Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  Friday came before we knew it. Erin had called the night before to let us know again that we should be in court that morning.

  I slept better than I had the night before I testified, but still not particularly well. I felt pretty confident that Erin and Brandon had enough evidence, but it is strange how our nerves can get us to doubt. When I got out of bed Friday morning, I stuck to my routine and went for a run. Oddly, changing into my courthouse clothes, I felt like I was putting on my uniform. I was in race mode, focused and nervous, telling myself that the result didn’t really matter. Guilty or innocent, I was going to be okay. I had that same inner conversation the rest of the morning: It’s going to be okay. Just believe.

  My parents sensed that I was in that runner race day zone, and they didn’t say much to me. I was too nervous to eat, but sat at the table with them as they drank and ate and asked a few questions about what Erin had told me.

  I repeated what I’d said the night before. Erin said it was always difficult to estimate exactly when a trial and a jury’s deliberations would end. The proceedings were to resume at nine o’clock, and she wanted us there just before then.

  I was nervous, but I was also eager that morning. Not just because I hoped the trial was going to be over, but because I was going to get a chance to see Erin and Brandon in action. They expected to deliver their closing arguments that morning. I felt like I’d been kept in the locker room for so long. Now I was going to be along the sidelines watching the two of them do their work.

  Erin and Brandon met us just inside the courthouse doors. Instead of being escorted to the waiting room, we stood in the hallway and then, just before nine, walked into the courtroom. Just setting foot inside there elevated my heart rate. I felt my body tense. It was strange to sit looking at the judge and her bench and not out at the audience. I remembered how odd it felt for me to sit with the judge over my shoulder. I could vaguely remember what she looked like, but sitting facing her, I was left with the impression that she wasn’t as no-nonsense as she at first seemed; there was something kind about the set of her eyes.

  It was important to me that I sat between Mom and Dad; they were my guardians, after all, the people who had cared and protected me from the time I was born and would still feel that responsibility and act in that regard for as long as they lived. We sat holding hands, my mother brushing her thumb across mine. I felt a bit of the tension easing out of me.

  A few moments in, Mr. Mazek, Arevalo’s attorney, said to Judge Balido, “I would just ask the Court for a directed verdict that the state hasn’t proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt.” My heart leaped and my throat tightened. I didn’t really know what a directed verdict was, but I remembered what Erin and Brandon had said about reasonable doubt. Mr. Mazek was saying that my lawyers hadn’t done their job.

  Judge Balido paused for a moment, then said, “Okay.” I felt tears welling, and my parents gripped my hands tighter, sensing my emotional response. “Your motion for direct verdict is denied. Okay. Anything else?”

  I had to remind myself to breathe again. I felt so relieved, and I expected the opposition’s lawyer to protest somehow. Instead, Brandon said, “Nothing else from the State, Your Honor.”

  As the jurors filed in, I tried to quickly explain to my parents what had happened. My mother rolled her eyes and shook her head while my father nodded and put his hand on my mother’s shoulder to help calm her.

  I turned my attention to the jury. I hoped to read their faces to see if their expressions revealed anything to me. Mostly, they looked distant, detached, not really bored but weary.

  The State had the burden of proof, so they went first. Brandon rose, and I was surprised by how he began. He kept referring to the jurors as “you guys,” and that seemed really informal to me. After a while, I figured out what he was doing. He was telling them he wasn’t “unmindful” of what they’d been through. They’d been forced to sit and listen, and they’d done a great job of that, he pointed out, and he thanked them for their patience, especially for how the Court had “dragged you in and out of here,” and apologized for sometimes being late.

  Then he finally said that he knew that the thirteen of them had a job to do, “to ensure that Arturo Arevalo never has a chance to do this again. There are thirteen people on this earth who can be heroes and saviors for Jessica.” I put myself in the jury’s position and thought I’d like to be able to think of myself as a hero and a savior.

  Brandon led them through the trial and the things he had addressed with them as far back as when the jury was selected. He spent a lot of time talking about DNA and how all that evidence was handled. He also mentioned that some of it was found on that “little, little dress.” I smiled briefly at that remark, thinking of how I’d always been known as Little Monika, but shuddering when I thought about the dress, how much I’d liked it, how hard those men had struggled to get it off of me, and how I never wanted to see it again.

  I felt my concentration drifting in and out, and I wondered if the jurors were having the same trouble. This wasn’t easy to listen to or to follow closely. Brandon did get my attention firmly back in place when he said, “You would expect to find the perpetrator’s DNA on the inside of the dress. Every single genetic marker, folks, 397 million to one.”

  He went on about the DNA on the duct tape and then Judge Balido said, “You’ve used nine minutes.” I don’t know why, but hearing a time announced like that made me feel better about the whole thing, put me back on the track or the course. I wondered how much time Brandon was going to be given, if he had some kind of PR of his own to beat. Was this just the first lap?

