Defense of an Other

by Grace Mead

  “Have you been attacked since you’ve been here?” Lieutenant Dietrich asked.

  “No. I told you. I cut a deal with Parnell for his protection,” Matt said.

  “If a homosexual is any man who has sex with another man, you know how many people I’d have to put into protective custody around here?”

  “Lieutenant Dietrich,” Luther said. “You know Parnell doesn’t mess around. Parnell’s going to kill Matt if he goes back to Building 2 tonight.”

  “All I know is verbal threats aren’t enough to justify protective custody,” Lieutenant Dietrich said. “But if you want me to take a closer look at the way things are going around here, maybe I should search the library.”

  “Yeah,” Ted said. “Maybe you should check every seventh book.” Lieutenant Dietrich scowled at Ted and a vein in his forehead started to throb.

  “I have nothing more to say.” Lieutenant Dietrich left the library and Ted scampered after him.

  “Do you think he was paid off?” Matt asked Luther.

  “He’s been gettin’ paid off for a long time,” Luther said. “Ted just confirmed it.”

  “What do you mean?” Matt asked.

  “Parnell’s been using library books to smuggle dope from Angola to Wheaton for a coupla years now,” Luther said. “Every seventh volume of a case reporter that goes to Building 2 has drugs hidden in it.”

  “And you knew about this?”

  “Yeah,” Luther said. “I’ve known about it for a while. But even us older folks can’t get in the way of business. No one likes that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Matt asked, hurt.

  “I was trying to protect you,” Luther said. “I figured if things went bad, then you could claim you didn’t know and you’d be telling the truth.”

  “Shit,” Matt said.

  “If you want, we can go to the warden. Dietrich will try to blame me, but we’ll just rat out Parnell at the same time. It’ll give the warden another reason to help protect you from Parnell.”

  “Then what happens to you?”

  “If I rat Parnell out, they’re gonna have to protect me too.”

  “I hate to ask,” Matt said.

  “Don’t ask,” Luther said. “It’s done.” Luther went to the phone and called the warden’s office. The warden’s assistant informed Luther he was meeting with Lieutenant Dietrich and would call him back.

  Matt emailed his current draft Supreme Court brief to Farrar and Lisa, along with a short note describing the potential threat from Parnell and Lieutenant Dietrich’s refusal to place him in protective custody. Farrar emailed back saying he was “on it.”

  Matt watched the clock for the rest of the afternoon. He wrote a letter to his mother, telling her he loved her and thanking her. Fortunately, they communicated those thoughts so regularly he didn’t need to give away the fact that he feared this letter could be his last.

  Six o’clock arrived without any call from the warden or email from Farrar.

  Ted appeared in the doorway. “Time to go back to Wheaton, Durant.”

  “Come on, Ted. Isn’t there some way I can crash here tonight?” Matt asked.

  “What? First time I picked you up to drive you here, you threatened to tell Parnell on me. How’d you go from there to begging me to keep you from him?” Ted asked.

  “I was just kidding earlier,” Matt said.

  “You weren’t and it doesn’t matter,” Ted said. “I’d be guaranteed to have an accident if I put you in protective custody. The lieutenant might have the juice to say no to Parnell, but I don’t. Let’s go.”

  Matt refused to rise from his chair. Even if Ted reported him to the Angola guards for refusing to move, their first reaction would be to stick him in solitary. But then Ted turned red and put his hand on his pepper spray.

  “Don’t make me do this, Durant,” Ted said. “It’s not the end of the world. They’re just going to teach you a little lesson.”

  Matt looked at the pepper spray and realized that Ted would just spray him into submission and then take him back to Parnell. He considered whether he should take his chances and risk going back to Parnell wounded and even more vulnerable, but it wasn’t a choice. Ted was a scumbag, but Matt wanted at least to get in a few shots at Parnell and his flunkies—he wouldn’t go down without a fight. “Okay,” Matt said. “I’m going.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Luther said. Tears ran down his face.

  “Don’t be. You did the best you could. You’re not the one who’s going to beat me up,” Matt said.

  The drive back to Wheaton took forever. Matt regretted it was dark and there was nothing to see, unlike his drive from New Orleans to Wheaton—nothing to see and nothing to lose. He just needed to do as much damage as possible before they took him down.

  The truck pulled to a stop, Ted deposited him outside Building 2, and then exited with truncheon in hand to make certain Matt went into the building.

  He entered Building 2 and Parnell was waiting. “Bathroom. Now!” Parnell barked.

  Once there, Parnell said, “I’m not gonna start fucking you up now because we gots to be at dinner in thirty minutes. But it’s gonna be a long night for you.” As he spoke, he ground his right fist into his left palm.

  “I was disappointed and surprised by the appellate court’s ruling,” Matt said with an even tone, determined not to reveal his panic and to keep his focus locked into one of the more important conversations of his life. “Their decision was wrong, and I’m sorry. But there’s still hope. The Louisiana Supreme Court could still reverse your conviction.”

