The Crown’s closing address was on Thursday morning, and I am sorry to say I have mislaid it. “Mislaid” is a euphemism. What happened was that when the prosecutor rose to address the jury, he pointedly spoke of Huey not as “the accused” or “Mr Dunstan”, but “this youth”. I was incensed. From then on I subliminally tuned out. A sort of blankness descended. It was remiss of me. But it is no different (perhaps only a sightless person can understand) to the blankness that descended on me once when my daughter Sarah invited me out to dinner on my birthday, and the waiter would not address me. Everything was said to Sarah and I found myself reduced to a cipher, meekly passing on my requests for service through her. For the entire meal I became strangely remote, and it was like that now in the courtroom. I was listless and utterly careless of what the prosecutor was saying to the jury. Even more surprising, when it was the turn of the defence and Lawrence rose to address the jury after lunch, I found myself still careless of my inability to concentrate. I was so indifferent—I knew the arguments so well—that I almost missed the moment he turned the tables on the prosecutor. Lawrence was talking about the street lamp.
“The Crown [Lawrence said] has made much of what it calls my client’s ‘cover-up’. It claims in support of its contention that the crime was planned, that Mr Dunstan deliberately broke the lamp outside the house to hide his tracks. But where is the evidence? The police have told us that they combed the house and surrounds thoroughly, with painstaking attention to the smallest detail. Can you imagine, if the lamp was indeed broken, that they would not have noticed? Yet they have presented no evidence to show it was broken.”
Yes, yes, I thought. Admiring the surgically-planted lie that was not a lie and could not be rebutted (he knew, Lawrence told me later, the police had overlooked it). Quite forgetting that a jury might not see it that way.
I sat through both closing addresses in a kind of stupor and shall not reproduce them here. Lawrence’s opening, I have to say, made me wonder. He began brightly, saying: “Who is on trial here?” But then without warning he suddenly leaped two and a half thousand years back in history to the trial of Orestes in 458 BC. Orestes is the chap who deliberately murdered his mother in revenge for his mother having murdered his father. I know why Lawrence wanted to do this. The Oresteia of Aeschylus is the oldest courtroom drama in human history. Lawrence wanted to draw the parallel between Huey and Orestes who was acquitted not because he was innocent, but because he was not blameworthy. I thought Lawrence was taking a big risk, going over the jury’s head like this. But perhaps he wanted to impress the judge. Who knows?
I went to bed that night tel ing myself over and over, tomorrow the judge will sum up. Tomorrow the judge will sum up. Whose side will he take? It is a myth that judges are impartial. Take Lord Denning’s treatment of the high-class pimp Stephen Ward at the time of his inquiry into the Profumo case in England; or Denning’s departure from the bench due to his racist remarks about juries. As the law professor and poet Christopher Silk, my near-contemporary, has written, most judges carry some emotive baggage when they are elevated to the High Court.
I tried to visualise Huey in his cell and instead found myself remembering a medieval woodcut I had once seen illustrating what a condemned man on the eve of his execution was given for supper: crushed beetles and spiders’ entrails. Clearly my emotions were running away with my reason. But there had to be, I kept telling myself, more to this trial than a mere verdict. As I thought this, there flashed into my mind the words of the priest in Kafka’s novel, The Trial:
“You are misinterpreting the facts of the case. The verdict is not so suddenly arrived at, the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict.”
Well I’ll be damned, I thought, and immediately fell into a deep sleep. I awoke on Friday morning feeling bright as a button.
“Your task on the surface is very simple,” I heard the judge say, after he had been summing-up to the jury for the best part of an hour. “You have to decide if the young man before you is guilty of murder, as the Crown claims, or, as the defence maintains, of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The one thing you cannot do,” the judge said almost casually, “even if you accept that he was no longer in control of his actions, is to declare the accused innocent of manslaughter. That is not allowed in law.”
Even if—? It was so casual as to be blatant, as if he wanted to remove at a stroke our defence of traumatic stress disorder.
