So they’re back to specific intent. For that, she says, the state must prove Ricky “actively desired” Jeremy’s death. “How do we determine whether a person has specific intent? We can’t open up their head and look inside. We can’t take a photograph of their brain right at that moment.” All we can do, she says, is look at the circumstantial evidence. Ricky says he doesn’t know why he killed Jeremy. He didn’t get rid of the body, like he presumably would have if he understood what he was doing. He’s never been able to give a reason for any of it. “It’s hard to have specific intent if there’s no reason at all. They ask, ‘Why did you do this?’ And he says, ‘I don’t know.’ If he had actively desired he would have known it. Heck, he would have told them that, too.
“The state’s only theory is that he killed Jeremy to hide sexual abuse. There wasn’t any sexual abuse, so he didn’t kill him to hide it.” Please, she urges the jury, use your common sense. This isn’t a man who was capable of specific intent. And if they do find specific intent in the moment of Jeremy’s death, it’s only because Ricky didn’t know right from wrong then.
Gray comes back long enough to call for a ten-minute recess. Then it’s Clive’s turn.
He begins—and Judge Gray walks out again.
Reading the transcripts of this is incredibly frustrating. No one acknowledges the strangeness of what Gray is doing. No lawyer walks to the front and objects. I suppose they couldn’t—there was no one to object to, after all; Gray had left. But when he is in the courtroom, no one goes to his bench, requests a sidebar conference, asks for an explanation, reminds him that he’s presiding over a capital trial, demands he stay.
And why is Gray gone? Does he just not want to hear this story again? He has said, over and over again on the record, in the lead-up to this day, that he does not want the judgment to be overturned. That he’s going to do it right so this trial is final. That’s why he had four alternate jurors chosen, not the usual two, and that’s why the alternates have been present for every day of the trial and have already been sworn in. He stopped the trial the day Ricky got ill from the new anti-psychotic drug the defense expert put him on. He waited for higher court rulings on minor questions in the case. He has proceeded with what anyone would call an abundance of caution.
Except for the comments he’s made. Except for the jokes. Except for the times when, it seems in the transcripts, emotions have gotten the better of him. I look at him and I think of all the years I stayed away from the gray Victorian house. All the times I forgot Ricky’s name, even when I’d just read it. How much my body tried to keep me away from this story. Gray will never serve on a death penalty case again.
But why don’t any of the lawyers object to his absence?
About that last question, at least, I have a guess: The lawyers still don’t know how this trial will turn out. Better not to do anything to disturb it if it could still go their way. That he’s missing may be an escape valve at this point, one either side could use to appeal if it doesn’t like the verdict.
“I’ve been doing this stuff for eighteen years,” Clive says. “This is all I’ve ever done in my life, is stand up in front of juries on capital cases. And the day I quit getting incredibly nervous about it is the day I’m gonna quit doing it. This sort of responsibility really terrifies me. I’m sure some of you folks didn’t sleep too well, and I hardly slept at all last night. And I hope you’ll forgive me. I know I’m not going to get through this without getting all emotional.”
He chose these jury members because of their personal experience, he tells them. Many have family members or loved ones with mental illness. Others are nurses or teachers. When they look at Ricky, he wants them to remember the people they know who’ve struggled.
Just as Clive remembers his father. His father is mentally ill, he tells the jury. “He’s ruined his whole life, he’s done some terrible things, some really terrible things.” And yet, Clive says, “it would be very hard for anyone to prove that my father actively intended to hurt me when he was doing what he was doing, because he didn’t. So they couldn’t prove that under any circumstance, and remember that, because without specific intent”—proved beyond a reasonable doubt—“you can’t find Ricky guilty of first degree murder.”
“This is the poor child, Jeremy,” Clive says. He shows the jurors the picture they’ve seen before, Jeremy at school. “This is Oscar Lee Langley.” He shows them the portrait that’s on Oscar’s grave.
Stop here. This is the strategy Clive tried at the seminar: Talking about his father. Now let Clive hold the photos up for a long moment, as he does for the jury. The jury will never hear about the seminar—not with how horrified everyone there was at what Ricky said. Clive got that excluded. But still, Clive sees his father in Ricky. He can’t not tell the story that way. So let him try to make the jurors do, in their minds, what he did with his father, and write the past onto the present. What he’s saying Ricky did in his mind. What I know I did in seeing my grandfather when I looked at Ricky. In the photographs, both boys—Oscar in 1964 and Jeremy in 1991—smile gap-toothed grins. They wear short-sleeved checked shirts. Their hair holds gleaming parts carefully combed by Bessie and Lorilei two long-ago mornings. “Is it coincidence or is it evidence of Ricky’s mental illness how similar these two pictures look?”
If Lorilei Guillory can see that Ricky deserves mercy, Clive says, then who is the jury not to? “In whose name is this trial going on? It’s not the state of Louisiana, it’s not me, this is for Truth. This is for the truth, the truth for little Jeremy Guillory. If Lorilei can see it, then we can see it, too. And Ricky is not just plain mean, Ricky is mentally ill, like my dad. Far worse than my dad.”
It is, finally, Killingsworth’s turn. One last time, Gray leaves the courtroom.
“Mr. Smith’s father isn’t on trial in this case. Mental illness is not on trial in this case. And when somebody comes up here and tries to convince sixteen individuals, sixteen citizens of this country, of mental illness that was made up in this case for your benefit, it insults me. You know, everybody can sit around and talk about oh, poor, pitiful Ricky Langley. Well, what about poor pitiful Jeremy Guillory? That’s what we really need to focus on, Jeremy Guillory, this little boy whose life was taken away on February 7, 1992, by that man.
“Pedophilia is a disease. I’m not going to sit here and try to fool you or tell you that I don’t think pedophilia is a terrible, terrible disease. It is. But pedophilia doesn’t rob a person of their ability to make a decision between what is right and wrong. And that’s what the issue is here.” Ricky’s choices in this case, she says, began when he first saw Jeremy. When he first realized that he wanted Jeremy. “He knew those choices were wrong. Because if he didn’t know those choices were wrong why in the world would he be having this conflict in his mind?” He molested Jeremy. All right, she’ll admit that they can’t prove exactly when it happened, she says, but it did. That semen on the back of Jeremy’s T-shirt—even if it transferred from the bedclothes, the stain would have had to be wet. “Use your common sense. What does that tell you?”
Ricky begins to shake in his seat, muttering to himself.
“That tells you exactly what you think it tells you. He had to ejaculate with that child.”