by Renee Rodin
Madam X’s lawyer had insisted she was a naïve dupe who’d been tricked into transporting drugs unwittingly, a victim. What undermined that impression the most was her own testimony. She had kidded about saving her own money and spending her husband’s to pay for expensive trips back home. No unsophisticated woman could conduct herself the way she did—she’d have to have a certain degree of social confidence in order to joke to the jury.
Right from the beginning almost all of us had entered a spirit of camaraderie except for a very shy woman, Dinny, in her fifties, who seemed to have trouble following the language, and Leon, in his thirties, who was standoffish and sullen. Many of us had tried unsuccessfully to engage him. Dinny was the only person he’d talk to. Today he showed up in a neat shirt. “I like that colour,” I said. He blinked several times before replying in a monotone, “It’s not blue and it’s not black.”
When Frieda the foreperson suggested we go round the table to outline our arguments about whether or not Madam X was guilty, Leon yelped, “I don’t have to share my mind with you people.” The rest of us gulped. We’d all seen 12 Angry Men, with the lone juror who was at odds with the rest and who ultimately persuaded the other eleven to see his point of view. We needed to hear Leon out. It took a lot of finessing but he was finally willing to speak. Then he didn’t shut up.
For an hour he spouted his convoluted ideas, first doubting the prosecution but then arguing against the defence. No more halting language, no more blinking, on and on he went relentlessly. After giving him a lot of latitude our nerves began to fray. If others argued with him he’d be quiet for moment as if to consider what they were saying. If I simply made a comment he’d shout, “Stop yelling at me.”
When I asked him what he meant by “overwhelming evidence,” he bellowed, “I’m not the one on trial here.” I finally bellowed back: “I’m not your mother—lose your bloody hostility!” The entire room froze except for Dinny who turned to me with a big grin and said: “Good for you, you tell him.” Probably figuring he’d lost his only ally, Leon threatened, “I’m going to tell the judge you’re all coercing me.” We could have been fined, disgraced, a mistrial declared. Frieda’s shout, “That’s not fair,” shut him up momentarily. But we knew we had a ticking time bomb on our hands.
We broke for dinner at a nearby high-end restaurant, with the court footing the bill, and sat in two long rows like kids at a family dinner, with Sherriff Todd and an armed policeman seated at the adult table. It was tense. After our meal we were shepherded along a circuitous route to a mid-range hotel a few blocks away. We were all seen to our individual rooms with the telephones disconnected. The police were going to stay up all night playing cards in an open area at the end of the hallway. Guarding us.
Ten million bucks worth of drugs is nothing to sneeze at, but I wasn’t worried about some enraged drug dealer coming after us, I was worried about Leon coming after me. All night I tossed and turned, stymied about what to do. You hear about juries that had been sequestered for weeks, even months. Our group wouldn’t last another day, I was sure.
At breakfast the next morning, none of us had much appetite for either food or conversation. I dreaded the rancour that was sure to follow. Leon and I sat as far apart as possible from each other. It was unnerving that a total stranger could dislike me so much. When we arrived back in the break room I said, in dulcet tones, “I’m sorry, Leon, I lost my cool yesterday. I’ve changed my mind, I agree with you. Madam X is innocent.”
Ten pairs of eyes fixed on me. Frieda mustered up all her authority and boomed, “You can’t just change your mind without giving us a reason.” I could feel the draft from Leon’s rapidly flapping eyelids. Trying to block me out. A second later he said, “I’ve thought about it, I’ve changed my mind. I think she’s guilty.” I shot back, “I’ve changed my mind too. I think she’s guilty.” Frieda rushed out to notify Sheriff Todd that we’d reached a unanimous decision.
In my sleepless night I’d come to the conclusion that Leon had such an antipathy towards me that the only side he’d be on was the side I wasn’t on. As unorthodox as my strategy had been, it had worked. Eleven of us sincerely believed in our verdict. Leon was incapable of arriving at a clear decision. We would have been log-jammed for days, and in the end nothing would have changed. I just hoped the other jurors didn’t see me as a nutbar, and understood what I’d done.
