Joe Cinque's Consolation
Page 22
The world was a network of threads connecting me to it. I was invited, for example, to a formal lunch in Sydney. The delightful man seated on my left was a judge. He asked me what I was working on. I told him. It turned out he had sat on a solicitors’ admissions board before which one of the law students who had given evidence in the Singh and Rao trials had appeared.
‘Ah!’ I said naïvely. ‘Would that be – ?’
He cut me off. ‘We’d better change the subject.’
‘Oh – I’m sorry. That was indiscreet.’
He smiled and nodded. The conversation turned to other things. A lawyer’s wife seated on my other side had overheard our exchange. ‘He has to be careful,’ she murmured to me, ‘not to say anything that might compromise the witness’s rehabilitation.’
‘Of course,’ I said; but I had to turn my face away, to conceal the bolt of blind rage that shot through me.
An email newsletter came to me from a refugee support group in Sydney. It bore the unusual name of one of the guests at the Monday night dinner party at Antill Street – the dinner after which ‘nothing’ was found to have happened. I called him at once. When I stated my name and business, he got off the line with a haste I am tempted to describe as unseemly, and never replied to any further communications.
In a second-hand bookshop, down the Victorian coast at Lorne, I came across a book written by Justice Crispin himself, and published in 1988 when he was plain Ken Crispin, still at the bar. It wasn’t about criminal justice. It was a Christian treatise on divorce. But I snatched it off the shelf. I was struck by its straightforward practical good sense. In a chapter entitled ‘Law and Morality’, he marvelled at the faith many lay people have in ‘the ability of judges and magistrates to dispense justice’. To a lawyer, he said, such a faith is ‘bewilderingly naïve’. A court of law is not necessarily a court of justice. ‘A judge is merely a fallible human being like the rest of us. He has only the demeanour of the witnesses and the plausibility or otherwise of their evidence to assist him in determining who is telling the truth.’ And I could not help noticing the relative unguardedness of his definition of duty of care: ‘a person [has] a duty of care toward any other person whom he might reasonably expect to be affected by his actions.’
In April 2000, Maria Cinque called me. Guiltily I tensed myself for a question about the still non-existent book. But she spoke in a light voice, one I hadn’t heard before – younger and fresher, less burdened. She told me that the week before Easter she and her husband had gone to Canberra to get the criminal injuries compensation that was due to them. They had received more than $88,000 – the maximum allowable being $100,000. They had already been awarded money to cover the cost of Joe’s funeral.
But what she really wanted me to know was that she had been able to speak with Justice Crispin.
‘In his chambers?’ I asked, surprised.
‘No – in the court. It was a hearing. We made an application. They said, “Crispin doesn’t want to talk to you – we’ll have to get another judge.” But in the end it was Crispin. And they told us, “You can’t say this – you can’t say that.” Nino got angry. He said, “If they tell me what I can say and what I can’t say, what’s the point? I’m not going.” So I went in on my own. I wanted to tell Crispin everything he did that was wrong.
‘I had to swear on a Bible. I told the barrister what I wanted to say to the judge, and then the barrister asked me questions. I had to be careful not to say “You did this, you did that.” I had to say “The court this” and “The court that”.
‘I told him we couldn’t accept the judgement and we never would. I said, “How can anyone think she try to save him, when she was on the phone for twenty minutes and she wouldn’t give the address?” I wasn’t allowed to name anyone. I had to say “The Italian from Griffith”. I said, “He study law – maybe one day he’s going to be a judge, like you.” I talk about the psychiatrists – I apologise before I say this but I said, “These two bullshit artists –”
‘I told him everything that happened to our family. I said, “How am I supposed, your Honour, to go on?”
‘He nods his head. He says, “Yes, it’s a terrible tragedy. But we have to go on. I pray you will be able to remember the good times.” He was upset. He told us he lost a child, too, an infant child, I think. I didn’t tell him that it’s different, not the same as when your son is murdered – I didn’t tell him that.
