Trial, page 38
“Call it living if you like.” Standing, Ford stared down at Harris with none of his usual equilibrium. “I’m obligated to convey your offer. I’ve always been lawyer-like in our dealings, a fine upstanding member of the Cade County Bar and a proverbial credit to—let us say for the sake of polite ambiguity—my profession. But I just want to tell you how contemptible this is. Or would, if I’d ever learned the vocabulary at Cade County High School.”
Harris stood to face him. “That’s totally uncalled for.”
“I wish.” To Chase’s surprise, suddenly Ford’s voice became rough with emotion. “You already know that Bullock was a racist, and probably dirty. I imagine you suspect that Malcolm Hill is telling the truth. For sure you know that the physical evidence doesn’t contradict him. But you’ve got just enough extraneous shit to try and sell the jury on Malcolm as a Black cop killer.
“So don’t ever tell me you run a nice, clean office because you don’t embezzle money. What you’re doing by the book is one step up from a lynching. As far as I’m concerned, you should come to court in a white robe instead of a pinstripe suit…”
“Enough,” Harris interrupted. “I won’t be insulted. We’re through here, Jabari.”
Chase rose from his chair, standing next to Ford. “Not quite,” he told Harris. “As one elected official to another, I’ve got something to add. You’re looking to pacify all the racists in town by making my son choose between death and a living hell, all for a crime you must doubt he committed. You may hang on to your office, but there’s no way you’re fit to hold it.” He stopped, summoning his next words slowly and succinctly. “I’d quit public life before selling my soul as a condition of survival. But it seems like yours should be discounted for excessive handling.”
Ford put a hand on Chase’s shoulder. “Guess we’re through now,” he told Harris. “My co-counsel and I need to tell Malcolm all about your generous offer.”
Outside the courthouse, Ford and Chase stood on the grass. “Never done that before,” Ford said quietly. “Just lose it.”
“Why not? I did.”
“You’re his father. I thought I was going to keep you from going off on Harris.” Staring at the ground, Ford shook his head. “I always knew that bottling things up came at a cost. But Black folks have plenty of practice, and Black lawyers in this place get even more. Guess this was the moment I got too sick of it to care.”
“No matter, Jabari.”
Ford looked up at him. “How are you doing?”
Chase tried to find the words. “Sick. Angry. Scared for Malcolm. Devastated for Allie. And completely unsurprised by what just happened.”
“Yeah, I sensed it coming the moment Tilly started ruling on our motions.” Ford paused. “I could feel how pissed off you were at me. There was just nothing I could say.”
“You’d already said it—you predicted how the judge was going to rule. I just couldn’t help reacting to the reality of it.” Chase looked him in the face. “We may have more disagreements. I am his father, and I’ve got my own instincts. But you made a reasonable judgment about Tilly giving you a jury to work with. As of now, that’s in the rearview mirror.”
Ford nodded. “How do you think Malcolm will take this?”
“Not well. I didn’t, and I’m not the one who’s been locked up with PTSD running laps in his head. Imagine him deciding on this. Before we see him, I’d like to tell Allie.”
“Want me to be there?”
“No need.”
“Didn’t think so.” Ford shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ve known Allie Hill pretty much the whole nineteen years you two weren’t speaking. So I know how much better off she is with you here.”
Sitting beside Chase on the porch, Allie gazed at the fields where she, then Malcolm, had played as children.
“There are so many things I’m remembering,” she told him. “Bringing Malcolm home from the hospital. Watching him grow. Seeing him love and be loved by the same two people who’d always loved me. Thinking about why I came back here.” Her tone became weary. “It wasn’t just about all the racists who don’t hide what they are. People like Harris are why I exist. They always have been racists, and now they hold my son in their hands.”
“What will you tell him?”
“I only know what I want him to say. All my life I’ve raised him to claim the life he deserved. All that time, I was so afraid I’d lose him.” Her shoulders squared. “They can kill his body, or kill his soul. I’m frightened of the first and can’t abide the second. But he’s not just my child anymore.”