“On any normal balance sheet,” he went on, “you would have to find the accused guilty of murder. He has deliberately killed a man…”
I was still finding it difficult to read the judge. His impartiality until then had been patent. Except once, when he absently referred to Huey by his first name, the judge had barely uttered a word or intruded during the entire proceedings. This was peculiar. In my eighty-odd years, I have formed a view of criminal judges which is possibly unfair but nonetheless true, and that is that they seem to consider the court of state where they sit as their private chamber. I remember a judge who when trying a man who had surprised an intruder—the accused had bailed up the man and impaled him on a pitchfork—took over the role of prosecutor and more or less conducted the Crown’s case from the bench. Yet this judge of ours was not a bit overbearing. He was the opposite.
There is the law and—to state the obvious—there is justice. They are not the same. Good law doesn’t guarantee justice; equally, good justice may result from bad law. The two are often at odds. But what happens if the law and justice are both against you—if you are imperilled by both? This is what happened at Huey’s first trial. Both the law, as misinterpreted or mis-defined by the judge, and the judge also, were against the defence. Now, a second time round, the defence was still hamstrung. Lawrence’s case had opened up an area not defined in law. However he argued it, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, flashback, the law on provocation remained undeveloped. Effectively it did not exist. The law—or its absence—was still against him. That left the judge.
I pictured a man in spectacles, close to retirement; he wore his glasses hanging from a cord round his neck and when at home sat about in a cardigan shelling peas for dinner. Then again, for all I could see, he might have had short hair chopped off above the ears and been one of those modern specimens who let witnesses burble on while gazing innocently at their PCs on to which they have downloaded the latest computer game. (Huey’s trial, I should have said, was one of the first to admit PCs to the criminal bar.)
“He has deliberately killed a man and he has admitted to deliberately killing this man,” the judge was saying. “But—” It was the “but” that roused me.
A few minutes later:
“Members of the jury, there has been much talk of a cover-up, of a series of wilful actions by the accused at the scene of the crime. In particular you may recall a street lamp that the Crown maintains was deliberately smashed by Mr Dunstan. But—”
There it was again—the forensic “but”, the greedy conjunction, the hungry worm of legal peroration. There are probably more worms and qualifications in a summing-up from the bench, more buts ifs howevers notwithstandings probablys ontheotherhands and perhapses, than there are mustard seeds in Canada or hues in a peacock’s tail. However, something was happening inside this judge’s mind. I began to listen carefully. The voice was measured, gnomic (gnosis, knowledge). I was listening for a signal, my hair standing up like filaments waiting to be charged. But after another hour, the atmosphere in the courtroom had not changed. I decided that I was mistaken.
According to the record, the judge summed up for three hours and ten minutes. There was no mid-morning break. The jury rose in time for a late lunch. So it must have been about morning-tea time, what would have been morning-tea time had there been a break, that Huey farted and I heard from out of the tangle of judicial phrases coming from the bench the word “sympathy” enunciated. I sat forward again.
“Pardon”, I heard coming from the dock behind me. Huey had a habit of br
eaking wind and saying “pardon” afterwards. I had been sitting forward in my chair, then sideways at an angle, craning my neck to hear the judge.
“Members of the jury, you may recall an incident earlier in the week when I called the accused by his first name.” A cough. A clearing of the throat. His Honour had paused to drink a glass of water? “I should have referred to him of course as, ‘the accused’ or ‘Mr Dunstan’. I made a mistake. I called him ‘Huey’. You must ignore this. Put aside any feelings of sympathy or prejudice you might feel I showed towards the accused then or at any other time. It might seem that I was exhibiting a kindly or fatherly attitude, calling him by his first name. Think nothing of it.”
There it was. The moment I had been waiting for.
Or was it? Afterwards, when the judge had dismissed the jury to its deliberations with the usual caution, Lawrence sounded unconvinced. I put it to him: “Well. ‘Ignore what I have said. Think nothing of it.’ That was telling them, wasn’t it?”
Lawrence was collecting up his papers. I heard him speak to someone. It was about 12.15 p.m.