In the courtroom the atmosphere was charged. We were cave stick figures moving in slow motion, re-enacting the primordial ritual of dealing with transgression. My stomach was roiling.
The foreperson was asked to announce our verdict. She stood up and in a loud, clear voice said, “Not guilty.” None of us corrected her. Had she been feeling simpatico all along because the accused came from her own culture? And was also a mother? Frieda had told us she had just lost her own mother. Sending Madam X to jail would mean depriving another daughter of a mother. All this went racing through my mind before Frieda said, “I mean ‘guilty.’”
Twelve wiped-out people, one of whom couldn’t wait to feed her baby straight from her breast, staggered back to our break room to collect our belongings and take off. But Sherriff Todd marched in right after us and said, “You can’t leave, the judge wants to talk to you.” “Damn,” I thought, “Leon had somehow managed to tell the judge we’d done him wrong, he’d been coerced.”
All the judge really wanted from us was our approval. He asked if we’d found his twenty-three pages of instructions before the trial and his twenty-three pages of instruction after the trial helpful. None of us had strong feelings about him one way or another, but we respected him for not making himself too big a part of the story and for acknowledging that being on a jury was a complicated and difficult process.
The factor that had concerned us the most throughout our discussions was what the sentence would be if we found Madam X guilty. We’d asked Sherriff Todd to find out for us but he couldn’t. Now, though it was too late, we could ask the judge ourselves.
He said, “I have no idea, it all depends on what her lawyer presents to me.” Madam X’s lawyer had probably just gone through the motions at the trial, it was all a game, he knew we would find her guilty. His real job was to get her off with as light a sentence as possible.
None of us was convinced sending her to jail would act as a deterrent to others. Instead it would just end up costing taxpayers money. And maybe even teach her to be a better drug mule after she got out. But our hands were tied. The best approach would have been a sentencing circle. Once the judge officially dismissed us we all scurried out of the building. It felt as if I’d been away for weeks rather than just one night. I was so relieved to be free, though I had helped do the opposite for another woman, a mother yet. The first thing I did when I came home was to soak in a bath as hot as I could bear.
I wanted to go to her sentencing, scheduled for the next month, but none of the other jurors had been up for it and I was scared to go alone. She might have thought I was gloating.
I called the courthouse after the hearing and when I was told Madam X got ten years I felt sick. It was the same number of years as her daughter’s age. Soon she might be vulnerable to drugs herself. We’d all been aware of her presence. Was this symmetry deliberate on the judge’s part, his way of delivering justice?
Much as I tried to coax the information out of the court worker on the phone she would not tell me where Madam X was being incarcerated.
The Neighbourhood
Although my own energy is my biggest concern and I’m awful at meetings (I get impatient if people don’t get to their point quickly and I don’t like waiting for my turn to talk), I joined the environmental protection group some friends recently started on our street.
The lawn signs we made, “Vote to Control Climate Change” soon sprang up all over the area and beyond. Because we made it clear we’re strictly non-partisan we were viewed as a critical mass of swing-voters and within months every major political party began to chase after
us hoping we’d align ourselves with them. Our riding is considered progressive, though it certainly has its share of reactionaries, notably our Member of British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly, Gordon Campbell, who also happened to be the Premier of the province. He’d been in power for years, though I never heard anyone admit they voted for him.
From media accounts he always seemed to be brainstorming with his cohorts or hosting visiting dignitaries, so we were surprised at how quickly he accepted our invitation, though we were his constituents, to join us at a neighbour’s house. It was at the same time his government was promoting yet another of their highly polluting but highly-profitable-to-corporations energy schemes. This one involved coal, the wave of the past.
