by Bri Lee
‘How long is that!?’ he asked, gathering his robes from where he’d just put them away.
‘Almost forty minutes.’
‘I think that might be a record,’ he replied, putting on his wig.
‘Does it mean anything?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, pausing to look at me, ‘they normally take a little longer to decide if they’re going to lock someone away.’
A few jurors were laughing as they entered the courtroom. I glared at them but they didn’t look in my direction until Judge entered and sat at his bench behind me. Then they all sat quietly, at attention.
‘Would the speaker please stand up,’ Judge asked, and a man got to his feet. ‘Have you reached a verdict?’
‘Yes, we have,’ the man said. He was in a flannel shirt and jeans, with a brown belt and boots.
‘Very well,’ Judge nodded and turned his face to me, ‘please take the verdict.’
I stood up, holding the arraignment sheet I’d sweated onto just two days earlier, and felt myself shrink at the absurdity of the room, of us sitting there to determine the truth about such a shitty thing. In his summing up before the jurors had begun deliberating, Judge had reminded them that he made decisions about the law, while they made decisions about the facts. It offended me. Who were these people to decide such a thing? How are they not chosen more carefully? How often did they get it wrong? And me! I still had pimples and lived at home eating my mum’s spaghetti—why the fuck was I the one standing there taking the verdict?
‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of count one, indecent treatment of a child, under sixteen, under care?’ I asked the speaker.
‘Not guilty,’ he replied.
I asked again, and again, and the verdict was the same on each count: not guilty, not guilty.
Judge formally announced that Williams was acquitted on all charges. Court adjourned and Williams was let out of the dock. He started shaking hands with people, beaming. The complainant was somewhere else, waiting for her mobile to go off, and I looked up at Eric, the prosecutor, pitying him having to make that call. I pictured her crying. I was familiar with that image: I’d seen it replaying on the screens in court for hours.
With the verdict coming so fast and no sentence to carry out, Judge and I had a few hours free in the afternoon. I should have started on my pile of overdue paperwork but I was twitchy. My skin was hot and it felt as though I had bindi-eyes in my blood, or that I’d breathed in too much of the fibreglass insulation my dad once made me help him put in our roof. Dry grass outside the courthouse crunched under my feet and pebbles came loose from the hot, black bitumen road.
I called Vincent, raging to him about how cavalier the jurors had seemed. How they’d thought the complainant wasn’t trustworthy because she was sixteen and knew what an erection was.
‘How could it only take them half a fucking hour!? Did they run out of fucking biscuits!?’
Vincent listened patiently.
‘Did I tell you the jurors were complaining about Subway?’ I asked him at one point.
‘No,’ he said.
‘They get lunch during the trial, and they didn’t want to have to eat sandwiches again.’
‘Wow.’
‘Subway is good food! I get Subway as a treat sometimes when I don’t pack lunch!’
I asked him how he was doing, and we chatted for a little while until the inevitable pause before we said goodbye. The words I really wanted to say wouldn’t come out. The sun was too bright and I didn’t know what I wanted from him. We told each other we loved each other and hung up, then I sat on a bench and picked at my fingernails for a while, feeling even more alone than before I’d called him.
Back in chambers I found Judge, hoping to share some vitriolic confusion with him as well, but he had already moved on to preparations for the sentences he had to deliver the following day.
Too freshly outraged to move on, I logged on to my computer in the empty courtroom and started researching child sex offences. The line of defence for Williams, unofficially, was that he just wasn’t a child sex offender—he was a normal man, working hard, saving for a boat. He was just a bloke, and he liked women the way a bloke was supposed to. Definitely not a paedophile.
It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for: a 2011 report by the Australian Institute of Criminology clarifying commonly held mistaken beliefs about sex offenders.
It is a common misconception that all child sex offenders are paedophiles, the subheading went on, when in the majority of cases sex offences against children are opportunistic and carried out by people who are also attracted to adults. The offending most commonly takes place in the home, without the use of a weapon, and the perpetrator is an older male, known to the victim.