Pondering her implicit question, Chase took Allie’s hands in his. “I want him to fight this,” he told her. “But once I say so, I own a piece of risking his life. So would you. Every day of a trial will be even harder on us both.”
“I know. But that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
That was the heart of it, Chase knew. “Compared to Malcolm,” Chase answered, “nothing can.”
In the visiting room, Malcolm sat at the end of the table, with Chase Brevard and his mother sitting on each side, and Jabari beside her.
Leaning back, Malcolm hugged himself. “I’m afraid, all right?”
His mother touched his arm. “All of us understand, the best way we can.”
Malcolm shook his head, a captive to misery and fear. “I don’t want to spend my life in prison. I don’t want to never go to college, or fall in love, or have a family of my own. I don’t want to never sleep in my own bed again, or sit on our porch, or taste Grandma Janie’s cooking…”
“I understand,” his mother repeated softly. “I was there…”
“I don’t want them to fill me with poison,” Malcolm went on. “I don’t want to feel my life slip away while the three of you watch me dying through a glass window. I don’t want either one of those things happening because of some racist.”
Allie fell quiet. “None of us does, baby,” she finally said. “But only you can say what happened that night.”
Watching Malcolm and Allie, Chase, like Ford, remained silent. He felt every moment of their son’s anguish, and hers, as his own.
Finally, Malcolm turned to him. “What would you do?”
Across the table, Allie glanced at Chase and nodded.
Chase steeled himself. “I can’t decide for you, Malcolm. But there’s only one way for you to get back in the world. That means trusting Jabari and me to do all we can. Speaking as a father, I’d go to trial in a heartbeat before I let these people make their lives a little easier by stealing yours.”
For a long time, Malcolm simply looked at him. In a tight voice, he said, “You mean that, don’t you?”
Chase met his eyes. “That’s why I came here. True, I love your mother. But you’re the only son I’ve got.”
Malcolm said nothing, did nothing but continue to study his face. At length he angled his head toward Ford. “I guess it all comes down to me testifying.”
Ford glanced at Chase. “Maybe,” he answered. “But that’s another decision only you can make.”
Quiet, Malcolm looked from Ford to Chase and, finally, to Allie. “OK, Mom,” he said at last. “It’s like you always told me. No matter how hard it is, sometimes there’s only one way to stand up for yourself. The only way I’ve got is going to trial.”
PART seven
The Trial
61
In late January, Jabari Ford and Chase Brevard arrived at the Cade County courthouse to commence their defense of Malcolm Hill for his alleged murder of Sheriff’s Deputy George Bullock.
Sheets of rain soaked the ground, and the thunder that followed jagged yellow lighting came so close that the earth seemed to tremor. Deputies in rain gear lined the front of the courthouse and the steps climbing to its entrance, and Al Garrett had cordoned off a section of lawn on each side with a chain-link fence. To further prevent violence, the governor had sent state troopers in combat gear to man the barricades, interspersed with members of the prison riot squad bearing clear shields.
Despite the deluge, reporters and demonstrators filled the lawn beyond the fencing. Near the street jammed with sound trucks, angry whites wearing “MAGA” caps and carrying flags and placards massed with armed members of White Lightning led by Charles and Molly Parnell, some carrying hand-lettered signs saying “Death To Cop Killers.” For a last moment before exiting the car, Ford and Chase watched them through the shimmering, rain-spattered windshield. “Some of these people,” Ford observed somberly, “aren’t from anywhere near here. It’s like all the demagogues and haters made Cade County their spiritual home. God save Malcolm Hill from America.”
The lawyer looked exhausted, Chase thought. “How’s your family doing?”
In profile, Ford’s eyes narrowed in something resembling a wince. “OK, for now. We’ve got neighbors with shotguns sleeping on the floor of our living room. I try telling myself that no lynch mob full of racists will come to the house, looking to harm my wife and children. But then I see these people, and I ask myself whether I could save my family if the old days came back. It’s the primal fear of Black husbands and fathers.” He glanced at Chase. “And Allie?”