‘We were there about half an hour. The money was nothing. The most important thing for me was to talk to him. I told him what I wanted to tell him. I got it off my chest.’
She asked after my family. Thinking that we were linked only by her sorrows, I gave a brief formal answer, but she pressed me: she really wanted to know how things were for me. I told her that my daughter was about to have a baby. Warmth flowered in her voice. I told her how crazed our mother was, how lost in her dementia. I told her that I couldn’t think or write. She was quietly concerned. Later, when my grand-daughter was born and my mother died at last, Maria sent me cards inscribed with the good wishes of her whole family: ‘Maria, Nino, Anthony and
Every morning for the next two years, I sat down to read the papers with the scissors in my hand. Nothing interested me but murder, trial, punishment. I hunted out accounts of psychiatric expert evidence. I compared different judges’ styles of sentencing, trying to perceive the reasoning behind them, to make them scan. I read trashy tabloids that railed against the leniency of courts, screamed for harsher sentences, trumpeted about what it cost the taxpayer to keep murderers in custody. I collected horrors, pointlessly, fanatically, in a sort of secret grief. It was a long, grinding, obstinately interior process that had nothing to do with intelligence. My files bulged with cuttings that did not enlighten me.
I buttonholed lawyers in cafes and cocktail bars. I grabbed the sleeves of criminologists at literary festivals. I sat with judges at book launches and in their chambers, and saw the pack ice form on their faces as I babbled out my inarticulate questions. I forked out for psychoanalytic conferences and came home none the wiser.
One day I saw a notice on a lamp-post advertising a Victims of Crime rally on the steps of Parliament House. I got on my bike and rode down there.
The sun shone on a loose crowd that was forming at the top of Bourke Street. Many of the demonstrators had attached pictures of their murdered loved ones to their T-shirts. Some of these photos were miniatures fitted into the hearts of frilled rosettes. Others, life-size, had been screen-printed right on to the cotton garments. On their backs people wore the slogan MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A common poster read LET THE VICTIM HAVE THE LAST WORD IN THE SENTENCE.
I had never seen gathered in one place so many faces full of brute suffering. Yet even this group of tormented people was faction-riven. Their mode of argument was, for the most part, naked pain and rage. People Against Lenient Sentencing urged the return of the death penalty. The Homicide Victims’ Support Group demanded the introduction of minimum sentences. Other groups saw their role as offering help and comfort to the unceasing flow of new wounded ones who staggered out of the courts. ‘The laws are really there to protect the criminal,’ declared a grey-haired man. ‘We are the ones serving the life sentence.’
A kindly-faced middle-aged woman took the microphone and said in the plain, modest accents of a housewife, ‘I’m not a public speaker. I’m a mother. There are mothers here who want their children mentioned but they can’t get up and speak. We all have broken hearts. Our daughter was murdered – and her unborn baby – and he got three years. I think they’re worth more –’ Her voice cracked and she broke into sobs. Another woman, her face working, stepped up beside the speaker and gripped her by the shoulders until she had composed herself. ‘There are two ways you can react,’ the speak
er went on, wiping her eyes with a hanky. ‘You can whine with self-pity, or you can help other victims.’ Then she unfolded a sheet of paper and slowly read aloud from it a list of murdered women. For a moment the power of her simple rhetorical gesture – the naming of the dead – hushed the restless crowd.
The longer, more ambitious speeches consisted largely of blunt assertions. Victims are the battlers of our society. Judges – these softies sittin’ on the bench – don’t seem to be able to get it right. Some of them don’t bother to put in tax returns, and get away with it. Lawyers make too much money. Unless you are a member of the legal profession you cannot get justice. The money now being spent on frivolous appeals should be put towards building more prisons. Plea bargaining must be done away with. Victims are second-class citizens, a silent majority, fobbed off as ratbags and rednecks, sick and tired of these politicians, these judges, these cibble livertarians. And worst of all, it’s the victims themselves, as tax-paying citizens, who foot the bill for the criminals’ appeals.
