Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

To me, he seems overloaded. Despite his bulk, he appears always to be on the run, shuttling from client to client. After these two conversations, I get the feeling that he wants to close my case as quickly as possible because he gets paid only once a case has been resolved. He doesn’t bill by the hour, nor has my family given him a hefty retainer for his services. For him, as for all court-appointed attorneys, it’s a numbers game, trying to clear as many cases as he can. He has an impossible job. As an inmate says to me, “He’s trying to empty an ocean with a spoon.”

  * * *

  —

  The day before the trial, my attorney goes through jury selection. I change out of my orange jumpsuit, put on the one suit I own, and go with him to a conference room at the back of the courtroom. He explains that the three defense attorneys and the prosecutor will choose twelve jurors and two alternates from a pool of about forty people. I will sit next to him and observe the process of selection known as voir dire, which means literally “to speak the truth.”

  The jurors come in one at a time. The attorneys and the prosecutor refer to the questionnaire each juror has filled out and then ask a series of basic questions to determine if the person can be fair and unbiased such as “What do you do for a living?” and “Do you have any police officers in your family?” and then one question that jolts me: “Has anybody in your family or any of your friends been accused of sexual assault?”

  Nothing they ask appears to be a trick question, but I know that the defense and the prosecutor each have been given three opportunities to strike a witness, meaning they can each disqualify three people for no reason.

  After a parade of six or seven white people, an Asian woman comes in. The prosecutor strikes her. Several white people follow her, and then a man of Indian descent comes in. The prosecutor strikes him. After a couple of hours, the prosecutor and the defense attorneys settle on a jury. It dawns on me then that all of them, including the alternates, are white.

  The prosecutor thanks the last juror candidate and murmurs to my attorney, “I’ll see you in court tomorrow.” He leaves, closing the door behind him. I wait for a second, and then I say, “Why are there no Black people on the jury?”

  My attorney looks at me uncomfortably. He yanks up his pants. His hefty belly protrudes through his shirt.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “I thought I was supposed to have a jury of my peers. How can this be a fair trial without any Black people?”

  “Well,” his says, after another hitch of his pants, “according to the Constitution, we do have a minority on there.”

  “Who? I didn’t see a minority. He struck every person of color.”

  “There are a couple of women.”

  I’m stunned.

  “A couple of women?”

  “Yes, women are considered a minority.”

  I start to raise my voice.

  “How is that a minority? That’s gender. That’s not race.”

  He finishes tucking in his pants.

  “You should’ve been there when they wrote the Constitution,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  As I walk into the courtroom, I see my mother, Aunt Sugar, and her husband, Bill, who is my godfather, and Aunt Honey. The moment my mother sees me, her shoulders tremble, and she begins to cry. I shake my head. I have caused her so much pain. I turn my head away because the last thing I want to do is fall apart before I even get to my seat. I whistle out a slow breath to calm myself. Then I pray for the first time in months. I pray to God to end this for her, now.

  I sit next to my lawyer, in a row with Dimitri, Rovaughn, and their representation. Rovaughn’s lawyer, Boyle, reminds me a little of Judge Hue—an older white man dressed in a sharp, neatly pressed suit. He moves and speaks with purpose, as if he knows the answer to every question he asks. It’s clear he didn’t come off a panel list of attorneys provided by the court. No wonder Rovaughn’s family had to mortgage their house to afford him.

  Dimitri’s attorney bears some similarity to my attorney. He looks bored. Sitting in the courtroom, counting the hours until the trial ends, banking his time so he can get paid. Tapping his legal pad nervously with the eraser end of a pencil. Let’s move this along, I read in his eyes. I see no motivation to win. Forget motivation. Does he have the skill to win?

  Yet we’re all accused. We’re in this together. We can ride Boyle’s coattails. At least that’s what I hope we can do. Because at this point, even though I know we’re innocent, as I look at the all-white jury and at the steely-eyed prosecutor, who either avoids making eye contact with us or looks at us dismissively, a sense of crippling fear presses in on me. I’ve seen too much, heard too many stories—on the street, in jail, from my friends and family. If you’re Black, being innocent doesn’t matter. At all. Unless you’re willing to mortgage your life savings.

  The judge, a white woman in her creased black robe, enters, and everyone in the courtroom stands. I take a quick scan of the faces. Other than the folks related to me and my friends, I see no other person of color. Not one other Black face. The lawyers are white. The judge is white. The jurors are white. Our accuser is white.

  The trial begins. The prosecutor presents his opening statement to the jury. Since the arraignment hearing months ago when Judge Hue admonished him to fill in the holes in the case he’d presented, he’s clearly spent some time closing up those holes. The prosecutor has come up with a clear, direct tactic. A theme. He presents that theme to the jury.

  Fear.

  That’s the message the prosecutor delivers. That’s what he hammers at relentlessly. Fear.

