“Is it going to keep giving me …” David tugged at the sheet. “Will it keep hurting like this?”
“No. They don’t think so. You’ll just … in that one eye …”
“I’ll be sporting a patch, like Jack Sparrow.”
“If you like.” Claire lifted his hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry, but I’m just glad the eye is the worst. It’s been so scary.”
The machine beside David’s bed whirred. A dolly rumbled down the hallway outside the room. Claire heard a mingling of voices calling back and forth unintelligibly.
“Guess I won’t be making the bigs now,” David said finally.
“Probably not. Be hard to catch up with the high heater.”
They sat together without speaking. Claire looked around and noticed that more flowers had arrived since her last visit. The room was beginning to smell like a florist’s shop.
“May I touch your nose?” she asked.
David let go of Claire’s hand and interlaced his fingers on his stomach. He breathed deeply, getting ready.
“All right,” he said, “go ahead, but control yourself.”
Claire ran the tip of her finger down the bridge of David’s nose and drew a slow circle around his mouth.
“A patch,” she murmured, “might give you just that touch of continental panache that is the hallmark of tall, awkward guys from Wisconsin.” She sat back. “The girls of Green Bay will go apeshit.”
In the long silence that followed, Claire could not tell whether David was taking the time to absorb the bad news or drifting off to sleep again. His unbandaged eye remained closed for a long minute. Finally, he spoke without opening it, and Claire realized he had been awake the whole time.
“You know Lady Justice?”
“The long-waisted babe with the great tomatoes and the scales?”
“That’s the one.” The edges of his mouth turned down as something struck him. “I wonder whether I’d have gone into law if Justice had been a short fat guy with hair on his shoulders.”
“I bet not.”
David turned his head slowly and rolled his eye toward Claire, crinkling it into a smile. “Those were the very first words you spoke to me. Remember?” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, maybe the blindfold hides the fact that Lady Justice has only got one good eye. She has to do her best with just the one.” He sighed drowsily. “Considering everything, she does okay.” There was another pause, and then he added, softly, as he faded, “The point is to try … as hard as you can. Come here for a sec.”
Claire stood and leaned over him, putting her face close.
“I love you,” David said. “I can see that plenty clearly.” His face relaxed; sleep was overtaking him.
“That’s nice,” Claire said and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Tell me again some time when you’re not on so much Demerol. Rest now. I have papers to grade.”
She moved her chair back to the far wall so as not to disturb David, settled herself, and pulled a sheaf of papers out of her bag. The grading occupied her for about thirty seconds. Then, she put the papers on the floor, pulled out a Kleenex, and dabbed her eyes.
In a few minutes, David was asleep, breathing regularly, and Claire leaned back in the chair, letting her eyes drift over the vases of flowers from David’s various friends, judicial colleagues, and old law partners. The summer sunlight, filtered by the mini-blinds, made the room seem to glow, and the current of air-conditioning caused a few curling flower petals to flutter. One stray band of gold made its way across the wall and touched a chrome table in the far corner, where the Knight and the Wife of Bath sat side by side, and a cluster of red, white, and blue balloons tied to one of the metal legs bounced gently against the ceiling.
68
On March 18, 1984, Governor Michael S. Dukakis issued a proclamation exonerating Dominic Daley and James Halligan. Their prosecution, the document read, “was infected by such religious and ethnic prejudice” that they had been denied a fair trial.
Photograph by George Peet
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank my earliest readers and supporters, Ted and Esther Scott; Julie Perkins; Nancy Winkelman; Carolyn Mitchell; Jeni and Scott Kaplan; Sheila Graham-Smith; Dr. Peter F. Shaw; and Dr. Randall H. Paulsen. My gratitude extends particularly to my author friends, whose guidance has been so important and reassuring: the poet Ellen Bass, Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd, Jonathan Harr, Elinor Lipman, Anita Shreve, Joe McGinniss, Joseph Kanon, John Katzenbach, Madeleine Blais, and Suzanne Strempek Shea. Others whose advice was particularly helpful include the literary agent William Reiss, David Starr of Springfield’s Republican newspaper, and David’s friend Loring Mandel. Boston’s Grub Street provided invaluable help through its annual Muse & the Marketplace seminars.
I also thank judicial colleagues who have read the draft, including my former boss and now dear friend, US District Judge Joseph L. Tauro, as well as Chief Judge Patti B. Saris, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, Judge Rya W. Zobel, Judge Denise Jefferson Casper, and Judge William G. Young. My thanks also go to my former colleague Judge Nancy Gertner, currently a professor at Harvard Law School.
