by Bri Lee
That day, the jury were sent out to deliberate, and within an hour they’d replied with a note. My heart sank, thinking it would be Gladstone all over again, but it was a question: Please define reasonable doubt?
We reconvened court and Judge read out the prescribed paragraphs from the Queensland benchbook: a compendium of resources that tell judges what to tell juries about certain issues, infamous for confusing the matter further rather than clarifying it.
‘You know what they do in New Zealand?’ Judge asked me as we returned to chambers, after I’d made a joke about tallying the number of times we’d be asked that question.
‘What?’
‘When the jury asks, “What does reasonable doubt mean?”, they just tell them, “You have to be sure,”’ he said, smiling.
‘Wow! But that’s so—’
‘So simple!’
‘I know!’
‘And it works,’ he said, gesturing excitedly. ‘Here we get all caught up in sounding smart and using big words. Jurors don’t care about legal words, they just want to know how to do their job. If you tell them they need to be sure, they’ll tell you what they really believe.’
I wondered, yet again, why Judge had only made it to the District Court. I imagined how differently that building might run if he was at the top. He’d been on the Fitzgerald Inquiry—the commission of inquiry into police corruption in Queensland in the 80s that got a premier deposed and several very powerful men jailed—and spent years in both prosecution and defence. He researched childhood development and designed rules for when barristers were cross-examining kids in court. He actually cared about the justice system. But he’d have to retire in a couple of years. What part of the game hadn’t he played right?
Dad had told me plenty about how political the appointing of magistrates and judges was. I thought again of his refrain, ‘Never look for justice.’ Apparently not even within the justice department itself. I couldn’t hide my loathing of the judges whose religious and ‘moral’ beliefs influenced the way they ran court. Perhaps the power-parties took place after Church on Sundays—it was as likely an explanation as any.
As I walked to work the next morning, I felt like shit. It didn’t help when I spotted Evelyn as she strode into the glass sliding doors ahead of me. Did she straighten her hair every day? Was she one of those rare and miraculous creatures who remembered to moisturise their elbows in winter? My pitiable state was unsurprising, given my smoking, drinking and purging the night before, but I was grateful that the jury were out deliberating. It gave me time to catch up on feeling human.
I made a coffee and sat by the window on level thirteen. Dark clouds were threatening rain nearby, but in the clearer distance an aeroplane made its way slowly across the skyline. I wondered if Maggie would be triggered, for the rest of her life, whenever she saw a model aeroplane. A harmless—even fun—object for most people might sit dormant in her mind, ready to explode her brain in an unsuspecting moment. Horrific memories of screaming and trauma would shatter through her life like shrapnel. I read once that the human body slowly pushes shrapnel back out through the skin. That a shard of metal can take years to reach the surface and finally, truly be expelled. Veterans get bits coming out of them decades after wars. Could the same thing happen to memories? Perhaps that was what I was feeling: an itchy, irksome thing, a foreign object inside me, moving just millimetres every year, tearing through me until it breached.
‘He told me I was beautiful,’ Maggie had said.
I wanted to go find her, to hug her and tell her that she’d be okay, but I wasn’t yet at a time in my own life where I could walk past a trampoline and not think about what had happened to me, so I’d have been lying. What would I really have told her? That she was braver than me, for a start. That I was so proud of her—in awe of her, even. But I’d also have had to tell her that her memories would be with her forever. That they might walk silently alongside her, like giant spiders nobody else could see. That some people might be afraid of them when she tried to explain it all. That she might find them grotesque.
‘Hey, hey,’ Megan sat down beside me, ‘what’s up?’
‘Ugh, just the same shit, you know. The mum’s friend. They’re deliberating. It’s already been overnight so I’m hopeful.’
‘That’s good.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m in a child exploitation material sentence,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Oh, shit, again!? How many of these gross dudes are out there?’
‘Too many, I guess,’ she said. ‘We’ve had to break for lunch because there’s literally so much material to go through.’ We both sat quietly looking out the window to the city below. ‘Lizzie was in my office crying this morning,’ Megan told me.
‘Shit, I didn’t realise it was that bad,’ I replied.
‘Her judge told her that she wasn’t the first choice for the job,’ Megan said very quietly.
‘What!?’ I stage-whispered, ‘what good does it do to tell someone that?’
‘I know, it’s just cruel.’ She shook her head.
Judge called out to me from his office and I jumped up, waving goodbye to Megan.
‘I left my evidence law material down in court,’ Judge said to me, sitting at his desk, pen in hand.
‘I’ll grab it!’ I smiled. ‘Are you checking about this tea-drugging business?’
‘Yes, I’m a bit nervous about a mistrial,’ he said. ‘I need to know how to direct the jury, or if I should just leave it.’
I nodded. We hadn’t had a mistrial yet but Megan had told me how painful it was. One of the counsel makes an error, or a witness says something about the defendant’s criminal history, or a juror asks a stupid question about having googled the defendant, and the whole trial goes down the drain. Cancelled. It takes at least another six months to schedule a retrial, the complainant has to go through the whole horrific process again, and the defendant is either out on bail or locked up in the meantime. Nobody wins.