“I wouldn’t bank on it, Ches. Do you want to come back to chambers with me for a bite to eat?”
“No.” I said that I might stay in the courtroom and wait it out. Privately I gave the jury no more than twenty minutes before they returned. I wrinkled my nose, sniffing, and said to Lawrence: “Is that liquorice you’re eating?”
“Here. Have some.” He pressed a small square into the palm of my hand. Lawrence sometimes carried a strap of liquorice in the folds of his gown and nibbled at it in moments of need. He seemed of a flutter.
“Excuse me a moment. I have to talk to the family.” I sat down and waited. He departed and returned. He said, “I’ve told them, either we shall have a verdict in half an hour or it’s going to be a long wait. Drink, Ches?” He finished gathering up his papers and we went across the road for a drink. When we returned, I waited in the lobby while he slipped down to the cells to see if Huey was still there. But Huey had been taken back to prison.
An hour later, back at the hotel, I rang Lisbeth. We talked for a bit and she asked me how I was feeling. I said it was hard, waiting. I told her Lawrence had given me a cell phone so he could call me when the jury was coming back.
“What will you do? If you go to bed you’ll never wake up.” We talked some more, and she said: “I think you should go out. Why not do a Buck House?”
So I did that. I ate a late lunch and took a taxi from the hotel to the far side of town where the streets petered out into roads and open farmland; I asked the driver to drop me by a junction I knew. It was where I had once turned off forty years earlier to meet a man nicknamed Butch, baptised Isaac, on one of my first jobs in New Zealand as a probation officer; then I walked back into town, groping along by streets I had once known but no longer remembered, asking directions in simulation of a walk to Buckingham Palace in a previous life. Lisbeth and I were in London for a family reunion. We had been married for five years but I had been registered blind for barely three and was at a crossroads in my life. I had got beyond the stage of hoping to see again; and beyond the stage of despair when my sleep was broken by terrible dreams, knowing it would never happen; I had got beyond chimeras and had started to reach inside, searching for a kind of inner strength in order to work out some priorities to make life worth living again. But in practical terms I was lost, stranded somewhere in the second dimension, and terrified to venture outside by myself. I lacked confidence walking along strange streets.
“Where are we now?” I remember saying in London, as Lisbeth piloted me across Grosvenor Place. And, as we turned into Buckingham Palace Road, “How far to the Gate? Can we see it yet?” At this stage I still needed goals, zones of reach beyond the limits of my body and the outstretched cane, just to keep me surviving. But I came back from that walk to Buckingham Palace stimulated by the London crowd, my head bursting with new ideas and horizons. And indeed something of that rejuvenated curiosity began to infect me now, percolating into my being as I groped my way back into town through the forgotten streets of Cornford. Asking passers-by, “Where am I now?” And, “How far to the courthouse? Can we see it yet?”
A fresh northerly was blowing; it rained in showers and I had to take shelter more than once; the soughing in the giant willows growing along the river eventually gave me my bearings. I crossed the bridge leading to the RSA and courthouse complex. There had been no call from Lawrence on the mobile phone and the courthouse, when I got there, was deserted.
I had just got into my room at the hotel when the phone rang.
“They’re back,” I said. “Are they back?”
“No. They came back with a question, that’s all. Not good, Ches.”
“What about? Don’t tell me. The goddamn street lamp.”
“Yes.”
It was not only not good, I thought, it was diabolical.
“Nothing else,” Lawrence said. “Try and keep your dinner down.” He rang off. It was then a quarter past six. I showered and walked about the room naked, scuffing my heels on the carpet, towelling myself. I was bathed in a lather of sweat when I went down to the dining room.
The jury returned at 9.15 p.m.
There was little warning. Lawrence came for me at the hotel shortly after nine o’clock. I had finished dinner and was sitting at the table fortifying myself with coffee laced with whisky when his call came. Somehow I had missed the jury when they had come in earlier for tea. According to one of the waiters, a laconic specimen called Albert, the jury had been marched in and out of the dining room in short order about five-thirty.