“She didn’t sleep all night. It’s hard for me to watch. But neither of us wants to be alone.”
For a moment, Chase thought again of all that had happened to them both, the centrifugal forces of present and past. He was still a congressman, albeit on leave: Though the Fourth District of Massachusetts had narrowly reelected him, the House Democrats had lost the majority—making Chase, in Jack Raskin’s estimate, all the more important to the future of his party and, perhaps, the country. But consumed by his son’s defense, Chase had effectively abandoned his nascent campaign for the Senate, and he could not see past the trial that awaited Malcolm. As for Allie, the new voting law that retarded voter access had led to wrenchingly close races across the state, including a loss for Governor, accelerating the tension between her needs as a mother afraid for her son and the inescapable pressures of leading Blue Georgia.
“Showtime,” Ford told him, and they got out of the car beneath their umbrellas and headed toward the courthouse.
Together, they climbed the steps to the entrance between a phalanx of deputies.
As reporters thrust sound mikes from beyond the barricades, a man shouted, “Kill them!” At the corner of Chase’s vision, Molly Parnell appeared dressed in a White Lightning jacket and brandishing an AR-15, her mouth distorted with hate as it spewed venomous words he read as, “Go fuck your nigger.”
“Sort of redefines the phrase ‘femme fatale,’” Chase murmured to Ford. “You wonder what breeds human garbage like that.” It was a relief, he discovered, when they passed through security and their footsteps began echoing in the hallway.
Entering the courtroom, Chase paused to reorient himself.
It was modern, spacious, and devoid of architectural imagination. Four chandeliers hung from brass chains, and Judge Tilly’s raised wooden bench loomed above the left corner, stationed in front of the door to his chambers. To the right of the bench was the witness stand and, directly in front, a desk for the court reporter. Behind it was an American flag, and facing it was a table for the prosecutor, to his right, and one for the defense.
Separated by a wooden railing and bifurcated by a carpeted aisle were six rows of wooden benches, once again packed with reporters and spectators, who now included, as the prosecutor and judge well knew, a veteran lawyer from the Department of Justice. Beneath the paintings of judges in black robes, armed sheriff’s deputies again lined the walls. To each side of the courtroom were television cameras positioned to capture the judge, lawyers, and witnesses, for an increasingly violent and embittered nation; but not the members of the jury who, for the duration of the trial, were sequestered at the Winthrop Hotel while not in court.
They waited in the jury box, their composition a tribute to Ford and, Chase was compelled to acknowledge, to Albert Tilly. On the cusp of jury selection, Tilly had sternly informed the lawyers of his resolve to assure that the list of potential jurors from across Cade County accurately represented the race and gender of its residents. The judge had proven a rigorous supervisor: Working from a diverse jury pool of roughly two hundred people, he brought in the prospective jurors one at a time and, after extensive questioning by Harris and Ford, asked questions of his own.
The painstaking process had taken two weeks. The result was a twelve-person jury of eight men and four women—seven whites and five Blacks. There were, by Ford’s reckoning, three likely foremen: Stephen Hewitt, a white computer science professor from the local community college; Robert Franklin, the first African American loan officer at the Cade County Bank; and Nettie Gray, a brunette whose precise and punctilious manner reflected her position as chief financial officer of Freedom’s only department store. All had sworn that they could serve impartially; all, as required by law, disclaimed any moral objection to the death penalty. Collectively, Ford had opined to Chase, they were better than he might have expected, and the best he could do.
“Never would’ve happened,” Chase had deadpanned, “if I hadn’t insisted on keeping Judge Tilly. I could sense his finer qualities from the moment I saw him.”