I’d only ever heard stories about defendants calling for a retrial after being found guilty because they rightly suspected that the complainant just wouldn’t be able to go through the whole process again.
Retrials were a huge problem in the system, and one I was keen to avoid happening on my watch. Not to Maggie.
I took the internal judges’ elevator down to level ten and grabbed all his materials, then exited the courtroom through the normal doors to go back up to our offices. But I was stopped mid-stride, disturbed.
Outside the courtroom, the stark, open foyer was silent, but Mr Baker may as well have been screaming. Or maybe his soul was screaming and I could hear it because I also belonged to his awful world. As he sat looking out the huge glass window, such terrible sadness emanated from him that I couldn’t tear my eyes away. He was like a beacon for a black hole. I let an empty elevator open and close in front of me, staying where I was at the end of the room, quietly watching his obese, slumped figure. Baker would wait the next two days to find out if he was about to go to prison. He had his hands clasped in his lap, and the skin on them was thin and covered in age spots.
I thought about those ancient hands moving over a young girl’s backside and flinched.
The rain was coming down so hard, Baker couldn’t even see anything out the window. Just a huge glass pane of rippling grey. On another day I had stood watching the effect of a real Queensland downpour on the large cold windows, marvelling at the beauty of the dappled light and how protected I was from nature, ten storeys high in a marvellous human invention. I didn’t know what Baker was thinking while he sat there, but probably it wasn’t about how fantastic glass skyscrapers were.
Baker should have gone outside and walked around a bit, got a fresh flat white, enjoyed the rain on his thin skin, because it seemed likely he would be looking at large grey walls every day for the next eight years.
It must be an awful time for a defendant, waiting for a verdict. Perhaps if I was a more selfless
or mature person I’d say something like, ‘I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy’, but of course I knew one person in particular I would wish it on.
In the elevator back up to Judge, with my arms full, I pressed my forehead against the cool chrome panels. Would I? Could I?
Maggie had. Maggie’s mum believed her. I felt sure that my family would believe me. Maggie wasn’t old enough to have a boyfriend, though.
I looked at the greasy stain my cheek had left on the elevator wall and exited quickly as the doors opened on level thirteen, thinking of how disgusting my body was, wondering how Vincent could want me if he knew what had happened to me, let alone if I told him properly about this stuff or tried to deal with it in some way that meant telling other people and talking about it a lot. It could alter something between us; it could shift our tectonic plates. He might not want to be intimate with me again. Maybe it was best I not tell anyone, ever. I was fine, after all. I had a law degree, I was in a good job, I had friends and a boyfriend. Why would I light a fire under all that?
‘Thank you,’ Judge said to me as I placed all the material on his desk. ‘I also need you to proofread this judgment for me, please,’ and he passed me a thick document. It was another pre-trial hearing about the admissibility of evidence he must have heard before I’d started. A friend of the family had allegedly molested three young girls—all cousins—when they were in the swimming pool, and the defendant’s family had enough money to fight the allegations at each stage. I sat back at my desk and thought about my own pool in Yeronga, out the back of our house, right next to the trampoline. Perhaps the fire had already been lit.
BUNDABERG WAS BEAUTIFUL. JUDGE AND I were staying at Bargara, a beachside outcrop of houses on stilts and sleek apartments that converged at a jetty with some single-storey shops attached to the shoreline. Each morning Judge and I met at the car, and I drove us for twenty minutes through sugarcane fields to the courthouse further inland. The sky was bright blue and the fields of rich green grew up around us at least ten feet high. In his luxurious, silent car we slid along the long, flat road, only catching a glimpse of the horizon at one point in the journey where the road gave a slight rise. I remember looking out for that vision, remembering to be grateful for the blue and the green, the cool leather seats. It was the one time that entire year when I enjoyed driving for Judge. The one time my nervousness behind the wheel was overcome by the beauty of our surroundings.
It was only when we reached the courthouse and had to buzz ourselves into the carpark through the barbed-wire fence, and I could see the men waiting on the cement out the front of the Magistrates Court, and the police officers milling around with their heavy utility belts, that I was brought back to reality. We’d step out of the car into the humidity that was normal for a tropical autumn and enter the old brick building, and I would walk past a filing system of current matters and a huge storage room full of floor-to-ceiling shelves of old cases. I wondered if there had been a crime in Bundaberg for every sugarcane plant that grew in Bundaberg. How many women and children needed to be processed—churned through the system—before change would come?
The Bundaberg courts building was unremarkable but for its odours. The old building had a mould problem, so chlorine in the air stung my eyes as though I was in a public swimming pool. Somehow the pong from the ancient carpets still reached my nose, though. The courtroom itself had few features of note, but the dock was new. It sat apart like an implant, with its glass panels and sleek metal lock, from the wood and linoleum of the rest of the room. The seats for the public were reminiscent of church pews.