A tall, rangy man with a weatherbeaten face, wearing a purple suit, cuban-heeled boots and an Akubra, seized the microphone in his work-hardened hand and launched into a speech of rough, skin-prickling eloquence. He shouted out a list of recent horrible murders and the ‘pathetic sentences’ their perpetrators had received. ‘The blood and suffering of their victims would be sufficient to paint Melbourne in shame!’ he cried. ‘Bloody great stuff, isn’t it! Did you know you can get ten years for smuggling a bloody galah outa this country?’
Whenever he paused for breath, hoarse male voices would rise from the back of the crowd in a chorus of protest against gun control. A red-faced old woman near me kept croaking, ‘Bring back hangin’!’
Sprinkled through the crowd were certain anguished people, most of them women, who had come unaccompanied to the rally. They didn’t seem to know anyone: they did not take part in the forming and melting of small groups whose members greeted each other with tears or smiling hugs. They stood singly in silent dignity. Their haunted faces seemed to show that they were being flayed again by the clumsy verbalising going on around them, and yet they still sought the company of fellow-sufferers. Throughout the whole event a young man and woman stood quietly side by side, high on the grey stone steps of the Parliament. They looked like brother and sister. Each of them held a burning candle, and between them they displayed a large colour photograph of a handsome young man. No one spoke to them. They were abstracted from the moment, facing out over Bourke Street.
When the rally broke up I approached several of the speakers and asked for copies of their addresses. The request puzzled them. They glanced down at the crushed sheets in their hands and looked at me helplessly. One, with a shaven head and thick moustache, asked warily, ‘You’re not from Fitzroy Legal Aid or anything, are you?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to write a book about a murder.’ The man in the Akubra, whose face close up was sun-creased, sparkly-eyed and intensely likeable, shook my hand warmly and said, ‘Thanks for takin’ an interest.’
As I was wheeling my bike back towards the road, I noticed a woman of my mother’s age in a cotton sun hat, sitting alone, chin in hand, in a motorised wheelchair that she had parked against one of the huge pillars of Parliament House. I stopped beside her and said, ‘Do you think it’ll do any good?’ She didn’t turn her head. I thought she scorned to reply. I waited. Then she took her hand away from her mouth and said, ‘No, dear, I don’t. Nothing will do any good.’
She reached forward into the basket of her chair, and from under a crocheted shawl drew out a dull gilt frame. She turned and held it out to me. It contained a hand-tinted studio photo from the 1940s. A young man smiled broadly, showing large gappy teeth. His head was tilted protectively towards that of a soft-lipped, sweet-faced girl with permed hair.
‘In a few days,’ said the old woman, ‘at eleven o’clock, it’ll be fifty-six years since he was killed. My brother.’
‘What happened?’
She told the story in a low, sardonic voice. ‘He was waiting to be demobbed from the Navy. He’d been in Japan. He went down to the wharf to see a big troopship leave. A woman – someone he’d met in the city – ran out of the crowd. She called out “Watch this!” and put both her hands right in the middle of his back. Into the water he went. The ship was already moving, the propellors were – anyway, they didn’t find him for a week.’ She watched my reaction with the wry expression I had seen on Maria Cinque’s face. ‘No charges were ever laid. And you know – one of our neighbours had the temerity to say to my mother and me, “You’ve changed, since Brian died.” ’
I read miserably, wildly, at random. I bought personal memoirs by undistinguished, wounded people whose children had been murdered and who, like Maria Cinque, were asking the universe, ‘How am I supposed to go on?’ I ploughed through books on depression and mental illness and suicide. For the first time, awestruck and angry, I read Crime and Punishment. I read true crime by writers who lacked the skill to portray decency, whose talent could not prevail against the leaping dark energy of badness and rage. I devoured everything I could find by Gitta Sereny. I read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I wept over the quiet reasoning of those who maintained that the purpose of criminal proceedings is not ‘to still the desire for revenge in the victims’ hearts’, but ‘to repair the rent in the social fabric’. I bowed before Primo Levi who had ‘deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness’ rather than ‘the lamenting tones of the victim’ or ‘the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge’.
