JURY TRIALS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN POORLY WRITTEN stage plays. You’ve got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them.
On his most recent visit, Oliver bequeathed to me a clean copy of my trial transcript—all twelve volumes, as if I would read through them and inexplicably be able to tell him about all the testimony that never came in and show him all the evidence that was deemed inadmissible by Herr Direktor. He seemed to need some sort of tangible reason for involvement that he could take home to his girlfriend or mother and show purpose of trade. After all these months, he still didn’t realize that my memory has become as foggy as an old shadow. As watered down as community theater.
For a childhood spent in the wings of the theater watching my mother traipse across stage to stage, singing that she could do everything better than me, I would say my trial was one of the few comforting episodes of this entire ordeal. Even if I was declared guilty upon arrest, invariably my life was serene sitting on stage right with the director all in black and the stagehands adorned in blue and gold. The audience was, well, the audience—comprised of film crews and journalists, and family, friends, and professional partners of Sarah and Marlene Dixon. The only problem, of course, the only hiccup of human nature in the entire production, rested with the jury: twelve individuals and an alternate selected by the authors of opposing narratives all generating theatrics to get someone to see the story their way. It’s the same each time, and yet trial after trial produces the same predicament.
Without fault and without fail in nearly every trial, the judge directs the jury to disregard a statement just accidentally uttered by one of the witnesses. And when they pollute the simple cognition of twelve sedentary jurors, the judge presumes that they will simply ignore it.
“I will instruct you now to disregard the witness’s last statement,” the judge says. Ad nauseam. Ad infinitum. Ad … well, you get what I’m saying, at least one time too many per trial.
How a system that delights with impeccable and acerbic precision can employ such a gelatinous technique astounds me, even today. Please disregard what I said when I mentioned my mother dropped me as a baby. Or erase from the appellate record of your cerebral cortex that once upon a time I lied to Oliver Stansted. Or Marlene Dixon. Or that I cried myself to sleep for three years straight after Persephone Riga moved away. Or that I used to fuck the guy down at Lorenzo’s for a slice of free pizza every other Tuesday. They have nothing to do with what happened on January 1, 2003.
I instruct you to disregard the witness’s statement.
The poetry of the line is almost comical. Nowhere else in life can a person of power instruct another to ignore a statement or observation and ensure its pragmatic compliance. Observation is inherently pliable. In life, we witness movement and emotion and sensation dissimilarly from everyone else. Once spoken, words will never be ignored, no matter how many judges instruct us to do so, no matter how many appellate courts confirm this to be true. People will never forget. Memory simply doesn’t work that way.
Madison McCall told me later on (during my first appeal) that the law simply presumes that the jury complies with this judicial order. I guess we on the Row aren’t the only bobble heads in the chorus of players after all.
I can’t remember exactly how many times my judge actually instructed my jury to ignore statements made by unwilling witnesses, but it had to be well into the double digits. That many serendipitous errors have to be planned. Or at least cause for a do-over. At the parade of pretrial motions—the government’s most expensive dress rehearsal—Madison McCall tried unsuccessfully to throw out my interrogation, but only after an intestinal road of paperwork throwing around words like Miranda and police misconduct. Even with the interrogation transcript admissible, I would not testify to rebut it, or repeat the offense in phase two, the segment that would bring in the death sentence.