by Bri Lee
After the large meal I went to my bedroom and closed the door, cherishing the white shaggy carpet under my feet and the quiet hum of the cooking show my mum was watching on the other side of the wall. I took some things out of my American suitcase, still not fully unpacked, and replaced them with others, trying on some of the pantsuits I’d bought before leaving and finding that many wouldn’t button at my hips. I had to dig around my cupboard for clothes Mum had bought me from op shops in previous years; things I’d hated when she’d brought them home because I couldn’t believe that she’d thought I was so big. I looked at the mirror, the grey dresses and black slacks fitting me, and to quell my rising anxiety I resolved to do better.
The spaghetti bolognese Mum had lovingly prepared for me that night, because she knew it was my favourite, because she knew I was stressed, pooled in a clumpy mash on top of the shower drain, and I swirled it around with my fingers, pushing it down. Tears came out as the food came out and it felt good. The hot water felt good. I would do better. Be better.
I waved to Judge as I saw him walk toward the Qantas check-in area at Brisbane Airport, and was relieved to see him also in casual clothes. I heard stories of other judges requiring their associates be in formal workwear at all times, even on Sundays when flying out for circuits. Not for the first or last time, I considered how lucky I was to be paired with him in particular. We went up to the Qantas Lounge and I swore under my breath, looking out across the free bar and buffet area. The ‘other half’ milled around.
Later on in the plane Judge saw two fashion magazines sticking out of my tote bag. ‘Did you take those from the Lounge?’ he asked, and I panicked before I looked up and saw he was smiling.
‘Maybe?’ I answered with a grin, and the plane took off.
We chatted and I asked him all kinds of questions about circuit. He told me some towns were different from others, that juries did and didn’t respond to different things in different areas. In some regional places it was extremely difficult to get guilty verdicts, while in a few others being charged practically meant convicted. Some communities had particularly tense relationships with the local police—powderkeg style—whereas some were brimming with mutual respect and cooperation.
I had asked for the window seat and I looked down at Gladstone, thinking that the huge rusty aluminium refinery beside the town seemed like a giant, inflamed pimple. I didn’t know if I could make that kind of joke with Judge. After six years of university and a couple of months travelling, I found it difficult to avoid swearing in front of him. I didn’t even know if I could ask him about the political news I’d read in the paper that morning, or about his weekend. He wasn’t only my boss, but an extremely intelligent and important man as well, and it was the beginning of our year together. My eyelids were drooping but I fought the fatigue, embarrassed at how it would look for me to fall asleep—it was exhausting not knowing quite how to behave.
I thought back to what I’d researched about Gladstone. Previously home to the Gureng Gureng and Bayali Aboriginal tribes, then at various stages ‘discovered and named’, the town was now home to almost 50,000 people. It was one of Queensland’s granite-belt towns that had benefited greatly from the mining boom and grown into a city, but that golden tide had receded. The big shipping port I’d read about stretched out beneath the plane window, spoiling what would otherwise be a beautiful coastline.
When we landed and picked up the hire car, I remembered I would have to drive it, and my knuckles went white as I gripped the steering wheel. It would be one thing to make a conversational faux pas, but I couldn’t imagine rear-ending someone with my judge riding shotgun.
We pulled into a supermarket to pick up supplies for the week, and he passed me in the magazine aisle. ‘You know you have to pay for these ones?’ he said, walking past me, and we laughed.
I messed up a lot on my first day in court. It was overwhelming. I made a note in my diary to make sure I trained my associate better than I had been trained. Rebecca, my predecessor, had already known how to do the job when she’d started working for Judge, and given he was a relatively new appointment to the District Court judiciary, he’d never had to work with someone who so fully had no idea what they were doing. To make things worse, I was the only associate that year to be sent on circuit in their first week. I couldn’t pop into another associate’s office and ask for help. Even with all the posturing and competition among associates I had presumed we’d share a certain level of camaraderie, but I was marooned. The prosecutor’s name was Eric and he seemed to take pity on me, but I couldn’t be seen to be talking to him too much or asking for his help.
During another callover first thing in the morning, I spoke aloud in court when I wasn’t supposed to. Afterwards, in chambers, Judge had to tell me things I should have known already. I forgot to pick up a jury list in the morning and didn’t tell the court transcribing service that we needed daily transcripts. I took hours to process files at the end of the day, knowing each one should have needed only a few minutes’ attention from an intelligent mind. If I made any mistakes there could be grave consequences for real people’s lives. It slapped me in the face with every new case. Wake up, little girl! the job yelled at me.
Nearly a hundred matters were on the list and I was fortunate—or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it—to be working for a man who took the responsibility of his job seriously.
‘If we don’t bring this matter on in these sittings,’ he said to a lawyer asking for an adjournment that week, ‘these people won’t have their case heard for another three months.’ Time was a warped concept in court. People’s liberties hung in the balance every single day, and juries deliberated for hours that felt like years, yet matters would be adjourned for months on end. I didn’t know how or why things worked the way they did, and our time in Gladstone was hell because of it. We stayed back at work every day until well after the sun set.
