Tipping the Scales

I hear the chains dragging on the floor long before I see his face, but our eyes don’t meet. I try to blend in with the wooden panels of the hallway because I’m not here on any official legal business. I’m just an observer.

The fluorescent lights of the courthouse reflect off the surface of his buzz cut. His orange suit reminds me of a sunset. A sunset marks a new beginning. It means saying goodbye to the current moment. For inmate 1707, this marks the end of life as he knows it.

He has a tattoo of “Matthania” that runs the length of his arm, wrapped in flowers and vines. I wonder if Matthania is his daughter, or his girlfriend, or his ex-wife. I wonder if the tattoo now haunts him, if it carries with it the pesky voice of his former spouse whispering over his shoulder --this is what your life has come to without me.

He had one too many drinks and now a group of children have disappeared. For vehicular manslaughter, he gets 15 years without parole but his expression doesn’t change after the judge’s pronouncement.

                                                             

 *

In a cozy office, I’m sitting across from my professor: a  quiet academic by day, and a staunch death row attorney by night. 

“The man was scheduled to be executed the day my daughter was born.” He says, using  The Annals of Jurisprudence as an elbow rest.

Perhaps he wished he could have split the two hemispheres of his face in half so that he could reserve one side  for smiling—-welcoming the new joy that had entered his life and one for mourning the fate of the person he had  tried to save. His face would  mirror  the tragi-comedy muses of ancient Greek dramas, reflecting the dual nature of our existence. 

“That must have taken a huge emotional toll on you.” I don’t know what else to say so I offer a statement of fact.

“It did. It really messes with your head. But... it’s the circle of life I suppose. And it just goes round and round.” 

He glances at the wall clock. “Now back to this week’s reading.”  

      *

 

There is a vast timeline of cases in which people have been falsely accused, convicted, and  executed —-with or without a trial—as a result. 13 year old Joan of Arc by burning. 14 year-olds George Stinney Jr. and Emmett Till  by electric chair and lynching respectively.  42 year old Troy Davis by lethal injection.  54 year old Ken Saro-Wiwa by hanging. 

There are so many ways to kill a man but not that many ways to save a life: CPR, mouth to mouth resuscitation, Heimlich maneuver, use a defibrillator, try to talk someone out of shooting themselves or jumping off of a balcony, call 911. Give an EPI pen. 

 

In My Last Supper: One Meal, a Lifetime in the Making, the restaurant critic Jay Rayner chronicles the final meals of death row inmates. Some wanted a bountiful feast of fried foods and desserts,  others were content with a single olive rolling around the plate. This last supper—-this ability to consume food for nourishment— would be a  final testament to their  humanity, before it was sucked away. 

*

 

How is the mind of a killer wired? Can we assume that someone who commits murder was always destined to do so? Did the superego malfunction while the id took over? 

We would like to believe that everyone is born with a blank slate of innocence that only gets soiled with experience—the serial killer was once a tormented child, and maybe, in his own eyes, still is.  We are often the heroes and heroines of our own stories, hardly seeing ourselves as the villains.

 *

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life. Maybe that’s why the symbol for justice is a scale. Wrongs must be corrected. For every crime there is a punishment,  so that order and balance can be restored. Yet, there will always be collateral damage. Someone will lose a father, a sister, a friend,  a quality of life, even as another gains closure, clarity, satisfaction, or restitution. 

Meanwhile someone may spend a lifetime on the chopping block  because of an accusation and a system that fails to vindicate.