I hung my robes in my little office annexed to Judge’s and thumbed through the fresh stack of files on my desk, practising the pronunciation of names, ready to read them out in the courtroom when I arraigned each one of them.
The word ‘arraignment’ came from an old French word that meant ‘to call to account’. At the beginning I had thought the arraignment was a meaningful, significant moment in court, but by Bundaberg I knew better. That feeling had been conjured by my own ego because I happened to have a role in that part of the process, but Judge and counsel were rarely surprised by anyone’s plea, and even less surprised to hear about their offending. Very few criminals were original, neither in their crimes nor in the way they tried to evade responsibility for them.
At that moment I remembered a funny story my father had told my family about a break-and-enter where the burglars posted pictures of themselves and their stolen loot on Facebook, tagging the McDonald’s carpark they were in. The police pulled the CCTV footage, tracked them right back to their rental property around the corner, and arrested them within twenty-four hours. ‘They’re not criminals because they’re smart!’ Dad had said, and we’d all laughed. It was less funny now. So many defence submissions for sentencing stated that their clients were ‘below average intelligence’. Maybe we could make jokes about intelligence for punch-ups down the pub, but I felt quite sure that the ‘smarter’ sex offenders were simply more educated and wealthy and therefore less likely to be brought to court.
Judge once wondered aloud to me about what he was supposed to make of the submission. ‘Technically half the population is of below-average intelligence, but I don’t think 50 per cent of people would agree, would they? And what does defence even mean when they say it? Intelligence comes in all different shapes and forms. If they’re trying to tell me he lacks a formal education, then they should just tell me that. Maybe I could make an order that makes it easier for him to find certain kinds of work.’ Judge was holding his wig in his hand, waving it around, frustrated. ‘Don’t just tell me he’s stupid.’
A magpie on a branch near the window cried out, bringing me back to the present. Its throat caught the sunlight as it bobbed to warble its beautiful song. Every new town would have another new stack for me. Towns I would never go to in my whole life would have stacks waiting for someone else.
I found the file for the trial that was to start that morning. R v Kevin Donny Reester. The indictment listing the charges against Reester was the biggest I’d ever seen. It stretched over five pages and painted a picture of offending that escalated as it spanned almost a decade. Multiple counts of indecent treatment of a child were followed by counts of rape in the double digits. Two counts of maintaining a sexual relationship with a child finished things off with a horrific flair. Every count carried multiple circumstances of aggravation—communicating to the reader that yes, things got worse. Many indicated that the complainant was under twelve or under ten, and all showed that the child was ‘under the care’ of Reester at the time. I got to the end of the long list of allegations before I realised that there were actually three complainants. I hadn’t noticed initially because they shared their last name; they were sisters.
The courtroom was empty and silent as I set up my workspace in front of Judge’s bench. I finished preparing things but couldn’t shake a bad thought: I’d never seen multiple complainants in a single criminal trial before. That’s right, I remembered from university, joinders. I slumped back into my chair and looked at the dust motes floating through the still space. There are extremely strict rules about putting a single defendant on trial for offences against multiple complainants; history shows that it’s just too overwhelmingly prejudicial to the accused. Juries can’t get past it—can’t resist a conviction. We are social animals. We groupthink. Normally the Crown has to make an application to the court to allow a joinder, but that day my anxiety rose when I couldn’t see any record of that happening on the file. The case painted against Reester by the indictment document alone was overwhelming. I felt sure he would plead guilty if things went to trial like this—with all three sisters together.
A door at the opposite end of the court opened, and I pretended I was busy but watched two men walk in. I didn’t need to see that one of them was a security officer to guess the other was Reester—the space, previously still and quiet, hummed with tension. They took their places: Reester in th
e dock and the security officer sitting in front of it. Reester wasn’t just slim, he was skinny, and I estimated he was much shorter than me. I glanced from the balding man behind the glass to his file on my desk. It had manifested in front of me. From a case note in class to something dirty and real. I didn’t even want to touch it. My stomach had begun churning.
I knew that Reester’s lawyer would challenge the joinder application. He’d be an idiot not to. And if those girls couldn’t bring their case together then maybe none of them would even testify. The offending had occurred over a decade ago so there was unlikely to be any evidence aside from their memories. They weren’t children anymore either, and juries aren’t kind to women unless they’re ‘perfect victims’.
I returned to my little office and looked out the window, but the magpie was gone. The palm trees stood out against the vast blue sky vista, and I fumbled trying to fasten my jabot around my neck. The little white tie with its two starched tails felt utterly ridiculous. A tightness was spreading across my chest and I ripped it back off, panting for air. I fumbled with the window but it was sealed shut, so I put my forehead on the cool glass and tried to imagine feeling the breeze I could see moving the palm fronds. I willed the magpie to return, humming his song, my fingers at my neck, and counted to five breathing in, and counted to five breathing out. I needed a break but someone knocked at my door. There was no rest for those who worked with the wicked.
Callover finished about an hour later and Judge announced that the court would move on to the listed trial—to Reester.