The courtroom in Gladstone was obviously much older than the ones in Brisbane, but not old enough to be nice in an antique way. The ceilings were low, the bricks speckled and the carpets mustardy. As always, Judge sat up on a raised platform at one end of the room behind a huge closed-in desk. He faced outward toward everyone except me. In every courtroom, the associate has a small desk in front of the judge’s; normally the height of Judge’s desk started after the top of my head when seated. We could pass things to each other and whisper to the exclusion of all others if we needed to, and together we faced the rest of them: the public in the pews right down the back, the prosecutors and defence counsel at the bar table directly opposite us, the jurors in two rows of six along one wall, and the defendants in the specially separated dock, normally somewhere between the bar table and the public. All those basic elements are consistent in courtrooms across Queensland and Australia.
Sometimes the dock is open to the air in the middle of the room with just a wooden balustrade, at others it’s off to the side and enclosed in glass, as in Gladstone. I’d read studies about different types of docks having prejudicial effects on juries’ perceptions, but nobody talked about this that year. I would see over ten different kinds of docks, and it seemed like the cherry on top of a sundae of reasons why juries got things wrong.
Once callover was finished that first morning, Judge adjourned so the group of potential jurors could be brought to the court. I was in overdrive preparing. I found the old wooden barrel I would pull the jurors’ name cards from, and the form I needed to fill out and then place with the records of the trial. Cheryl, the extremely friendly bailiff, was trying to chat to me about her weekend and I was short in response. I felt as if I was sandbagging my house for a cyclone and Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking—just not the right time. She had multicoloured hair and an inability to match the volume of her voice to her quiet surroundings. By the end of the day I knew all kinds of private information about her. I had managed to dodge most of her extremely personal questions.
‘So the first trial is this indece
nt treatment one, right?’ I asked her, picking out a folder from the fifty or so others, trying to bring the focus back to work. ‘James Williams?’
‘Probably! Another stepdad?’
‘Huh?’ I asked, confused, panicking I’d missed something.
‘You’ll see,’ she replied cheerily, swinging her courthouse keys around her fingers, ‘I’m just off to the loo!’
When everything was ready, I made the short walk from the courtroom to the doorway of Judge’s chambers. ‘They’re ready for you, Judge,’ I said, and he stood and followed me out.
‘Good morning, Judge,’ Cheryl said to him brightly in the hallway, ‘all ready to go?’
‘Yes, let’s get to work.’ He adjusted his wig; one of the little white curly tails was stuck in the collar of his jabot and I fought the urge to adjust it for him. I wondered if one day I would feel comfortable doing that.
My pondering was cut short by Cheryl dramatically bursting open the courtroom door. ‘Silence, all stand,’ she boomed, and it began.
The associate is the one who stands up at the beginning of the trial, in front of the whole courtroom, and arraigns the defendant. I read out the document telling Williams what he was charged with, who he’d allegedly done it to, and when. The bailiff had called for silence and Judge offered an official welcome, but my voice was the one that levelled each heinous accusation, the one that made clear why we were all gathered. My fingertips left sweat dots on the pages. Williams stood up and I asked him if he pleaded guilty or not guilty to three counts of indecent treatment of a child under sixteen, each with a circumstance of aggravation that she was under his care.
‘Not guilty,’ he said assuredly, three times. He was a balding man in his forties or fifties. An ordinary-looking dude, my notes said.
I pulled twelve name cards, one after the other, from the old wooden barrel, and watched the unlucky Gladstone residents huff, inch past each other, and take their seats in the jury stands when I called their names. Prosecution and defence called out challenges to some of the names I called. Normally defence don’t want too many highly educated people, and nobody wants a lawyer or a priest in the jury room because people defer to their opinions too much.
The next step is the prosecutor’s job—to read out a list of witness names so that jurors can raise their hands and speak to the judge if they recognise any names and might have a conflict of interest.
‘The third witness,’ the prosecutor called out while I was busy scribbling down minutes and keeping up, ‘is Breanne-Leigh Stowers.’
My head snapped to attention because of the involuntary way our minds betray us when our names are called. I was to spend the afternoon of the following day hearing my name in among testimony about a sex offender.
A woman from the jury raised her hand, and Judge asked her to approach his bench. I heard them whispering but nobody else in the court was close enough.
‘What is your reason for requesting excusal?’ he asked her.
‘Well,’ she whispered very softly, ‘I had something like this happen to me, and I just, I mean…I don’t want to listen to this.’
‘I see,’ Judge said, ‘and you feel that your personal circumstance means you would not be able to be a fair and impartial juror in this trial?’
‘Ah,’ she hesitated, ‘yes?’
‘Very well, you are excused,’ Judge said to her, and directed me to pick a replacement from the barrel.
I lost count, throughout the year, of the number of women who excused themselves from sex crime trials because they themselves were survivors.
We adjourned for a short break so that the jury could get acquainted over Nescafé Blend 43 and Monte Carlos. Judge addressed counsel to make sure everything was in order, and then we took a break as well.