  He next talked about the Accomplice Witness Rule and put it in simple terms. “Did what Luis say about the crime that was committed match what Jessica said? Did it? Think about it in your own mind.” I liked how Brandon asked those questions. Even though he said “Did it?” he said it so gently that the jurors couldn’t have thought that he was challenging them, just reinforcing the idea that what the Weak One had said about the Worst One was the same as what I had said. How could he be biased if he was telling the truth, especially since he and I had never spoken after that night, could have never linked up our stories? We both spoke the truth. Brandon also reminded the jury how I’d seen that man’s face because he was the one who wanted to kiss me. How that was the worst thing of all because I couldn’t distance myself from what was being done to my face.

  He also accounted for the difficulty I had in identifying Arevalo in the photos or remembering his heavily tattooed arms: “It was poorly lit, her head was down, she did not want to look, and she told you it was the worst part.” He emphasized that point about it being dark when he talked about Arevalo not being able to identify that the dress I was wearing was full of patterns and bright colors. If the accused and his victim both had trouble seeing, then that proved that it was too dark to see clearly. He appealed to their common sense and ability to reason clearly.

  I thought Brandon did a good job of accounting for the things that I might have had questions about if I was a juror. He wrapped up his time by saying, and I agreed, “The only just verdict in this case is guilty, and we would ask that you do so swiftly.” Amen to both those thoughts.

  I sat back in my chair and sighed, feeling like there was no doubt that the jury had to see things Brandon’s and my way. My mother and father both looked pleased to see me smiling. My father pulled me toward him and kissed the top of my head. I could almost feel him transferring his faith and his confidence to me.

  Mr. Boncek, the second of Arevalo’s lawyers, then took over for Mr. Mazek. I didn’t want to listen to him. I knew he was doing his job, but it was hard to accept that someone was trying to allow that man to go free and to think that others were praying for him to escape punishment for what he had done to me. His wife and his children were in the courtroom, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. I held on to my mother and father’s hands extra hard. I was a bit afraid of how they might rea
ct to what was being said. I’ve always been told that I have a look that could kill, and as we sat there listening to the defense attorney I realized where I’d got it from.

  I wanted Mr. Boncek to look at me when he spoke, when he was defending this man. He did not. He did not look at my mom or dad. I thought for a second that he was too cowardly to look at us, but then I realized that this was a sign of his compassion. He did not want to harm any of us. Then the worst thing in the trial of the Worst One happened.

  Mr. Boncek attacked Luis Zuniga, the man who’d turned on the other two, and let the jurors know that he was likely to get a pretty good deal for himself. The defense attorney stressed that Luis was a drug user, that the day after the rape, though he was unemployed at the time, he’d had enough money to go and purchase drugs. Where did he get the money? Could it have come from selling the watch they’d taken from me? How trustworthy was a rapist and a thief?

  My mouth went dry as I sat there, imagining what it would be like to be a juror and hear those words. Would I be able to trust what someone like Zuniga had said? Mr. Boncek hammered away at that point, asking jurors, of the three men, Arturo Arevalo, Luis Zuniga, and Alfonso Zuniga, which of them wasn’t related by blood? Blood will tell. Blood is thicker than water. Didn’t it make sense that Luis would try to save himself, save his relative, and sacrifice the one man to whom he had no real connection?

  The emotional side of me said no, but the logical side of me said that there was some doubt. Was it reasonable doubt? Had Mr. Boncek planted enough seeds in the minds of the jurors to make it less than clear-cut? How much doubt was enough to make them vote for not guilty? By the time Mr. Boncek finished up his look at the DNA evidence, why none of his client’s was found on my cell phone that everyone said he had been talking on—because the police hadn’t bothered to have it tested—he had opened up the door to many other questions about how the police and the prosecutors had handled my case. By the time his nearly twenty minutes were up, when he finally said, “You’ll see the gaps in the proof, the doubt that exists in this case based on reason and common sense. I’m going to ask you to do the right thing, the just thing. I know it’s difficult because of the nature of the crime, but this isn’t a decision based on sympathy or what the public might think, because you were the only thirteen people that sat in here every day and listened to this evidence, and I’m going to ask you to go back there and find Mr. Arevalo not guilty, because that’s what he is. Thank you.”

  My mind was swimming. How could both lawyers say that based on reason and common sense two completely different conclusions could be arrived at? Did people have good common sense? Could they really reason?

  I thought of my own struggles since the trial, how reason and emotion had been locked in a battle, how at one time I could believe one thing to be true and in another moment I could believe its opposite. After all, I’d always believed that running gave my life meaning, and then at another thought I believed that I should quit doing it because it was completely pointless and meaningless. What did that say about the truth?

  I didn’t have a long time to contemplate that, because next it was Erin’s turn to speak.

  “You have eighteen minutes and thirty seconds,” Judge Balido told her.

  Erin stood and stepped to the front of the courtroom.

  Eighteen minutes and thirty seconds. One thousand, one hundred and ten seconds. I thought about how many laps of the four-hundred-meter track I could do, how much ground I could cover, in that time; I could easily do five thousand meters and more.

  The picture of the shocked girl with the blank gaze flashed on the screen again.

