“The United States rests, your honor,” the US Attorney said flatly.
My attorney glared at me, stood from his seat, and made his statement.
“The defense rests, your honor,” he said.
Feeling cheated, and incapable of saying what I felt I needed to say in the manner I needed to say it, I was frustrated by the Federal Government’s procedures, policies, and the rules of law regarding how testimony was treated, accepted, and processed.
After receiving instructions regarding decision making and the charges against me, the jury was excused to deliberate.
And I faced life in prison if convicted of the crime.
Negotiating for a lesser sentencing was not possible. Charged under the provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, I was fucked if convicted.
But I sat stone faced, somewhat confident that the United States of America would not convict one of its own citizens for making an idle comment in a drunken stupor one night in a bar.
“They’ll take you back to your cell and after the jury decides we’ll assemble for the verdict,” my attorney said.
“Any thoughts?” I asked.
“Hard to say anything for sure, but I’m feeling pretty damned good. Now, I’ve got to run,” he responded as he reached for his leather bag full of files.
I stood and placed my hands behind my back, all but inviting the US Marshall to handcuff me.
After he did so, he led me to the holding facility. The walk was eerily quiet, and made me feel even less like the US citizen I had always believed was a title I was naturally able to claim.
“Not supposed to say anything about the trial or give an opinion,” the Marshall said as he stopped outside the door leading into the holding facility.
“Don’t expect you to,” I said.
“Goes without saying, I didn’t say this,” he said.
I nodded my head toward him and made note of his bronze name tag.
L. R. Stone.
“Blackburn’s a god damned liar,” he said through his teeth.
“Appreciate it,” I said in response.
“Hope the best for you, son,” he said as he pressed the button on the wall, opening the door.
Another guard led me to a meeting room where I waited in my slacks, jacket, and tie for the jury to reach a verdict.
While I sat and considered what the future might hold, I prayed not for freedom, or for a favorable verdict, but for Em. I prayed she would have the strength to rise above all of this, regardless of the outcome, and proceed through life as if it never happened.
And I prayed for the ability to accept an unfavorable verdict, should it come to that, as the man I had always represented myself as being.
Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Five
EMILY
November 20th, 2006
Waiting for the court to decide Jackson’s fate wasn’t an easy thing for me. I was prohibited from seeing the trial, but now that it was over, I was allowed to go into the courtroom for his verdict to be read. I prayed all night, all morning, and even in the hallway for Jackson, and for me. I prayed that regardless of the verdict, we both would be provided the strength to continue living life loving each other and cherishing what we had the opportunity to share together.
Life without Jackson was impossible for me to comprehend, and although I had made it the last two months without seeing him very often, it wasn’t easy for me at all. My heart felt empty, and I felt alone. Now walking into the courtroom, I felt as if my heart was a hollow shell, dangling ten feet behind me by a string as I made my way to my seat.
“Are you Em?” a woman asked.
She was small, cute, and very soft spoken.
I nodded my head and forced a smile, something I had become quite good at in the last few months. The gathering of ATF agents, many of which I remembered from the day of the raid stood beside her, all talking and laughing as if they didn’t have a worry in the world. I found it terribly wrong that if Jackson lost, he went to prison, and if the ATF lost, there was no punishment. In my opinion, if the government stood to lose the same as the citizens they tried to wrongly prosecute, they’d attempt to convict far fewer citizens.
“I’m Sydney, Jackson’s sister,” she said.
“Oh my God,” I gasped as I raised my hands to my face and covered my mouth.
“I heard they prohibited you from seeing the trial,” she said as she shifted her eyes toward the ATF agents.
I nodded my head. “They did. But I get to be here for this.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said as the jury walked into the room.
I stood and stared blankly into the courtroom, almost unaware of her or anyone else’s presence. As the US Marshall brought Jackson into the room, I admired his nicely trimmed beard, fancy clothes, and how he held his head high as he entered the room.
“He looks good,” I said as I tilted my head toward him.
“He does,” Sydney responded.
“So, you were there the day they…”
“All rise,” the bailiff bellowed.
The courtroom all stood. The judge entered the courtroom from the back, undoubtedly from a secret place where no one could get to him. I shook my head the thought of the secrecy of it all. After he sat down, the bailiff barked out into the room.
“You may be seated.”
After shuffling some paperwork on his large wooden platform, the judge leaned toward the microphone.
“In the matter of the United States versus Jackson Shephard have you reached a verdict? The judge asked.
“Yes, your honor, we have,” the juror responded.
“And how do you find the defendant?” the judge asked.
The man looked down at a sheet of paper he held as if he was uncertain of their finding. I crossed my fingers and began to pray as he read the verdict.
“In the matter of the United States of America versus Jackson Shephard, we, the jury, find the defendant, guilty of conspiracy to commit murder,” the juror said.
My stomach convulsed and I almost vomited. As the passageway in my throat constricted to a point making breathing difficult, I realized I was still standing. I fell to my seat and covered my face with my hands.
This can’t be happening.
As Sydney sat beside me sobbing and rubbing my back, loud cheers from the ATF agents erupted into the courtroom.