  “You will see that this girl was scared,” he says, pacing in front of the jury. “She didn’t know these three Black men from Chicago. They came up behind her and they scared her. She was scared.”

  You would be, too, he implies without saying those words aloud. He doesn’t have to. I see the jurors following him with their eyes. I can almost identify their own fear. Their fear of us. Of me.

  “You’re also going to hear that her roommate walked into the room,” the prosecutor says. “But her roommate didn’t know what was going on. It was dark. She couldn’t see what was happening. The girl didn’t say anything to her roommate—because she was scared. The roommate left. Then you’ll hear that the girl walked out of her room, went down the hall, and then came back toward her room to leave the building, to get away from these men. But one of these men was in the stairwell and forced her back into her room, where the three men gang-raped her.”

  I look at my lawyer. He’s staring off into space. I cannot believe that he is not appalled by the ridiculous, false narrative that the prosecutor spins in front of the jury.

  I grab a pen and write on the legal pad in front of me.

  “Lies,” I write. “Never happened. Lies!”

  I slide the pad in front of my lawyer.

  He looks down. He sniffs, then turns away to watch the prosecutor.

  The jury can’t be buying this crap, I think.

  I look over at them.

  They’re riveted.

  I don’t really focus on the rest of the prosecutor’s opening statement. I know that he continues to hammer home his theme of fear through practically every sentence. I stop counting how many times he says, “She was scared.” Finally, he finishes his opening and takes his seat. Boyle, Rovaughn’s attorney, smooths his tie and begins his opening remarks to the jury. He’s respectful, passionate, convincing.

  He challenges the prosecutor’s version of the events. He suggests that the story the jury hears will at times not make a lot of sense. He cautions them that when what they hear doesn’t make sense, they have the responsibility to question it, to cast doubt. Sometimes, he suggests, people come to conclusions based on hearsay, based on prejudice, based on race. He concludes that you, as a jury, cannot come to a co
nclusion based on race. You have to listen to the facts, to what happened.

  He sits down and the judge calls on Dimitri’s attorney to make his opening statement next. The attorney passes.

  The judge calls on my attorney to make his opening statement.

  My attorney stands, hitches up his pants, and says, “Well, when it comes to my client, Jarrett Adams, you’ll see the same thing that Attorney Boyle said.”

  He sits back down, heavily. That’s it.

  I want to grab the legal pad in front of me and tear it in half.

  * * *

  —

  The prosecution calls their first witness, Sergeant Scout, the officer who interrogated me in Chicago. She brushes past me, sits on the witness chair, swears to tell the truth. The prosecutor asks her to give an account of the events after the night in question.

  “We got a call,” she says.

  The prosecutor interrupts. “Who did you get the call from?”

  Sergeant Scout gives a name I hadn’t heard before.

  “The accuser’s friend,” she clarifies. “She told me that this young lady had been raped on campus and that she was at the hospital having a sexual assault exam. So, I went over there.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  “I interviewed her. I started to put things together, you know, about what happened.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she was raped by three Black men she never met before. Two or three Black men. She wasn’t sure.”

  I look at the jury. I want to shout, “Remember what Boyle said. She would know that detail. This doesn’t make sense!”

  “Then what did you do after you interviewed the young lady?”

  “I went back to campus and started talking to people who were at the party that night.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “It was three Black men who came onto campus. They were cologne salesmen from Chicago.”

  “They weren’t students?”

  “No.”

  “Did you talk to the girl’s roommate?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she came into the room and saw her sitting on the bed with a Black man but she couldn’t see what was going on. It was too dark.”

  “No further questions.”

  Boyle walks over to Sergeant Scout. He looks at her and pauses. He seems to study her for a long time before he speaks.

  “Did you have a chance to talk to these young men?” he asks.

  Sergeant Scout shifts in her chair.

  “I talked to two of them.”

  “Mr. Hill. Rovaughn. And Mr. Adams. Jarrett.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s start with Mr. Hill. What did he say?”

  “He said he was there and that all three of them had a consensual sexual encounter with the girl.”

  “And Mr. Adams? What did he say?”

  “He said he was there, but he denied having any involvement in anything.”

  I nearly spring out of my chair. She’s lying. I told her the same thing. I told her the truth.

  I start to scribble that on the legal pad, but I stop because I catch a glimpse of a sneer forming on Boyle’s face. He knows Sergeant Scout is lying. He steps in closer to her. He’s crowding her now like a boxer pressing his opponent into the ropes. I can feel her discomfort from here. Then Boyle speaks, softly, intimately, as if they were the only two people in the courtroom.

  “That’s what Mr. Adams said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, well, I’m assuming you recorded your conversation with Mr. Adams, right?”

  “No. We didn’t record it.”

  “No? They had recording technology available, right?”

