My attorney has told the jury right in her opening statement that in this case there were no eyewitnesses and the evidence presented would be circumstantial. She went out of her way to emphasize how our system of rights entrenched in the state and federal constitutions protects the defendant's right to be silent in a criminal trial, even in a rape case such as this where the victim has died. Neither the judge nor the jury seem to care that I have refused to take the stand.
It was no more than a mere coincidence that I laughed rather rudely when my attorney was delivering the most eloquent part of her opening statement. My laughter had nothing to do with what she was saying. I have my own views on whether a criminal defendant should be allowed to keep quiet; in this case, for example, where I am the sole surviving eyewitness, I believe the judge should ask me questions and the jury be allowed to draw any reasonable adverse conclusion if I refuse to answer them--which I most certainly would. No, I did not laugh at my moral inconsistency either; such is the way of life.
I laughed because my attorney was pregnant and she looked quite repulsive: sometimes I felt it was the little creature in her womb who was spewing out the words of her opening statement; and sometimes I thought her pregnancy was fake and she had stuffed a pillow inside her belly. Only one juror caught on to my playfulness; he winked at me when I laughed--as if he agreed with me. Having no clue of what was in my mind, my attorney was busy making it clear to the jury that I did not kill the victim and that no murder charge had been filed against me. The victim was killed on her way to the hospital when at an intersection the ambulance collided with a police car involved in a hot pursuit at an unusually high speed. There was some evidence to show that the driver of the ambulance had been drinking margaritas for hours before he was called to pick up the victim from the scene of the "incident", as my attorney put it.
As far as I remember, the incident took place in the run-down cemetery located northeast of the town. Ever since the dawn of recent civilization, the town has been racially segregated: northeast is predominantly black; southwest exclusively white; the middle town is mostly inhabited by immigrants who, despite having lived for generations in the town, look and behave as if they have just arrived from their homes in Latin America. Different ethnic groups live in their own communities disconnected from each other except on the day of "the taco festival"--a day when all races congregate in midtown for eating tacos, drinking margaritas and dancing a localized form of Flamenco. On almost every other day, including the fourth of July, blacks detest whites, whites ignore blacks, and both blacks and whites don't think much of the immigrants.
My attorney has done a good job in pointing out to the jury on more than one occasion that the incident took place on the day of the taco festival. All the jurors, even the one who winked at me, are from the southwest side of the town; they all are white, (including the one who appears to have some oriental features) and they all understand quite well the frolic mood the festival induces among the people of the town. This is a day when retired and lonely men ask to kiss young ladies and teenagers resuscitate each other mouth-to-mouth in front of their church-going aunts and uncles. In some alleys, not far from the main street where the taco festival is held, everyone knows that black men fondle white women and gays and lesbians hold hands, embrace, kiss and bitch about heterosexual tyranny.
Most Latino immigrants do not take part in the hugging and kissing festivities, because the taco festival is the day when they want to make some extra money, and most set up food shops to sell hot and fried food made out of corn and wheat dough. Responding to the beat of the lambada music shooting out from their worn-out cassettes, some peddlers shake their behinds while ringing the cash register or handing over the merchandise to the customer. Some customers respond to these gestures by blowing kisses in the air; and some by shaking their own behinds faking a moment of sexual intimacy. So far, no one has brought out the fact that it was on such a phony moment of sexual transaction that I noticed for the first time the so-called victim who, after buying a taco, blew an alluring kiss in the air and swung her buttocks.
I followed her as she walked down the main street leading towards the gay and lesbian alley. She was nibbling, rather seductively, at the taco awkwardly wrapped in a white napkin.
It was a bewitching moment for me. For the first time in my life, I wanted to make someone pregnant; not anyone else--but her.
I followed her, imagining all sorts of things: making love to her in the middle of the cemetery located in our neighborhood--not far from where I was born and raised, not far from where I played and fought with other kids, not far from where I went to school and dropped out; in fact, very close to where my defiant buddies used and sold funny stuff, very close to my home and family, very close to anything I had ever known or felt.
I imagined her getting pregnant--first without anyone noticing it, not even her. Then one day, I thought, she would be jolted into the gravity of the enterprise when her belly would bulge as if she had been drinking a lot of beer. She would walk around taking heavy steps and dragging her body in the cosmos as if a prophet was being born-- the prophet of fusion, who would preach tolerance, love, dignity for all.
She was quite friendly when I started talking to her. She responded generously to all of my initial questions such as where are you from and what do you do and how many brothers and sisters do you have and when are you graduating from college. The conversation flowed smoothly like a documentary without commercials. She knew how to switch the topic when the existing one had been exhausted or was not working or was plain boring.
She said that she was politically liberal; that her father was a bigot but she still loved him; that except her mother women were smarter than men; that gays and lesbians should have the right to priesthood; that war was bad, even in self-defense. I shared some of her views and during this long conversation I felt emotionally exhausted and intellectually defeated--I did not know why. Maybe, she was too intelligent. But when she started making fun of my baseball cap and the way I wore it, I cheered up. My energy returned and I could feel the blood surging through my body.
Meanwhile we had walked into the cemetery--unintentionally, almost instinctively, as if the mythological gods had forced us into an unfamiliar and tragic predicament.
All of a sudden I realized that we were walking among the dead, some of whom were recently buried, some centuries ago, some as free men and women, some as slaves, almost all of them victims of arrogance and injustice, almost all of them bruised in their souls. Secretly, quietly, without sharing with her, I asked myself whether she was responsible for the wretched lives my ancestors lived before they died; and whether she was responsible for the injustice done to the dead even before she was born, even before she realized that the town was racist and that bigotry was a disgrace to my community and to the cosmos.