“How did they seem?” I asked him.
“Hungry. One of them was reading a book.”
“Yes, but their mood. What sort of mood were they in?”
“Noisy lot. Bit cross, I thought. The ladies wanted wine. Not allowed.” That’s something, I thought to myself. But then Albert spoiled it, saying: “One of them was bawling. Little fat chook. I’ve seen her about. She was bawling her eyes out.”
“Silence. All stand!”
The formula may be shorter and the scarlet robes gone, but the words spoken and the hush of anticipation when a jury returns on a capital charge have barely changed since Elizabethan times.
“Will the foreman please stand—”
Extra chairs were being brought in when we arrived. Lawrence did a nice thing, piloting me deftly through the well of the court to sit beside him at his table. I knew, because he told me, that Lawrence had established eye contact with one of the jurors who had a habit of nodding emphatically when he, Lawrence, or for that matter the prosecutor, Sparrow, scored a point. (The same juror, it turned out, who had come into the dining room reading a book.) It further turned out that the judge’s three-hour summation had left Lawrence feeling confident, uncertain only about one lone juror who had refused to look at him again and listened stony-faced throughout. “I wonder if he is with us or against us.” Lawrence remarked to his junior.
I heard the click of the dock-gate behind me as Huey was brought back by the guards. The court reassembled and I tried not to fidget with my hands. I have heard it said that even experienced counsel get so overwrought waiting—the time between the announcement that a verdict has been reached and the delivery of the verdict can seem like hours though it is normally only twenty or thirty minutes—that they wet themselves. But Lawrence was not of that breed. Nor, I guessed, was he watching to see where the jury would glance when the accused was brought in—on the rule-of-thumb that if a jury instinctively glances towards the dock as if to check the accused isn’t the ogre they thought when the trial started, the verdict will be a favourable one. No, Lawrence was waiting, watching for one man. Now, as the jury filed back into the courtroom, even before the foreman rose to give the verdict, Lawrence took hold of my little finger under the table and pinched it, and I knew instinctively he had been given a nod, another nod but this time a clear nod, a nod with meaning, and that we had won. I cho
ked on the verdict nevertheless.
When the verdict came, Lawrence was still holding my little finger, squeezing it. “Eureka, eureka,” he seemed to say. Although it might have been, “Wonderful, wonderful,” like Samuel Butler looking down from the southern alps when he first sighted the land of Erewhon.
Hot tears were sliding down my cheeks. I needed to get out. An emotionally incontinent witness is not a pretty sight. I waited for the judge to speak—“I don’t expect to see you again, young man,” I heard him say, illogically, as if Huey was walking free (he had still to be re-sentenced on the lesser charge of manslaughter). The judge thanked and dismissed the jury, and I departed the courtroom in a wash of mewing noises. I had the impression of passing by a group of people glimpsed round a fire with their faces in the light, as if engaged in a form of communal activity like rain dancing. Huey’s family, I later learned, had come forward. Throughout the trial they had occupied a block of seats at the back, the father wearing a knotted tie and holding his hat, the mother in a knitted jersey with her hair tied in a bun, the two of them coming and going from the court unobtrusively, like shadows, as if to deflect attention from themselves, or wrath. Although the father, however unprepossessing, must have been a presence for Lawrence who disappeared to the back for thirty-second conversations with him at almost every break. Now the aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews were all swarming over the rails to embrace the figure in the dock, bobbing up and down making noises like little animals.
Outside it was raining again. I stood on the steps of the courthouse feeling the wetness of the night. Lawrence was talking to reporters. We said goodnight and arranged to meet again in the morning. I felt the spray from the swishing of passing cars and the breath of the night come up from the street, and as I was stepping down I felt a touch on the elbow and something damp in my palm, like a paw. A small wet hand was grasping mine. It was cupped, then the fingers were extended to clasp my own in a way that I recognised. It was the father. We stood there in the rain, holding hands, and I had the impression as we parted and I walked off into the night that his eyes were shining.
The Crime of Huey Dunstan Page 18