Several of my law clerks and coworkers at the US District Court in Springfield read drafts of the book—during their time, I must emphasize, outside working hours. These include Luke Ryan; Emma Quinn-Judge; Ruth Anne French-Hodson; Beth Cohen (now of Western New England University School of Law); my judicial assistant of nearly thirty years, Elizabeth Collins; and the court’s supervising pretrial services officer, Irma Garcia-Zingarelli. Stephanie Barry of the Republican newspaper helped by reading the draft in light of her unique knowledge of the Springfield community. My wonderful friend Bill Redpath, who does not smoke and is not an attorney (though he’d be outstanding if he were), kindly lent me his name.
The early support of Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education was crucial in getting the book into the light of day. I am especially grateful to Jack Reilly, Maryanne G. Jensen, Annette Turcotte, and Richard Millstein, and particularly to Ben Monopoli for his sharp-eyed editing and helpful suggestions.
All the people at my publisher, Open Road Integrated Media, have been smart, warm, fun, and full of good ideas. The opportunity to work with someone like Jane Friedman, with her intelligence, vision, and experience, has been awesome in every sense. I also offer my thanks to Tina Pohlman, Nina Lassam, and Luke Parker Bowles, consummate professionals who have steered the book through its production and promotion. I am most especially thankful to Maggie Crawford, my editor, whose tactful, persistent, and good-humored support has done so much to improve the manuscript and make her dear to me.
My literary agent, Robin Straus, deserves her own paragraph, and more. She has been, at every step, a supremely competent advocate, a knowledgeable adviser, and the best of friends. I am so grateful to her.
My parents, Ward and Yvonne Ponsor, and my sister, Valerie Pritchard, were kind enough to trudge through the manuscript when it was barely embryonic. Their loving support has kept me working. My gratitude to them, for everything, is beyond words.
The tragic story of Dominic Daley and James Halligan has been told and retold over the years. My best resource about the incident has been the Honorable W. Michael Ryan, retired first justice of the Northampton Division of the District Court Department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judge Ryan not only provided detailed comments on the draft, but he put his extensive collection of materials on the events of 1805–06 into my hands. This is not intended to be a scholarly work, so I will not canvass all the references I have dipped into. Three articles were most helpful: Massachusetts Superior Court Associate Justice Robert Sullivan’s “The Murder Trial of Halligan and Daley—Northampton, Massachusetts 1806” in the Massachusetts Law Quarterly (1964) at 211–224; James M. Camposeo’s “Anti-Catholic Prejudice in Early New England: The Daley-Halligan Murder Trial” in the Historical Journ
al of Western Massachusetts, Vol. VI, No. 2 (Spring 1978) at 5–17; and James C. Rehnquist’s “The Murder Trial of James Halligan and Dominic Daley” in Legal Chowder: Lawyering and Judging in Massachusetts, edited by Hon. Rudolph Kass (retired) (Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, Inc., Boston, 2002), at 232–235. Particularly helpful was a detailed document, lent to me by Judge Ryan, “Report of the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan,” compiled anonymously by “a Member of the Bar” and published by S. & E. Butler in Northampton. I also enjoyed and found helpful Michael C. White’s fictional treatment of the story in The Garden of Martyrs (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2005).
Central to my efforts was the late Yale Law School professor Charles L. Black Jr.’s book Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1974). This small volume still offers the most pointed analysis of capital punishment I know of. My novel may be viewed, in part, as an attempt at a fictional version of his excellent book.
Last and most important is my beloved wife, Nancy. We live together; mornings, we write together. Then, we have lunch together, and we talk about our writing together. Her eyes, her voice, and her smile are the most beautiful things I have ever known. Without her, there would, of course, be no book, but that would be small beans, since without her, there would be nothing at all. With her, there is everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Ponsor graduated from Harvard, received a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for two years at Pembroke College, Oxford. After taking his law degree from Yale and clerking in federal court in Boston, he began his legal career, specializing in criminal defense. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1978, where he practiced as a trial attorney in his own firm until his appointment in 1984 as a US magistrate judge in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him a life-tenured US district judge. From 2000 to 2001, he presided over a five-month death penalty trial, the first in Massachusetts in over fifty years. Judge Ponsor continues to serve as a senior US district judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Western Division, with responsibility for federal criminal and civil cases in the four counties of western Massachusetts. The Hanging Judge is his first novel.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Ponsor
Cover design by Biel Parklee
ISBN 978-1-4804-4190-3
Published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Hanging Judge Page 39