Ford and Chase took their seats in the courtroom, leaving a chair between them for Malcolm. From the prosecution table, Harris nodded with perfunctory courtesy. Beside him was Amanda Jackson, a Black assistant district attorney in her midthirties. In Ford’s estimate, she was not only able but a shrewd choice: At least for the Blacks on the jury, she would serve as a counterweight to Ford himself and, symbolically, to Allie.
Turning, Chase located Allie and her mother in the first row behind them. A few hours before, he had held her, restless in the dark. Now, however sleep-deprived and worried, she smiled at him. Janie, too, briefly smiled. With Malcolm, Chase thought, these two women, Black mother and daughter, had become his family in Georgia.
Across the aisle were Dorothy Bullock and her children. Ignoring Allie and Janie, George Bullock’s widow stared fixedly ahead. But Fay Spann, sitting beside Bullock’s daughter, pinned Malcolm Hill’s mother with a poisonous stare.
At the preordained time, 9:55, two sheriff’s deputies escorted Malcolm to the well of the courtroom. He was dressed, Chase saw, in the subdued charcoal-gray suit Allie had bought to accommodate the weight loss sustained during his imprisonment in a room with one overhead light, books, a television, and a bed. In descending quiet, he walked between the rows of spectators fixated on every step, taking his place between Ford and the man everyone knew was his father.
To Chase, Malcolm looked older than his years. But his face was set with the resolve reminiscent of Allie’s at her worst moments of adversity. Touching his shoulder, Chase said under his breath, “We’ll be OK.”
Turning, his son started to answer. Before he could, the courtroom deputy called out, “All rise,” and the capital murder trial of Malcolm Hill began.
62
Ascending the bench, Judge Albert Tilly was a portrait of genteel gravity. “The prosecution,” he told Harris, “may deliver its opening statement.”
Allie watched the district attorney approach the jury, wondering what impression he would make. In his gray suit, gray tie, and white shirt, he seemed to affect the clothing and demeanor of a serious man attending a memorial service, and the tone of his opening remarks suggested reverence and regret.
“We are here,” he began, “because a leading member of our community is dead.
“Deputy Sheriff George Bullock spent three decades in law enforcement. He gave his days, his nights and, finally, his life, to make Cade County safer. On the night he died, he was simply doing his job, as he had every day of his career. He stopped an unknown driver on a routine DUI, never knowing that this was the last traffic stop he would ever make. Because the man behind the wheel was Malcolm Hill.”
Helpless, Allie fortified herself to hear a sanctimonious reimagining of the sneering deputy who had trapped her son on a dark country road—a compendium of pious lies calculated to persuade twelve men and women who did not know either person that Malcolm deserved to spend his life in prison, or to die. Her mother, Allie saw, had clasped her hands tightly together, as if listening might become unbearable.
“Only one gun was fired that fatal night on Old County Road,” Harris continued, “the Glock 19 that Malcolm Hill had purchased a week before. George Bullock died with his gun still in his holster, from a single bullet fired at such close range, there were burn marks on his face.” Harris paused, scanning the jury, and suddenly his voice rose in anger. “That’s what happens, ladies and gentlemen, when you’re murdered up close and personal—very personal—by an angry young man filled with hatred for any law enforcement officer who happens to be white.
“You don’t have to take my word for that. Take Malcolm Hill’s.”
Turning abruptly, Harris walked to the prosecution table, picked up a remote, and aimed it like a gun at a television screen beside the witness stand. “This,” he told the jury, “is a video posted by Malcolm Hill one year before he murdered George Bullock.”
Harris clicked the remote, and the opaque glass filled with the image of Double-XX.
Allie was shaken again, this time by watching the jurors fixate on a rapper personifying menace in quasi-military gear, a black handgun dangling from his finger, words echoing in the courtroom as he called for the random murder of police. With a twitch of Harris’ finger, the rapper’s lethal smile froze on the screen. As Allie watched, the Black juror in whom Jabari reposed considerable hope, Robert Franklin, looked from the frozen face of the rapper to the frozen expression of her son.