“In the back!” the judge hollered.
“There will be no outbursts in my courtroom. Cease or I will find you in contempt,” he demanded.
The ATF agents became quiet, now laughing and chuckling in a dull roar.
“Em…”
I glanced upward. Jackson stood in front of me with his hands handcuffed behind his back, separated by the short wooden decorative wall standing between us. Still sobbing, I stood and stumbled to the wall.
“Mr. Shephard, you need to come with us,” A Marshall said as he reached for Jackson’s arm.
“Get your fucking hands off of me,” Jackson said through his teeth. “I need to say something to her.”
“Mr. Shephard…” he repeated.
I hated seeing Jackson upset. As I began to plead with the Marshall, Jackson turned around, scanned the courtroom, and shouted.
“Marshall Stone!” he yelled.
Another US Marshall quickly walked toward where we stood and talked to the first Marshall.
“I can give you just a minute, Shephard,” he said.
“Em, listen,” Jackson paused and cleared his throat. “Just let me go. Get your stuff out of the house, take the money, and go. Go open a restaurant, and start a new life somewhere…”
“Stop talking like that,” I cried. “I love you…we just…”
“Em, I love you, too,” he said, his voice carrying all of the emotion he was feeling. “But I’m not coming back. Now, take off that necklace and go somewhere…”
“I’m never taking it off,” I interrupted.
“Don’t leave like th
is,” I said as I attempted to find words to say all of the things that were running through my head.
My entire world was crashing down around me and I had nothing to pick up the pieces.
“Promise me. Promise me I’ll never see you again,” I blubbered between the sobbing and tears.
“Em, I gotta go,” he said as the Marshall tugged against his arm.
“Love you, Syd,” he said as he shifted his eyes toward his sister.
He clenched his jaw, obviously fighting against his emotions.
“And I love you, Em,” he said through his clenched teeth.
“Promise me I’ll never see you again,” I said.
“I gotta go, babe,” he said as he turned away.
“Promise me,” I shouted as he walked away, peering over his shoulder as he took each step.
And, as he walked away, he never said a word.
Not a single one.
Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Six
JACK
December 16, 2006
Do you have any regrets? Would you do anything differently if you could do it over? If you could turn back the clock Mr. Shephard, what, if anything…
Each time someone asked me one of those questions, they got the same response as the person before them. Regret wasn’t something I had ever known. I lived life by my own set of rules, and I had never been ashamed of anything I chose to do in living it. Not always were my choices in line with the law, society’s belief, or what most considered to be moral or just; but that didn’t make my decisions - or me - wrong. Because of my personal opinions and my adherence to my own set of laws, I had always perceived myself as being a man of honor, and one with a purpose. It didn’t necessarily provide any assurance other people understood me or agreed with me, but changing my ways wasn’t an option.
I realized in living my life I had made mistakes, I was no different than any other man; but acknowledging when I made them set me apart from most men. Recognizing my errors and realizing just what series of circumstances allowed them to come into play paved the way for me to always improve, making the days in my future fractionally better than the ones in my past.
Each new day in my life was always better than the one which preceded it.
Always.
He crossed his arms in what I had learned to be the standard prison Peckerwood pose, leaning to the side and studying me from head to toe as he did so. Standing six foot two and weighing roughly 220 pounds of solid muscle, Deuce would be intimidating to most men. No one, however, intimidated me. As he studied me I gazed around the cell, admiring the cleanliness. His cell was spotless and smelled like a hospital - at least what I remembered them smelling like when I was a kid.
“You can’t just go knocking a motherfucker out in this joint, especially one of the blacks. You ever done federal time before?” he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Been in jail a few times. Never locked up like this, no.”
He lifted his chin slightly and looked down his nose at me as he narrowed his gaze. “You bother to notice there’s segregation here? Cops don’t put blacks and whites in the same cell. Don’t mix whites and Mexicans either - or blacks and Mexicans for that matter. You notice at chow the blacks are on one side and the whites are on another? Same thing at the phones. Hell, look out on the run, they’ve even got their own place to post up. You notice that? Pretty hard to fucking miss.”
I’d never considered myself to be a prejudiced man. As far as I was concerned, men were men, and placing one in a category of any kind prior to knowing who a man was or what he stood for was wrong. I understood prison was different, and would require adjustments on my part, but I didn’t have to agree with why it was the way it was. After a short glare for him having me redirected to his prison cell in the first place, I nodded my head once in affirmation.
“Yeah, I noticed. Just what’s the fucking problem, Deuce? It’s Deuce, right?” I glanced over my shoulder toward the man who was slowly inching closer to where I was standing.
“The problem is this. A white bustin’ the head of a black, especially the one you busted, can pop off a riot in here. You need to ask permission before you go thumpin’ another black,” he explained.
As Deuce spoke, I noticed the man who shadowed him everywhere had moved half the distance between the cell door and where I stood. I immediately turned to face him and raised my hands into a defensive posture.
“You wanting to fuck me or something?” I asked as I shifted my eyes along his lean muscular frame.
