Death Sentence Circle

Juror Number Seven keeps his pet pig with him. He says it calms his nerves. It snorts and he hits it, but it keeps snorting. He is the first to speak.

“He said it himself, he was guilty the moment he was born.”

We sit at a round table reminiscent of meetings from the days of King Arthur’s knights. They are speaking in a consensus that the man accused is guilty which does not surprise me, nor does it worry me.

I have a thesis in my mind. The American law is clean and fair, it is a landscape of freedom and its language and upkeep are as letters planted upon its soil the sprouts of poetry and liberty and justice. From each coast, Pacific and Atlantic waters, it is one harmonious breath. I hum while I am thinking and my song is interrupted.

“I’m scared to even ask,” Juror Seven says. “But do you got anything you want to say.”

“He is not guilty until we allow for it,” I tell them. “Don’t you get what we’re driving at here--”

“He’s guilty twelve times over. Plain as the sun and the moon. Yesterday, and the next day. Guilty as hell.”

For three days, at eighteen hours a session, this is my fight and my heart.

The dust has risen and it hangs in the air. I open up a window and car horns blare and jackhammers tear up the sidewalk. Strangers cursing at other strangers.

A juror says shut the window and I do and wipe the sweat off my face. A sea of dust comes through my mouth as I speak.

“They’ve proven nothing,” I say. “Let’s go over the transcript. Nothing in it suggests--”

“They proved murder. You can’t see that? ” In a circle, they each nod and give a repeated form of justifiable conviction based on desired evidence made against the man whose life hangs in our balance.

“None of these things were even mentioned in the case,” I say. I speak with passion. I tremble inside but am not defeated by it. “He wasn’t even charged with murder. They never said the crime, nor a reason for arrest for that matter.”

“Didn’t need to. He said it himself, he don’t appreciate the earthly law.”

“He was accused of this notion. And this, he could not defend properly for himself. This, is why we are here, in this room, right now. To prove that--”

“And he had on record that he called for a man of God to come in and save his soul. He said he done what he done, right then and there.”

I get partway through an allegory, comparing the law to a type of code for the afterlife. It takes off from there, and I start really rolling. I feel I’m going to turn some minds and I roll up my sleeves. The words come together forming out of the dust.

“You’re taking us in circles,” I’m told. “Taking us nowhere.”

“But what have we learned from those who came before us and fought and died in the name of fairness and innocence? Do we not carry on their testament, the very blood that drove them? Is our Republic not unique, does it not offer humanity a chance, ideas of hope?”

“This ain’t no Ethics college course, college boy. This is real life and the real world, with real consequences. There ain’t no world to save here. No innocence to bring back up. He ain’t no youngern, he’s grown. And he done what he done. And done admitted it in more ways I can count.”

All agree. They stare me down. In their muted eyes I can hear Hell-hounds growling.

I’ve quoted the constitution, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. When I first arrived here I was glowing as though I were pregnant with the idea of democracy. I had no idea the only thing I’d walk out with would be great shame and grief, my senses consumed by death. I knew now my spirit would never again possess bliss or grace, satisfaction or even determination, that all I had to offer it now would be a wake.

We will take another vote, and it will be the last one counted.

I look outside and the sun melts and the sky turns to decay. The dying dust of stars float down to earth as it were the tears of Libra.

I try to speak as one last rally cry. My hands slip on the table and my forehead knocks against it, and I feel three of my vertebrae crack. They laugh at me. Then I hold my forehead in my own hands. I can no longer speak and am trying not to break down.

The beat of my heart, here, is the song of a caged bird. It chokes to death in my own neck. I stand, slouching from the table with a crooked spine.

In the bathroom I wash my hands. Scrubbing intensely, singing in my head, ‘By and by Lord, by and by,’ over and over. When I was younger, my mother rocked me to sleep humming these verses to me.

The soap cloaks my palms under the running water, but I can still smell my own sweat and dirt waiting underneath, and I punch the mirror above the faucet. Blood trickles from the gashed knuckles. The face I stare at seems an amateur’s imitation of a Picasso-styled self-portrait. Disfigured and alien, clattered features and a shattered jaw, an L shaped nose and a mind fissured by a cracked-glass pale lightning chain, the eyes of a drooping landscape and broken soul.