  “I’ve listened to too much of your bullshit for too long,” Parnell said. “I’ve already got a lawyer outside. What do I need you for?”

  “Did your outside lawyer offer an opinion on how I’d done?”

  “Yeah. He said today that you’d done a helluva job and it wasn’t your fault. But he’s a fucking lawyer on the same losing side as you. He says you did a bad job, that means he did a bad job, too. His opinion don’t mean shit.” Parnell spat on the ground.

  “What do you have to lose? Why don’t you just wait until your appeal to the Louisiana State Supreme Court is resolved? If I lose that appeal, it’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  “Boy, you need be taught a lesson. You know how expensive my protection is for other folks? You’ve made me look like a fucking fool. And I don’t stand for that. ’Sides, I figure someone like you starts by diddling dogs, kids, then dudes. And someone diddled my nephew. God, I hate faggots.” Parnell said. “Why don’t you enjoy dinner tonight? If’n you’re lucky, your jaw ain’t gonna be much good for eating for a real long time.”

  Matt went to dinner and sat, as usual, alone in a crowded row of inmates. The other prisoners watched him intently, but only Tyrone and a handful of others had any sympathy in their eyes. Matt didn’t bother to eat; he didn’t think he could keep it down, and one more meal wasn’t going to make him any stronger. After dinner, he walked back to Building 2 with a leaden weight in his stomach.

  Parnell was waiting for him with three large men. “I decided what I’m gonna do to you tonight. These guys’re gonna beat the shit out of you and then run a train. But it’s gonna be a clean train, if you know what I mean.”

  Matt knew what he meant. The prisoners’ intravenous drug use and unprotected sex—both before and after arriving at Wheaton—meant many had HIV or AIDS. A clean train meant Parnell wouldn’t include any prisoners he knew to be HIV-positive.

  “You can go ahead and struggle if you want,” Parnell said with an ugly grin. “Sometimes they like it better that way.”

  Matt allowed himself to be walked back into the bathroom, knowing none of the other prisoners would intervene. He focused on keeping distance between himself and his would-be assailants, remembering to think about striking, given that he was much smaller, and formulated a crippling opening combination followed by the moves most ingrained in his muscle memory—at least in theory.

  As the
y passed through the threshold into the restroom, Matt lashed out. He stepped into a sidekick, stomping down on the knee of the inmate to his right. Matt heard a wet pop as the man collapsed. Before the inmate to his left could react, Matt threw two left jabs and then a left hook to the ribs to set up the real strike: a right palm to the middle of his face. His nose crumpled into a crimson stain.

  Matt was clocked from behind at the base of his skull. He fell and looked up with bleary eyes to see Parnell holding a metal bed leg he’d somehow pried loose. Inevitability set in and he actually found himself less frightened than he’d been an hour before. At least he’d hurt two of the assholes.

  That was his last coherent thought before the stomping began. He experienced the remainder of the attack in strobe-like flashes as he drifted in and out of consciousness—the inmates kicking his ribs into shards and splinters; Parnell smashing his face into a pulp; and, finally, Parnell kicking him in the balls with all his might.

  Matt woke in the middle of the night on the concrete floor of the bathroom. He curled into a fetal position and sobbed until his body shook, which prompted a sharp pain in his ribs that broke his hysteria. He then drifted in and out of a twilight sleep for the rest of the night. No one in the building dared call for help, and Matt tried not to think about whether—if Parnell hadn’t been around—anyone would have bothered.

  Chapter 28

  Parnell had been so enraged and had beaten Matt into such a subhuman state that—perhaps because of physical impossibility, some vague fear of legal consequences, because it was obviously unnecessary, or some combination—he hadn’t been raped. The self-defense lessons had worked, just not the way he’d planned.

  After days in an outside hospital, Matt was moved to the prison infirmary, but, for the next three weeks, his jaw remained wired shut. Matt received a letter from Farrar enclosing an angry and threatening missive he’d sent the warden before Parnell’s ambush. Just as Lieutenant Dietrich had rejected Matt’s pleas for protection, the warden had rejected Farrar’s and—by the time Farrar had finished negotiating with the warden—it had been too late to go to a judge. Farrar had also been forced to file the briefs in the Supreme Court without Matt’s additional input. At the time, he’d been incapable of speech.

  Visitors weren’t allowed in the infirmary, but his mother sent daily letters. Though she’d apparently learned of his hospitalization from Farrar, her letters contained few questions other than general inquiries about how the doctors thought he was coming along. Matt had been lucky for his first couple of years at Wheaton and she knew it. She couldn’t bear to learn the details.

  During his third week in the hospital, Matt began drafting a letter to Eric that he imagined he’d never send. He revised it over and over and over, obsessing over minor edits: rather than countenance a scratched-out word, whenever he improved on a word choice and struck its predecessor, he recopied the entire page. And then he’d cross out another and have to start again. He didn’t explain the timing in the drafts, but he suspected if he ever sent it Eric would understand that it wasn’t coincidental. He attempted to thank Eric—in between the lines—for his first meaningful sexual experience and his continued support, but he found it impossible to write in the necessary code.