I then found a comment thread on a website where thousands of women reported the age they were when they first noticed men looking at them in a sexual way. The average was between eleven and thirteen depending on location. It was some kind of unspoken phenomenon in the collective unconscious: girls were being sexualised to the point that it made them self-conscious, at ages so young as to be illegal if acted upon, and yet society still labelled a man who was attracted to a twelve-year-old a paedophile. A paedophile is someone who is consistently sexually attracted to prepubescent children. If a man is attracted to adult women, but molests or rapes his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter because he is also attracted to her—and has the opportunity and believes he’ll get away with it—does that make him a paedophile? And what difference does that make? Where does our almost world-wide historical obsession with virginity and purity fit into all this? In Australia, where more than one in ten women have been sexually assaulted before they turn fifteen, perhaps that makes a whole lot of men kind-of paedophiles.
Where does this leave the pitiable man-who-can’t-help-it trope—the misunderstood and unfortunate soul who wishes he didn’t have forbidden fantasies about children? The AIC says those men, those ‘real’ paedophiles, are a fraction of the population. It seemed to me to be the difference between ‘true’ psychopathic killers, so rare as to be an anomaly, and the average murderer. I was more interested in the men like Williams. He had convinced twelve people that he wasn’t ‘that kind of man’, but it panicked me that the jury didn’t believe his stepdaughter. That she wasn’t worth even a full hour of their consideration if it meant they might have to eat sandwiches for lunch again.
The Williams case planted a fear inside me. A spore that would fester and grow with each trial I sat in. If people didn’t believe these women, why would they believe me?
I cried in the shower most nights we spent in Gladstone, throwing up dinner a few times too, as the sentences we heard stacked up. A few drug matters and a couple of assaults and robberies broke up the waves of sex offences. I went for a walk one night and almost felt afraid for my safety before I catalogued each assault and rape and remembered that every single one had happened in a domestic setting. Out on the street, walking to Maccas at half past ten, was perfectly safe compared to being a girl whose mum brought home a new boyfriend. I was also already a decade older than the average victim. The more I drank the more it all bled together.
When we were finally on our flight home, Judge took a moment to ask me how I felt, at the end of our first busy period.
‘I’m angry at everything,’ I said, ‘and it just feels like a lot of crime, and a lot of bad guys, and I don’t understand where they all come from and where they all go.’
Judge smiled.
‘And I think my father has accidentally raised a daughter for the Crown,’ I added, and he laughed.
IN HINDSIGHT, IT WASN’T A coincidence that of all the associates in that building, Megan and I became good friends. We worked for judges with similarly gentle temperaments and senses of humour. Hers and mine both got lumped with a huge portion of the sex offence trials and sentences, and we both saw plenty of regional Queensland on circuit. She and I were both stumbling throu
gh our first serious relationships, grappling to reconcile our independence with the romance arcs we’d been drip-fed since birth. We both loved travelling, we often swore, we even got adult acne at around the same time. She, a petite blonde, and me the giant ginger, spent the year trying to make each other laugh, or at least smile, in the face of overwhelming sadness. When Megan and I got beers and pizza after work, I didn’t long to be a different person like I did with Evelyn. Megan helped me see what I might eventually learn to like about myself.
We emailed each other sitting in court when barristers said particularly ridiculous things, or when jurors asked ludicrous questions, or when other associates got reputations for behaving as though they shat golden eggs.
OMG, I emailed her from the courtroom computer when I was back in Brisbane Monday morning, I’ve just come down to prepare court for a sentence, and there are twenty boys in the back rows from a visiting school, and a barrister has just come in and dropped all his stuff down at the bar table, turned to the DPP prosecutor and clerk, and said: ‘I’ve got a hot date at lunch, boys, so let’s not fuck around.’
Holy shit, what!? she replied within a minute.