Our group’s membership had grown by leaps and bounds, but we accepted his office’s stipulation that only fifteen of us be at the meeting and decided that we’d hear him out as our guest. I didn’t mention to the others that he and I’d already had an encounter a while back. It was just after he’d cut funds to health, education, housing, women’s shelters and the arts. Food banks were becoming a growth industry.
When Campbell caught sight of me at the meeting, there was a flash of recognition, but he couldn’t quite place me. I wanted to give him another piece of my mind. He’d used a huge surplus budget from slashing social programs to bankroll the Olympics and was now slashing even more. But I felt an obligation to our group to remain non-confrontational so I nodded politely at him and he nodded back.
We’d discussed what to do if he brought along a photographer and wanted to use his meeting with us for public relations, but he was accompanied only by a young, awkward aide, as if this were a training session for her. He was all dolled up in a pinstripe suit, maybe he was going somewhere else afterwards or had simply misconstrued who we were though we’d been vetted in advance. Maybe on paper it seemed likely we’d dress formally, but we were in casual clothing and sandals, it was midsummer.
To be hospitable we’d chipped in on cheeses, canapés and other finger foods as well as some good wine, but Campbell headed straight for the bottled water. He’d been in big trouble not long before for drunken driving while on vacation in Hawaii. His mug shot with a foolish grin on his plastered face had appeared in newspapers all over the world.
We sat down in a circle to begin talking, his aide was on one side of him and the only empty chair in the room was on his other side. He said, “No one wants to sit near me?”“It’s because we all want to see you,” I replied. We smiled at each other. He was the consummate politician, making eye contact with whomever he was speaking to, addressing us each personally—we were wearing name tags—peppering his speech with folksy talk such as, “I don’t want to bullshit you.”
From the technical dialogue that ensued, which I stayed out of because I had nothing to contribute, he had done his homework. He also looked more connected than when we’d bumped into each other before—back then his eyes had been empty. They’d since filled in a bit—he was supposedly on the wagon.
Campbell had come up the corporate ladder to first be mayor of our city for several terms. His rigid pro-development stance had helped lay the groundwork for rapidly escalating real estate prices, which is why Vancouver is now called “Vanhattan” and affordable housing is almost non-existent. Under his regime for the past several years, our province had the lowest minimum wage and the highest child poverty rates in the country.
The economists in our group are very smart and they were explaining to Campbell why there’s a lot of money to be made by going green. You could see he hadn’t anticipated their level of thought, and when he realized that we wouldn’t be satisfied with his only concrete suggestion, that we create community gardens, he changed tactics.
In confidential tones he said he was totally on board with us. But that he wanted to be re-elected, and if he showed how pro-environment he really was, he’d be “committing political suicide.” He urged us to “get involved in the public process,” write letters to his party, send petitions, because “they’ll listen if it comes from the ground up.”
Then, as if the devil made him do it, he suddenly boasted, “I just ignored a petition of 20,000 signatures asking me to lower the gas tax.” I took several deep breaths before asking, “Why?” It began to dawn on him what he’d said, and he mumbled something about the petition having been started at a radio station. I asked, “Does your respect for the public process depend on where it comes from?”
Now he was seriously fidgeting, his eyes scanning for the nearest exit and I was on the verge of taking a verbal lunge at him. The chairperson we’d designated for the meeting seized control and steered the conversation off in another direction while I concentrated on breathing.
I’d had a conversation with Noah just before coming to the meeting. Campbell stayed the two hours he’d scheduled for us and shook each of our hands warmly to say goodbye. When he, rather hesitatingly, came over to me, I said, “I promised my son I’d say two words to you. Campbell has quite a pallid complexion but whatever colour he does have drained from his face. Was he thinking, “Fuck you,” or “drop dead?” I said “solar power.” He exhaled and left.