  During Matt’s fourth week in the infirmary, he received a package he’d been awaiting anxiously: the transcript of Farrar’s oral argument before the United States Supreme Court. Matt had read the final briefs, which he believed made a compelling argument, but the transcript provided the first opportunity to gauge the justices’ reactions.

  Matt tore the brown envelope open and flipped to the first page:

  Chief Justice Roberts: We will hear argument next in No. 09–1359, Durant v. Louisiana. Mr Farrar.

  Farrar: Mr Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. Matthew Durant was the criminal defendant in a murder trial where his sexual orientation was central to his defense. We believe the trial court erred in two ways: First, the trial court refused to excuse jurors for cause who expressed religious objections to being gay that admittedly influenced their perception of the witness’s truthfulness. Second, the trial court permitted the prosecution to exercise a preemptory challenge based on the sexual orientation of a prospective juror. We believe each of those rulings violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment.

  Justice Roberts: Is your principal argument that those actions were without rational basis or that homosexuality should be a suspect class?

  Farrar: Justice Roberts, we’re advancing both arguments, and I’m happy to address either one.

  Justice Scalia: Let’s start with rational basis. Many state laws permit prosecutors’ broad and mostly unfettered discretion to strike jurors. Are you saying that such laws are irrational?

  Farrar: No, Justice Scalia. I am saying the prosecution’s use of that discretion to stack the jury against a gay defendant is irrational and not related to a legitimate government interest.

  Justice Scalia: That argument simply characterizes the purpose too narrowly. You’re an experienced trial lawyer. Have you ever exercised a preemptory challenge to strike a juror based on a gut instinct?

  Farrar: Yes, Mr Justice. But we aren’t dealing with a legitimate gut instinct in this case. And the purpose characterized as narrowly as you do would make it rational for a prosecutor to strike a potential juror based on race or gender.

  Justice Scalia: It might very well be rational to do so, right? I think that a prosecutor might legitimately think female jurors might have more sympathy for female defendants. It’s only unconstitutional because it doesn’t survive heightened scrutiny, correct?

  Farrar: Justice Scalia, I think it’s unconstitutional both because it’s irrational and because it fails to satisfy the heightened scrutiny.

  Justice Scalia: But do you agree it’s constitutional for a prosecutor to strike a juror based on gut instinct, or hair color, or shifty eyes or any basis other than sex or race?

  Farrar: I agree it would be constitutional for a prosecutor to strike a juror based on gut instinct or shifty eyes because there’s not a history of discrimination against those groups. I obviously disagree about whether a prosecutor can strike a juror on any basis other than sex or race.

  Justice Scalia: And the reason sex and race are different is because they’re suspect classifications, right? They’re classifications that this Court has subjected to a higher level of scrutiny based on the history and the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment?

  Farrar: That’s one reason, Justice Scalia, but I think the history and the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment also counsel against permitting prosecutors to strike jurors based on their sexual orientation. I also think a jury-selection process can be so fundamentally biased it independently violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of Due Process.

  Justice Scalia: How on earth does the history of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause support your position?

  Farrar: The Fourteenth Amendment embodies an antidiscrimination principle that protects discrete and insular minorities from animus based upon a characteristic that’s not morally relevant.

  Justice Scalia: But the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously didn’t envision it protecting homosexuals, did they?

  Farrar: I believe the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended for it to be flexible enough to later include women or, for example, an unpopular racial minority that later migrated to the United States. The text describes a principle, not a rule or standard. And the sponsors of the amendment discussed how it was intended to embody an anti-caste principle broader than just protecting those subject to discrimination at the time.

  Justice Scalia: But homosexuals existed at the time of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and the framers didn’t envision equal protection applying to them, did they?

  Farrar: I believe in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Kennedy noted on behalf of the
majority that some scholars believe that the concept of homosexuality didn’t arise until the late nineteenth century. The Fourteenth Amendment is also capable of addressing new forms of discrimination. Discrimination against Hispanics may not have been specifically addressed by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the principle and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment answers the question of whether Hispanics are entitled to its protection.

  Justice Scalia: But those are all arguments as to why homosexuality should be treated as a suspect class, correct?

  Farrar: Justice Scalia, I think that you’ve recognized the essence of Romer and Lawrence is that government actions motivated by animus toward homosexuals have no rational basis. You may have disagreed with the reasoning of those opinions, but you didn’t disagree with the logical consequences of those rulings.

  Justice Scalia: Does that mean that the prosecution would be constitutionally prohibited from striking a juror who’d engaged in bestiality, incest, bigamy, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication or obscenity?

  Farrar: To the extent that those activities are constitutionally criminalized in the jurisdiction, I believe the prosecution could exercise its discretion to strike jurors on those bases.