And it’s a male prosecutor, and a male clerk, and the barrister’s instructing solicitor is a man, and Judge is a man, and there are all these teenage boys in the back row, and we’re about to start a rape sentence. Do you ever get tired of being the only woman in court who isn’t the complainant? Am I being too sensitive? Now they’re talking about Call of Duty.
The next day we started another trial. The defendant, Mr Baker, was a big man—both tall and wide—with a white beard. He gave the overall impression of a Santa Claus impersonator in the off-season, especially because of how confused and sad he seemed. It was another child sex trial, though, so I was fresh out of sympathy.
It had only been a couple of weeks and I’d already stopped giving these men the benefit of the doubt. But had I ever presumed them innocent? I was too close to see any of it properly. I knew about damning yet inadmissible evidence, having proofread or seen many pre-trial arguments where evidence that could almost certainly secure a guilty verdict is deemed inadmissible. I’d been researching how widespread sexual assault against girls is. At law school the first and most sacred principle they teach you comes from Blackstone: that it is better that ten guilty men go free, than for a single innocent man to be imprisoned. Benjamin Franklin said it was 100. I doubted that Franklin had been confronted with the rapes of one hundred girls, but my tally was stacking up. I also started seeing more clearly how men were given the benefit of the doubt outside of the courtroom. Debate about quotas for hiring and boards was raging in the press, while some commentators were denying the existence of the wage gap. It was all connected in a big sticky web that I couldn’t see past.
Every case felt like a David and Goliath battle. ‘There’s no evidence apart from the complainant’s story,’ they kept saying, but what evidence was she supposed to bring? So many of them were terrified, submitting to intercourse to avoid the punches or cuts that, ironically, would have helped them secure a conviction. So many took months or years to come forward—then, despite showing monumental strength in making a report, they were cross-examined about their ‘inexplicable’ delay.
My opinion on a defendant’s guilt or innocence had no effect on the outcome of a case, so while I was forced to sit mute, observe and document, at least my mind was free to indulge in whatever trains of thought helped me through the day.
I looked across at the twelve people whose names I’d just called out, who now sat at attention for R v Baker listening to Judge’s opening address. Had they come in with clean eyes and ears? How much evidence would they actually hear and how much would be confirmation bias? Sex crime trials have higher rates of conviction where weapons are involved and where people of colour are the defendants. Mr Baker was big enough not to have needed even a butter knife against a small girl, and he was Caucasian. It was a farcical idea that my selection of individuals from the wooden barrel would turn them, miraculously, from average Australians full of fear and misunderstanding into truly objective arbiters of truth.
Thinking about all that for too long made the wigs and robes seem gaudy. The pomp and rigmarole was a pantomime. The more I learned of the huge, ‘blind’ justice system, the more I learned that it was just as human and fallible as everything and everyone that created and preceded it. I didn’t know how to reconcile its festering belly with the righteous image of my father. Disillusioned was an understatement.
The prosecutor stood up and welcomed the jury, resting one arm on his podium and taking a relatable, calm approach to stepping them through the horrors Mr Baker was accused of perpetrating. The jury was going to hear about two occasions that Maggie, the complainant, and her mother took the train to visit Mr Baker. Once they arrived at his house, they all shared a cup of tea and had a chat. After the tea, on both occasions, Maggie’s mother suddenly felt sleepy and lay down for a long nap. Baker had a room full of model aeroplanes, and one time he took Maggie there, and another time he took her into a white van he’d parked out the back of his house.
While Maggie presented her evidence-in-chief from the witness box, I heard her mention that Mr Baker’s house was near Yeronga Train Station, and my gut dropped. That was my train station, in the suburb I’d been born into, grown up in, still lived in. I’d be getting the train home to Yeronga that afternoon. Had I walked past Mr Baker’s house before? Had he been in line behind me at the bakery before? Another light in the constellation of crimes had flickered on.