I made Judge a cup of coffee and we sat in the armchairs in his chambers, chatting about Gladstone for a few nice moments until it was time to go back in.
First, the complainant gave evidence through a prerecording. She didn’t want to be in the same courtroom as Williams—who we soon learned, as per the bailiff’s prediction, was her mum’s ex-boyfriend. She’d been thirteen when, allegedly, he began touching her and saying inappropriate things to her, then fourteen when his behaviour allegedly escalated.
‘He would say weird things to me,’ she said. ‘Like he would say to me “Who taught you how to do that so well?” and “Oh, how’d you get so good at that?” while he was doing stuff.’
I shifted in my seat, a strange tightness coming across my chest and belly. I looked up at Williams and he was just watching the screen, a calm disdain on his face, his thin lips pursed. I didn’t recognise the words, or his face, but something in her mimicry of his tone rang true and evoked something familiar to me. A saccharine and filthy way of speaking to someone who is terrified.
When the prosecutor had finished stepping the girl through her evidence-in-chief, she underwent three hours of cross-examination. We had to break for lunch in the middle of it, and I was incredulous—three hours of crying and reliving trauma.
‘We don’t even expect young people to sit through three-hour-long nature documentaries!’ I said to Judge.
A defence barrister’s job is to make the jury question the credibility and reliability of a complainant, and this barrister was good at his job. He poked holes in her stories, reminding her of inconsistencies between afternoon and night-time incidents. He accused her and her mother of colluding to bring Williams—the ‘evil ex’—down. Eventually the barrister was asking her how much she knew about sex, and where she’d learned the names and slang for certain acts that she was alleging happened to her. He made a big deal out of how she knew the difference between a flaccid or erect penis. Sixteen was apparently too old to claim innocence, even though the alleged acts began when she was just thirteen. She got upset and cranky. She said she hated Williams. It was horrible.
The next day we heard from the witness whose name sounded just like mine. Breanne-Leigh was the complainant’s best friend, and was recounting times when she had visited the home where Williams lived. She told the court what she knew about the offending and how Williams made her feel.
I told myself the sick feeling in my belly was just a symptom of the anxiety I had about the new job. I was still making mistakes every hour. Learning the ropes was always going to be a bit tough. I just had to get settled. Back in my room that night, after dinner, I paced around with a warm beer, wondering if I could call Vincent. What would I tell him? I mean, it’s really messing with me that I keep hearing my name in and around this kind of stuff, like, it’s bringing shit up. I practised trying to sound casual about it. What would he say? What did I even want him to say? I just wanted someone to talk to about what was happening to me. A change in my body, a discomfort, a drywall in my mind being scratched at, a darkness leaking into my life.
I stepped out onto my balcony and looked over the lights of Gladstone. A man way down on the street staggered home. Where the fuck was I? How had I got myself there, so alone yet in the middle of so many people’s stories and crimes? It was only the beginning of the year; what if things got worse? I had to tell Vincent. You’re going to finish this beer, and then you’re going to rip the bandaid off. I stepped inside, sliding the door closed behind me with purpose, and I sat at the foot of the bed and necked the last of the beer, and found his name in my phone. My blood was pounding in my ears, my head lolling back slightly, my eyes shut tight, as I listened to the dial tone.
‘Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. The number you have dialled is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.’
I hung up fast, before the recording began. It was time for another beer and another cigarette.
Later in the evening I ate a whole packet of chocolate-coated Scotch Finger biscuits then threw them all up. We were staying in serviced apartments and after vomiting in the shower, washing my hair and brushing my teeth, I slipped into the tightly made bed, exhausted but clean.
At the end of the next day the defendant took the stand. His barrister stepped him through all the dates on which the allegations had taken place, producing a business work diary that suggested Williams had been out on painting jobs on a number of occasions his girlfriend’s daughter said he’d cornered her. The barrister remarked that Williams worked a lot; Williams replied that he was just trying to support his family, and that he was saving for a boat. Some of the jury nodded. In the break, Judge told me how rare it was for a defendant to give evidence.
‘But he’s got a relaxed, normal-guy kind of manner, doesn’t he?’ Judge said.
‘Well, they don’t always look like monsters, do they?’ I replied.
‘But he’s just a regular guy like you, you know?’ He grinned, teasing me. ‘He goes fishing on the weekends sometimes, he’s saving for a boat. Just a regular guy like the jury.’
The prosecutor did an okay job cross-examining Williams, but I knew that this was one matter out of a fortnight of work he had listed ahead of him. He might not have even known that Williams intended to take the stand. Prosecution have to put their whole case forward to give defence a chance to prepare, but the same isn’t true of defence needing to alert prosecution to their intentions.
Williams wasn’t afraid to look across to the jury when he answered questions. He shrugged a lot, offering a kind of sad surprise that he was sitting in court. He intimated that his ex was a little ‘unhinged’, that this accusation could be her elaborate plan to get back at him for leaving her for a younger, more beautiful woman.
The jury went out to deliberate but took less than an hour.
‘We’ve got a verdict, Judge,’ I said to him, and saw surprise flicker across his face.