  Sergeant Scout squirms in her chair. She looks as if she’d rather be anywhere but sitting on a witness stand being questioned by Boyle.

  “Well, I mean, yeah, they did,” she says.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t record it,” Boyle says. “How do you explain this? If someone says she was raped and the person she accuses says it was a consensual encounter, how do you make a charge of rape? How do you do that? It wasn’t because they were Black, was it?”

  “I object. Relevance,” the prosecutor says.

  “Sustained,” the judge says.

  Boyle backs off, but I can see that his point has landed with the jury.

  “No further questions,” Boyle says, and turns the questioning over to my attorney.

  My lawyer basically does nothing. He has Sergeant Scout repeat answers to three questions she’s already answered.

  Sergeant Scout leaves, and then the young woman takes the stand.

  The prosecutor leads her through her version of the events of that night, of how she had never met us before, how we all came up behind her, pulled her into her room, put on a vulgar rap CD, cut out the lights, started to dance with her and grope her, and forced her to have sex with us. She describes how her roommate came in at that point and that one of us grabbed her by the arm. She recalls her roommate saying to her, “What are you doing on my bed with them?” She describes storming out of the room after her roommate to explain, then coming back into her room, escorted by me. She says I made her get on the floor and have sex with me and my friends, and when it was over, we fled the building. She says she called her friend and asked him if she could come over to his place because she had been sexually assaulted.

  Her story is ludicrous.

  According to her, we began the rape, stopped, allowed her to walk out of the room, have an argument with her roommate down the hall, come back, and resume.

  I look over at the jury, thinking, you can’t be buying this, can you?

  Boyle begins his cross-examination.

  He speaks kindly.

  “At this time, how long had you been on campus?”

  “About a week,” the young woman says.

  “Just for clarification, you’re in the room and you said that they were groping you, but nothing was going on sexually at that point. But then your roommate comes in and says you were having sex on her bed?”

  “No, no, I was, you know, just on the bed at that point.”

  “You were scared for your life, though, right?”

  “Yes. I was scared for my life.”

  “So, you didn’t want to be in that room, right?”

  “No, I didn’t want to be in there.”

  “But when your roommate walked in, she thought you were having sex.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you were scared for your life.”

  “I was. Yeah.”

  “Then the roommate left and you went after her, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did anyone grab you and tell you not to go? Did anyone stop you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. So, you’re knocking on this door, down the hall, and you say, ‘Help me. Help. I’m being raped.’ Is that what you said?”

  “No.”

  “But you were so scared. You were scared for your life. Why didn’t you say that?”

  “I mean, I don’t know. I just—I didn’t know what to do.”

  Boyle stops, looks at his notes, at the transcript. “So, you’re knocking on the door, and you’re saying, ‘It’s not what it seems.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “Oh, well, you know, I didn’t want her to think that I was having sex on her bed with those guys. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t want her, you know, I was just so scared. I really didn’t know what I was saying. I was so scared.”

  “Okay,” Boyle says. “There’s an exit right by your room, down at the end of the hall. Why didn’t you go down that way?”

  “I don’t know
. I was just—scared.”

  “Right,” Boyle says. “As you walked down the hall, you passed a room that had ‘RA’ on it. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes. Resident assistant.”

  “Did you know the resident assistant was in that room?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you knock on that door if you were scared?”

  “I, uh, I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

  Boyle nods, looks at his notes, then peeks up at her. Her face has gone pale.

  “A phone call came into your room. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “My friend. She was calling me from my hometown.”

  “When you were on the phone with your friend, was this before or after your roommate came in?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Okay. All right. But you were in the room, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Obviously. You took the phone call. And these guys were there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t want these guys in there, right?”

  “No. I didn’t want them in there.”

  “Did you tell the person on the phone—your friend—that you needed help?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t say, ‘Help me’? Nothing like that?”

  “No. I didn’t. I, uh, no, I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was scared. You know, they were right there, and I was talking on the phone.”

  “In fact, there were other calls that came into your room, too.”

  “Yeah. There were other calls—”

  “So, you’re in there this entire time, there are phone calls coming in, all while this gang rape is going on.”

  The girl says nothing.

  “Right?” Boyle says.

  “I don’t. I can’t. I was so scared.”

  At this point, Boyle spins away from the witness stand and turns in my direction. For the briefest instant, I lock eyes with him, and maybe I imagine this, but I see a glint, the briefest spark of light. And I read something else in his expression. An emotion. I see power, even dominance, and I know we’ve won. I have been watching a lawyer at the top of his game executing a precise and lethal cross-examination. A master tactician. It’s as if I’ve been watching a lumberjack chopping down a tree, swinging his ax into the trunk, taking one cut, and another, and another. Slowly, methodically attacking the base of that tree until, finally, the tree begins to topple and fall.