Many of us have lived on our block for decades and we all try to look out for one another. Because we have a block watch, once a year the city gives us a bit of money to have a party and lets us put up road barriers to stop cars—that’s my favourite part of the day. Everyone brings food and we play with the kids. Throwing water-filled balloons to each other until they burst is always the most popular activity. A couple of years ago my ninety-year-old friend next door rode down the block to show us her snazzy new bike.
Last year an old bike got swiped from outside one of our houses and within minutes our telephone tree lit up and everybody was informed. Weeks later when a dozen shots rang out at the corner and several of us watched as the gunman jumped into the car he’d parked on our block no one lifted a phone. It was around midnight and we all thought it was too late to pass on such disturbing news.
The evening we had spent with Campbell, a neighbour, out for a stroll, noticed two strangers sitting in an SUV outside the house where our meeting was being held. They looked suspicious, as if they were casing the joint, so he called the police. The men in the vehicle turned out to be Campbell’s bodyguards.
Yew and Me
When I first moved into my house, in Kitsilano, my elderly neighbour on the left shrieked at my kids, who were very young at the time, for going into her yard to retrieve their ball. She was an obsessive gardener. I let the grass grow tall. After the cantankerous woman died a decade later I dug up my grass and grew vegetables in the front, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchinis in the summer, broccoli, Swiss chard and garlic* in the fall. All was peaceful for many years.
When my elderly neighbour on the right died, a couple I’d seen at a rally to protect the environment bought the property. They were planning major renovations and needed a letter from me to the city agreeing to their non-conforming design. For the following year my head felt as if I were constantly being staple-gunned. But I comforted myself with the thought that at least the racket was on behalf of a family and not impersonal developers.
One day, with nary a word of discussion, the new owners entered my yard and hacked my beloved old yew tree in half. Whoosh went a lacy curtain thirty feet high and fifteen feet wide. Where once was magnificent natural beauty there was now an ugly gash in the landscape exposing the construction site next door. When I confronted the tree-attackers they defended themselves by saying, “We didn’t think you’d care about privacy and we don’t like the look of branches hanging over things.” NIMBYs: they liked trees, but Not In My Back Yard.
I shouted “imperialists” at them. Just like corporations, they’d felt entitled to do the irredeemable. We had lots of words after that, and eventually they bought me a new tree. It was lovely and the largest I could find, though small in relation to the space it now occupied. But I’m hoping as the tree grows so will our rela
tionship.
I’ve lived in Kitsilano since the 1960s. It’s where the Squamish Nation lived for thousands of years before they were brutally displaced by British settlers at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1970s, when the developers saw what a nice job the artists and hippies had done with the area, they swooped in and the residents who’d improved the neighbourhood got pushed out by developments and bizarre rents.
Zoning laws have kept the buildings low and property prices high with taxes to match. The air is clean, the landscape lush. I live in a craftsman-style house built in 1910. Renting out space in it is the price I pay to be able to stay. I value what the poet, Robin Blaser, who lived around the corner, referred to as the polis, the community within the city, the interactions of the people.
Everything I need is within walking distance—decent food stores and the public library, the oldest branch in the province, with its self-appointed security guard reporting into her calculator. A couple of times a week I’ll drop by the thrift store on Broadway. The same group of us has been going there for several years—we’re a society of strangers. We never exchange names, only opinions on the merchandise, and whether what we try on looks good or not.
Every day, Chris of the long white beard carefully sets up a display along the chain link fence at the corner of 4th and MacDonald. He gives away furniture, books, houseware, electronics and clothing. And tells me, “I’m trying to topple the economy.”
I used to run a free store in my basement where “customers” donated or took things, depending on what they had or needed. No money ever changed hands. Free stores were common. I still have the oak printer’s cabinet, full of lead type, which I got from the Divine Light Mission Free Sale.
The cabinet has twelve drawers each divided into twenty-six small cubicles, one for each letter of the alphabet. Over the years most of the type has disappeared, and I’ve invited friends to fill a drawer with whatever they wanted. Jam has filled hers with rocks and minerals.