I respected Levi’s moral dignity, his restraint; but I was unable to emulate him. Where does this torment go, what can be done with it, the ‘desire for revenge in the victims’ hearts’ that a four-year sentence and an acquittal could not still? Was the law the wrong place to look for an answer to this question? Would the Cinques have to carry the entire load, now, by themselves? I did not believe that the rent in the social fabric made by their son’s murder had been repaired. I saw that there was no one to console them. I longed to write a lament for Joe Cinque. But what would be the use of one more victim story? What fresh understanding could it bring?
In 2001 I bypassed Anu Singh’s parents and wrote to her direct at Emu Plains Correctional Centre. I drew a long bow: I told her I wanted to discuss with her ‘the intersection of psychiatry and ethics, how they cross at points which continue to shift, and how the person in the street is often resistant to psychiatric concepts, preferring to think and speak in unmodulated terms of right and wrong.’ A few months later, in July, I was surprised to receive a reply: a typed letter in an equally formal style, over a large, dashing signature. After initial doubts, she wrote, she had decided she would be interested to meet me. Her own personal experience, and what she had discovered in gaol, confirmed that ideas of rationality and of right and wrong did not necessarily apply to people, specially women, who had been suffering from an emotional/psychological disorder at the time they committed their offences. The thesis she was researching for her Masters in criminology would focus on precisely these matters. She hoped to be granted her parole in October, however, and would prefer to wait till after that for our conversation.
At first I was exhilarated by her reply. It shot a beam of light into the philosophical murk where I was struggling. A chance to balance the story! A hope for insight into its deepest causes! But experience had taught me that people in Anu Singh’s position vis-à-vis a writer are apt to change their minds. So I considered several answers. At first I wrote grandly about ‘psychological and philosophical questions of responsibility, justice, punishment, atonement, forgiveness and redemption’. Then I told her that Joe Cinque’s parents had spoken to me at length on several occasions. Then I assured her that my aim was not to cause her further distress. But in the end I scribbled a couple of sentences, thanking her for her reply and saying I would be happy to wait till after her parole hearing.
On the last weekend of October 2001, the clocks were ch
anged over to daylight saving. It was exactly four years since Joe Cinque had been killed. Two days later I called Maria.
‘She’s out,’ she said drily. ‘I went to the parole hearing. I paid a barrister. He said, “There’s nothing you can do. It’s gonna be a waste of time.” But I didn’t care. I went.
‘It was at four-thirty in the afternoon. It was a different judge – older. He was understanding. There were women and men on the board. I wrote down what I wanted to say – what happened to our family, what happened to Anthony because of this. They listened. They retired, then they called us back in. They said they couldn’t do anything – she did everything right in gaol.
‘I challenge a lot. The barrister got cross with me. I interrupt the judge. I didn’t wait for him to finish talking. I say, “I come to this country when I was seventeen. When I became an Australian I swear allegiance to the Queen, and to Australian law. But now I despise the law. If I don’t do bad things from now on, it won’t be because of the law. It’s because of my conscience.”
‘I say to them, “Four years for killing my son? What sort of punishment is that?” They say, “She has to report to the police several times a week.” I say, “That’s not so hard. My son is dead. My son die when he’s twenty-six. She’s twenty-nine. She’s gonna have a life.” They say, “Yes, but what sort of a life she gonna have?” I say, “Doesn’t matter – she’s gonna have a life.” They say, “It’s the law.” I say, “Well the law is wrong.” I thought, “What can they do to me? They can’t do nothing to me – they can’t put me in gaol.” ’