He was of average height, a little smaller than average size, and covered in an overabundance of prison tat’s, primarily swastikas and other white pride tattoos, including a 14/88 over his left eyebrow. I later learned 14 was the 14th letter in the alphabet, N, which represented the word Nazi, and 88 was the eight letter, H, twice, and stood for Hail Hitler. Dressed in white boxer shorts, white socks, no shirt, and his shower shoes, he looked like every other Peckerwood I’d seen, but the fact he was invading my bubble set him apart from the rest.
His eyes widened as he stammered to form a response. “I was just…”
“Well, you just better back the fuck up a few feet, little man. You rolling up on me like that is making me want to add you to the list of motherfuckers I’ve knocked out today,” I said through my teeth.
He leaned to the side and attempted to look around me - and toward Deuce - for answers.
“Stand outside, Junior,” Deuce said from behind me.
“I’m not fucking around,” I said as I turned to face Deuce.
“You’re gonna have a tough life in here, Killer,” Deuce said. “You need to figure out how to do your time and keep your time from doing you.”
I shook my head from side-to-side as I gazed down at the toilet blankly. After a moment of collecting my thoughts, I shifted my eyes toward Deuce and pursed my lips. As soon as he showed outward signs of being nervous, I relaxed, realizing he was no different than anyone else.
Shot caller, my ass.
“Doing time?” I said with a laugh. “I’m not doing time. I’ve got life in this place. Far as I’m concerned, this is my new home. I don’t let people disrespect me in my home, and I’m sure as fuck not going to let them do it here - and as far as I’m concerned the color of a man’s skin doesn’t protect him from shit.”
He nodded his head and turned his palms upward. “In here it does.”
“Got my own set of rules,” I seethed.
He raised his right hand and extended his index finger. “If he disrespected you or the race, that’s one thing. But you need to get permission. There’s always, what do you call it? Circumstances. God damn it I can’t think of it right now, but it’s a kind of circumstance that lets you, you know, kind of step away from what’s normally…”
“Extenuating circumstances,” I interrupted.
“Yep. Extenuating. Appreciate ya,” he said. “So I heard he called you a ‘Wood, and you started beatin’ on his black ass?”
I shook my head. “Don’t know where you get your information, but that’s not even close. Here’s what went down, and I’ll tell you in advance, I don’t like repeating myself, and I’ve never been one to go over things and second guess my actions. Where I’m living doesn’t change that, so pay attention.”
He widened his eyes as he knelt down and squatted, pressing his back to the wall as he did so. I’d seen many of the people relax like this in the five days I’d been in prison; it was almost as if they were sitting, but without the aid of a chair.
“Have a seat,” he said as he tossed his head toward the toilet.
The six foot by twelve foot cell was no different than the other 1800 cells in the prison. It had two steel beds on one wall, one over the other, a steel desk anchored to the wall, a one-piece steel toilet with a sink contoured into the top of it, a steel locker anchored to the wall, and a steel cell door with a hinged slot. After excluding the space taken by the beds, toilet, and desk, there wasn’t much room left. I glanc
ed toward the toilet, shifted my eyes toward him, and shook my head.
“No disrespect, but I’ll stand. So we were in the kitchen, in the dish room. He told me to work the back of the machine, grabbing the dishes as they came off the washer. I’d been working on the front of it for four hours, and I just got the hang of it, you know, I was kind of in a rhythm. So I told him to fuck off. I said ‘unless you’re a cop, you got no fucking business telling me what to do’. The motherfucker sized me up, pointed to the rear of the machine, and told me to ‘get back there, you punk ass bitch.”
I waited for his reaction.
“Those exact words? Called you a ‘punk ass bitch?’” he asked as he slowly rose from his seated position.
I nodded my head. Calling someone a punk in prison, or a bitch for that matter, was about as disrespectful as one could be toward another man. Men will generally fight for honor, to protect those they love, or to support their system of beliefs. It really was no different in prison. Calling someone a punk was indicating he’d let another man fuck him - and become his bitch. For a heterosexual man, the thought is unthinkable. To simply allow another man to do something like that would suggest he was weak and incapable of standing up for something he held sacred.
And I was far from a weak man.
“Those exact words. So, I busted the disrespectful fucker in the gut with all I had. When he was trying to figure out what planet he was on, I got his ass in a headlock and beat him until my arm got tired.” I shrugged my shoulders. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Well, if that’s what he said, he deserved everything he got. I’ll go to the black shot caller and explain, so there’s no need to worry. But there’s one more thing.”
He stepped within a few feet of where I stood.
“He’s tellin’ all the blacks he beat your ass. Price you pay for not markin’ his ass up,” he said.
Deuce had been locked up for eight years, and was the shot caller for the Peckerwoods, a white prison gang. The prison had many white gangs, and they all stood for the same thing, the belief their race was superior to any other. From my quick inventory of the gangs in the five days I had been imprisoned, I placed the Peckerwoods on the lower position on the totem pole, the highest being the most violent. The Aryan Brotherhood, Aryan Circle, Nazi Low Riders, Dirty White Boys, and Hammerskins seemed to be more violent - or at least more prone to it.
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