  Erin began by reminding the jurors what their job was, and she then said, “And I would suggest to you that what you need is right there.” She pointed at the photo and then at me. “All you need is her testimony. Through her strength and bravery, she told you what she suffered that night. She came before you, and in great detail she told you what happened. And she said, they did everything to me. And she told you that the man sitting right there, those eyes, that face, he was the worst. And that is all you need.”

  I was thrilled to hear that. I’d thought for so long that the fate of this trial was out of my hands, but Erin told me that it wasn’t. This proved it. I did have some control, some contribution to make, and Erin had said that it was the most important one.

  Erin went on to show that there were other reasons to convict Arevalo beyond what I’d said. I heard the words, but they didn’t carry the same emotional weight, until she mentioned Kristine and her bravery. I thought again of how fortunate I was to have her as a friend, along with all the others in the courtroom and elsewhere who were so supportive of me.

  As Erin went on, I saw better the prosecution team’s strategy. Brandon had been very factual in his arguments. Erin hit on the emotional side, using heavily freighted language. She left the best of the worst for last: “And it has been our burden and our misfortune to have to talk about these awful, nasty, terrible things that happened to that perfectly innocent victim, that has been our misfortune and our burden, but that’s what we have done and we have given you exactly what you need to do your job.”

  She paused and looked back at the photo of me.

  “And I am confident that the thirteen of you—the twelve of you”—she corrected herself to account for the one alternate juror who’d also sat in—“will do just that. And when you return a verdict of guilty, of which you can be proud and never look back, you will tell this man, Arturo Arevalo, you will tell him that there is no place in civilized society for you.”

  As she sat down, she looked at me and smiled confidently. The last word had been spoken. Now it was up to the jury.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Release

  We all settled into the larger of the two waiting rooms. I thought about going into the kids’ room since I’d done so well after Kristine and I had spent our time there before testifying, but I didn’t want to give in to superstition. Besides, I was so nervous that I needed my mother and father and everyone else’s good energy to offset my own doubts.

  I could see my mother struggling with what to say, but my father stepped in.

  “So, I don’t know if I told you this, but I did forty kilometers on my roller trainer last Saturday. My legs felt strong.”

  “How long is the race?” I asked.

  “Birkebeinerrittet, my main goal is 92K, but I’ll do some smaller races leading up to it.”

  My father had recently become interested, borderline obsessed, with cycling. Many of our conversations centered on his training, a subject I really enjoyed. He was a veteran runner and skier, but cycling was relatively new to him.

  The conversations in the room seemed to ebb and flow. I took a lot of comfort in hearing my native language being spoken.

  I tried not to look at the clock and calculate how long some event was taking. Brandon and Erin had prepared me with the knowledge that juries can take a long time to make up their minds and arrive at a verdict or they can sometimes take a very short time—time seldom had anything to do with their decision about guilty or not guilty. When Brandon stuck his head in the room to let us know that the jury was in, I felt my heart skip a beat. I immediately glanced at the clock—twenty-five minutes. More than a minute faster than the quickest 10K a man had ever run and nearly four minutes faster than a woman had covered that distance. It felt like it took us that long and that far to walk down the corridor to the courtroom. My mother and father held my hands. Neither the judge nor the jury was in the room as we entered.

  I had to take two extra deep breaths before I took my seat behind the district attorneys. I had to make sure that I had enough air. We were told to rise just as I’d sat down. I felt my parents’ firm grip. I looked at each in turn, and their expressions said the same thing: we will manage this together no matter what. The judge received the document on which the jury verdict was written, black on white. She looked like she was reading it over and o
ver.

  I started to get worried. Was she reading something that was so shocking she had to take time to compose herself? Judge Balido asked the foreperson of the jury if the paper she had was the verdict she had signed.

  “Yes it is, Your Honor.”

  Judge Balido nodded and then continued, “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of aggravated sexual assault as charged in the indictment.”

  My whole body shuddered. I shut my eyes and whispered a thank-you.

  There was one thing left. Judge Balido then said, “I would like a show of hands of everyone if this was your individual verdict.”

  Twelve hands went up. They had all agreed: guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty.

  I could let go of the air I had held inside me.

  “Thank you very much,” Judge Balido said.

  The judge then announced that the penalty phase, when she would hand down her sentence, would be held on Monday. We’d have the weekend away from this, and as much as I wanted everything to be over with, I was glad that snowbound Anette would be able to be there. She’d be sure to add to our colorful celebration.

  On that day, Monday, December 20, 2010, Justice Day, I wanted to wear colors. Colors with a lot of life. I would dress myself as if I were going to a party. I asked the others to select happy colors, too. That morning, I stood before the mirror. I had put on a pair of black dress pants, a part of what I came to think of as my court uniform, but I had opted for a tomato-red blouse. I stood there tidying up a scarf I wore around my neck—its bright swirls of primary colors adding to my party mentality. Kelly came to pick us up in the morning, and Sidsel and Wenche, my Norwegian friends from the Dallas area, were already in court as usual. Once they slipped out of their overcoats and folded them neatly in their laps, I saw that they had done as I asked—bright block prints, vibrant reds and greens—and it looked like we were going to a Christmas party and not a courthouse.