What I once loved about the law is that it doesn’t let questions go unanswered. It finds answers for them. In life we’d call what happened to Helen Palsgraf as she waited for the train to take her children to the beach a chain of events. It would be clear that one thing had led to another: the young man running late, the porter trying to be helpful by shoving him, the package falling, the explosion, the scales, and then finally Mrs. Palsgraf suing the railroad. All of these events, we would understand, were tangled together—no one cause, no one beginning. Each time we told the story we might tell it differently, choosing to emphasize the young man’s being late if we wanted to make a point about carelessness, or the explosion leading to the scales’ fall if we wanted to say you never can tell what will happen. No one meaning.
But the law can’t leave it there. The law must determine what the story means. That’s what a trial’s for. The actual Palsgraf case was disposed of simply. The court found that the railroad wasn’t liable because the porter couldn’t have known that the wrapped package contained fireworks. What the case is remembered for now, though, and why I’m interested in it, is the dissent, which said that the railroad should have been liable, because the shove was the proximate cause of Mrs. Palsgraf’s injury. The question in Palsgraf, the dissenting judge said, isn’t really about knowledge of the fireworks. It’s where you want to start the causal chain. Once you decide that, you have decided the meaning of the whole story.
Palsgraf is a civil case. Proximate cause, as a formal named concept, doesn’t exist in criminal law. Criminal law doesn’t care where the story began. But how you tell the story has everything to do with how you judge. Begin Ricky’s story with the murder—and it means one thing. Begin it with the crash—and it means another. Begin with what my grandfather did to me and my sister. Or begin when he was a boy, and someone did it to him.
No one else can solve how to think about my grandfather. But with Ricky, at least, I hoped the jury would decide for me.
*
There will be four closing statements. Because the main burden of proof is on the state, it goes first and last. Wilson will speak for the state, with Mann rebutting her. Then Clive. Then Killingsworth.
“You may begin,” Judge Gray says to Wilson.
Then, the transcript notes, Gray stands and walks out of the courtroom.
“May it please the Court,” Wilson starts. The room erupts in awkward laughter. The “Court”—the judge—is gone.
She thanks the jury for their attention throughout the trial. There is really only one question they have to deliberate on, she says. When Ricky Langley killed Jeremy Guillory, did he know right from wrong? The evidence, she says, suggests he did. He started taking an anti-psychotic medication only when a defense expert gave it to him for the start of the trial. “He’s never had to be hospitalized for psychotic episodes. Friends around the time of this incident never noticed any odd behaviors. They never noticed anything. They just noticed someone who seemed normal to them.” The idea that Ricky has psychotic spells and was psychotic when he killed Jeremy is a concoction for this trial, she says. “I submit to you that there are people who do things that are just so horrible, and they know when they’re doing them that they’re so horrible, but at that particular time they choose to do them. Ricky Langley is one of those people. Those people simply aren’t mad. They’re bad.”
While Wilson has been talking—the transcript does not note exactly when—Gray has returned to his bench. Now Mann signals she’s ready for her opening statement. “All right,” Gray says. “I’ll stay for ‘May it please the Court.’”
“May it please the Court,” Mann begins.
Again, Gray leaves.
“It’s undisputed from the very beginning and continuing through today that Ricky Langley caused Jeremy Guillory’s death.” But what Mann wants to talk about, she tells the jury, is the burden of proof. She reminds them that during voir dire she and Clive asked them what “beyond a reasonable doubt” meant to them—and they answered “very high, even 99 percent.” The prosecutors must meet that burden of proof to make the murder first-degree. They have to prove specific intent to 99 percent. And, she says, they can’t.
That they can’t is the only reason they’re claiming Ricky sexually abused Jeremy. In the absence of evidence of specific intent, they’re trying to move the jury with emotion. But pay attention, she tells the jurors: Ricky is a pedophile, but there’s no evidence he actually abused Jeremy in that way. Ricky told Lucky and others the story of the murder eleven times, she says, and only one of those times did he say he molested Jeremy. (She means eleven times the jury has heard reference to. It never hears about Ricky’s bragging to Jackson, or how he described it in Georgia. The story was told many more times than eleven. It has been told so many different ways.) The only other piece of evidence of molestation is that there was semen on the back of Jeremy’s shirt, semen that matched Ricky—but can the state prove that didn’t come from Ricky’s bedclothes?