Removing my sunglasses, I looked into her eyes and to my great surprise they were no different from the eyes I had seen before, elsewhere. They looked exactly the same as, not a bit different from, the eyes of the cop who killed my father a few years ago, no different from the eyes of the teacher who flunked me in my composition class, no different from the eyes of the owner of the liquor store who caught me red-handed stealing a bottle of vodka. She was guilty, I whispered.
But then, I looked into her eyes again and found them beautiful. At that moment, I decided to erase the memory of the dead and of the injustice done to them; I craved to forge a new beginning, to write a new chapter in my life and in her life, indeed in our lives. I searched for a moment of oneness, and of love, and of fusion of the difference. I imagined co-founding a new reality in which she and I were equal partners. I asked her to make love to me.
The police officer 'who killed my father in self-defense' was on duty that day. He testified that he was driving around in the northeast neighborhood and as usual made a surveillance trip to the cemetery. A trip to the cemetery, he said, was an integral part of the beat; its purpose was to deter the neighborhood kids from using drugs and making any other mischief. The cemetery had indeed become a meeting place for the unemployed kids of the Northeast who sat on the graves of their ancestors and relatives drinking balderdash, smoking stuff, eating chicken wings; all too often engaging in long conversations that ranged from police brutality to white women.
The officer testified that as he was driving through the cemetery, he heard a low but constant moaning from a newly-dug grave. "As I looked into the grave," he said with a dramatic hand gesture pointing towards an imaginary grave in the courtroom, "there I found the victim lying flat at the bottom of the pit, facedown, absolutely naked; her hands were tied behind her back with a red handkerchief; and her cheeks were smeared with mud." The officer further told the jury that upon seeing him, the victim screamed, " I've been raped! O'my God! I've been raped--right here." A pair of blue jeans, a sleeveless blouse, black boots and an empty bottle of russian vodka were found, the officer said, in a bush not far from the pit. On cross-examination, the officer admitted that to the best of his knowledge, the victim might not have been wearing any undergarments, as no bra or underwear was recovered from "the scene of the crime."
The most damaging evidence came from my ex-wife who testified against me perhaps to avenge the haste with which I had dispatched her from my life, less than a month before the incident. My ex-wife made a big deal out of an old fight during which I had told her bluntly she would look uglier if she ever got pregnant and that if she ever did, I would do my best to make her seek an abortion. She told the jury that I wished only beautiful women could get pregnant and that I "still hold a grudge against God who fails to distinguish between women capable of giving birth to handsome children and others who are not." I know I have had such ideas in the past; but that was rather an aesthetic quarrel with nature. But I can see how my ex-wife's testimony bears upon the charge for which I am being tried. It was nonetheless inadmissible, my attorney told me, because "an accused can lawfully prevent his spouse from disclosing any confidential communication." Every time my attorney prepared her thin lips to utter the first syllable of the word "objection," the judge chimed in to overrule the entire concept. I have a feeling the judge does not like me: every time I look into his eyes, a chill spurts through my spine.
The owner of the liquor store did not add much to the prosecution's story. He did not bring up the fact that not too long ago he had caught me lifting a bottle of vodka from his shop. But he did say that on the day of the taco festival the victim, who was wearing blue jeans and a black blouse, and I came to his store and that she, not I, picked and paid for a big bottle of russian vodka. The owner of the liquor store further testified that he was "a bit surprised" to see the victim with "a kid from the Northeast" but other than that he did not notice anything out of the ordinary. On this, I don't understand why the judge asked the jury to disregard the statement because I know for sure that the owner of the liquor store squirmed to see us together.
The forensic evidence produced at the trial was much ado about nothing--high sounding cockamamie built upon concepts that would frighten anyone with common sense. The medical expert, perhaps a pathologist, who performed an autopsy on the victim's body, testified that there were no injuries to the body, nor was there any semen on the jeans that the victim was wearing on the day of the incident. However, the semen deposited on the victim's blouse, the doctor said, was plentiful and came from a person with type O blood. I am type O. For many jurors, I could see, this piece of evidence was like the third strike--I was no longer vested with the presumption of innocence. They all looked at me as if I were guilty beyond doubt--but of what? Nobody, not even me, paid any attention to my attorney's point that "every other person in this population is an O." The so-called expert, who looked eternally astounded as if fat pigeons had pooped on his statuesque bald head, went on and on explaining the blood types, the antigens, the DNA, and the structure of the victim's pubic hair found in my baseball cap. I could not fully understand the forensic finding that I was a "secretor." I guess it meant that my body was too quick to reveal its secrets to medical experts.
The expert further told the jury that the victim suffered from a progressive neuromuscular disorder that made her unusually susceptible to the effects of alcohol--and that the victim was three months pregnant at the time of the incident.
She was indeed pregnant. When she disclosed that to me right in the middle of the incident, I was shattered. My fantasy to forge a relationship, my dream to create a new reality, my longing to transform into love the age-old hatred that had ravaged the town, everything good in me crashed and came down for yet another burial in the graveyard. I felt as if I had lost my eyes. I could see nothing--nothing beyond the cemetery. In rage, I took out my handkerchief, forcibly tied her hands at her back, kicked her into the ditch and started walking back towards my neighborhood.
* Professor of Law, Washburn University.
All contents copyright © this story may not be published without the author's permission.
Return to the begining of the article