The second time, in the white van, Maggie had fought back. She said that both times she had been terrified of Mr Baker, and that she had ‘frozen’, but somehow in the back of that van, with his body so huge and terrible, she’d screamed and kicked and escaped. I looked at her properly then. She wore a white blouse, and her long brown hair was still slightly wet from being washed that morning; a beautiful, gentle cowlick sat just to the left of where she parted it. A gold chain sat lightly at her neck. Maggie had managed the impossible: Maggie had fought The Freeze. And she sat there in court, just metres from Baker! Maggie was my heroine.
At lunchbreak I got coffee with Dad. I thought my mum had probably told him to keep an eye on me at work, because we would meet up every other week.
‘What’s with this mum-falling-asleep thing?’ I asked him after briefly explaining the trial. ‘She’s just given evidence—the mother, that is—and she clearly thinks that her tea was spiked, but they kind of dance around it, even though the suggestion is blatant.’
‘They must have decided they couldn’t charge him for it,’ Dad said, ‘and so they can’t make an accusation of criminal conduct in a trial that they have no evidence to support.’
‘But everybody knows that’s what happened—or at least what the Crown is suggesting happened—so what difference does it make to say it out loud instead of dancing around it?’
‘They’re just the rules, my dear.’ He smiled and took a sip of his flat white.
‘The rules suck.’
‘Yep, sometimes they do.’ We were sharing a slice of lemon tart and started talking about plans for Easter when he asked me, ‘And how are you doing?’
I laughed. ‘This is like when I text your phone and Mum texts me back, pretending to be you, but I can tell it’s her because of the kisses at the end.’
I told him I was just tired, and felt like a liar.
As I walked back to my office, a wave of sadness hit me, topped with guilt, and I nearly burst into tears. How could I tell him what was actually eating at me, rotting on the inside? How could I do that to my mother and father—make them as sad as I knew they’d be? At least if I carried my secret alone, there would be only one casualty. Camera crews were pooling around the doors to the courts building and I kept my face down. So many awful things were happening in the building, I didn’t even know which one had made the news.
Judge had been wondering about Maggie’s mother
’s sleepiness too, and after lunch we convened court with counsel only.
‘What’s this about the mother being sleepy after having tea, then, gentlemen?’ Judge asked.
‘Yes, your Honour,’ the prosecutor stood up, taking the lead, ‘we have advised the witness not to make any criminal allegations about that aspect of the narrative, as we’re not in a position to go into it.’
‘Well, be careful then,’ Judge said sternly. ‘It’s getting a bit messy, and I don’t want a mistrial.’
‘Of course, your Honour.’
‘Very well, let’s get the jury back in.’
As usual, there was barely any other ‘evidence’. It was painful sometimes to see the looks on the jurors’ faces when they realised they wouldn’t get any CCTV footage or CSI-style DNA tests. It is the absolute catch-22: people feel they need certain types of evidence to feel comfortable convicting a defendant of a crime, but crimes against women and children are usually committed inside homes, by people they know. Mr Baker’s fingerprints would be all over that house and that van because they were his property, and there wouldn’t be any footage of the inside of his home. Without Baker ejaculating and then Maggie going straight to get a rape kit, there were no DNA test results to reveal in court. Maggie’s testimony was evidence, but defence had spent several hours telling the jury how unreliable it was. The defence barrister had the usual explanations to offer: that the mother had some ulterior motive, while the girl had an overactive imagination and was only too ready to go along with a wicked deception.
Crimes against men often have the kind of evidence that juries can easily accept—a black eye or a smashed window—but the justice system we uphold comes from the olden days. Queensland legislation says that a complainant’s lack of physical protest can’t be held as evidence that she consented, but without any broken ribs or split lips, defence barristers will tell the jury they ‘don’t have anything else to go on’. In order for the jury to find a defendant guilty, they often have to perceive a complainant as being particularly virtuous. It’s so easy for them to say that ‘her word alone’ wasn’t enough to overcome their reasonable doubts. The alternative is a little terrifying—that if one in five women are assaulted, one in five men might be assaulters.