Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion

by Grif Stockley

  I talk for thirteen minutes and don’t screw up any body’s name or forget any major detail. When I come back to the table, the expression on Dade’s face tells me I made a decent impression on him, anyway. Too bad he can’t vote.

  binkie calls as his first witness Robin’s roommate, Shannon Kennsit. It is a good choice. She is a slightly awkward-looking girl with a manner so engaging that you do not even notice she is as chunky as a jar of peanut butter. Shannon captivates the jury with her admitted weakness for the Razorbacks. Describing the time she first met Dade at the party on Happy Hollow Road, she can’t keep a smile off her round face.

  “Robin threatened to give me a tranquilizer to calm me down! I can’t re member being more excited except for the night the Hogs beat Duke for the national championship. It was like going to meet somebody you knew you’d see playing in the pro bowl someday.”

  Anticipating the direction I’d like to take this case on crossexamination, Binkie asks about Robin’s feelings for Dade. Shannon unselfconsciously tugs at the side of her mauve sweater to adjust her bra. This girl couldn’t be more relaxed than if we were seated in her room at the Chi Omega House.

  “She said she liked him. I asked her once if she meant did she like him as a boyfriend, and she said just as a friend. She said he really tried in class, and she admired that. Lots of players don’t care about school, but she said Dade did, and she was glad to help him.”

  As the most important witness (besides Robin) Binkie will call. Shannon is utterly believable, and she describes the moment that Robin’s crying woke her up with such genuine feeling that it is impossible not to be moved.

  “She was already in bed when I came in about twelve and didn’t say anything, but about four I heard her crying.

  She couldn’t stop, and I turned on the light. She looked awful! She was just crying and crying. I kept asking her what was wrong, and finally she said that Dade had raped her. I thought. Oh my God, how terrible! She’s got to go to the police or the hospital or someplace! But when I said this, she just shook her head.”

  I close my eyes, realizing I have been affected by what I’ve just heard. There is no doubt in my mind (nor can there be in the jury’s) that Shannon is telling the truth.

  Robin’s suffering was profound, at least to this girl. She has finally made her roommate and best friend real to me in a way that Robin herself has not. Why? All this time I’ve been able to think of Robin as an actress. What if she’s not? I glance at Dade. He is hunched over the table with his right hand over his eyes. I nudge him and he lowers the hand to his lap and sits up straighter, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is watching him. From behind the podium, Binkie asks, “Why didn’t you wake up your housemother or call her parents?”

  “She wouldn’t let me!” Shannon says, her voice anguished

  “I wanted to, but she kept saying that nobody would believe that she had met him off campus just to study together. She said she was afraid that her parents would think she had been dating him. They’re real conservative

  I glance quickly at the Perrys, who appear slightly dazed. What if I were Gerald Perry? I’d want to kill Dade.

  “What happened then?” Binkie asks, like some second banana prompting a talk-show host.

  “I continued to try to convince her that she had to go to the hospital. She kept saying he didn’t hurt her, but I told her it didn’t matter. She had to go tell somebody! Finally, about five-thirty she said okay, and I drove her to the hospital.”

  “Did you see her that evening before she went over to the house on Happy Hollow Road?” Binkie asks.

  Shannon presses her hands together under her chin as if this were a difficult question.

  “I sat next to her at dinner that night and she told me later in the room she was going out to that same little house we went to in the spring so she could help Dade get ready for a speech in communi cations the next day. I wish I had said something or gone with her. Then it wouldn’t have happened.” Tears well up in her eyes. From the right sleeve of her sweater, she pulls out a tissue and dabs at her eyes.

  I scan the transcript of the “J” Board hearing and her statement but find nothing inconsistent. Binkie asks her if she knows whether Robin had any alcohol before she left the sorority house.

  “Not that I was aware of,” Shannon says, “and we were together from about five until she left around eight that night.”

  “She smelled like wine!” Dade whispers fiercely in my ear.

  I nod, not sure I believe him, since he has already lied to me on this subject.

  Binkie asks if Robin described what Dade had done to her, but Shannon wrinkles her nose in distaste.

  “I didn’t ask her. It seemed too personal. If she had wanted to tell me, I would have listened, but she was too upset to make her talk about something like that. I knew she’d have to go over it a million times anyway.”

  Binkie keeps her on me stand for another ten minutes going on about the details of the time before she took Robin to the hospital, but according to Shannon she did most of the talking. Abruptly, Binkie announces, “Your witness.”

  I take my time getting to the podium, wondering how honest this girl will be under crossexamination. I start off focusing on the party she attended in the spring.

  “Did you talk to Dade the entire time?” I ask after a couple of preliminary questions.

  “No, I talked to Harris and Tyrone and some to the two girls who were there. Tyrone actually wasn’t very nice,” Shannon sniffs.

  So far I haven’t met anyone who is a member of Tyrone’s fan club.

  “Do you remember if you were in the same room all the time with Dade?” I ask.

  “No, he was in the kitchen part of the time talking to Robin,” Shannon says. This was a big event in her life.

  She remembers it all.

  I return to the table and pick up the “J” Board transcript.

  “Do you recall saying in answer to a question at Dade’s disciplinary hearing in November that Robin was, and I’m quoting here, ‘kind of a private person’?”

  “Yes, but we always talked about everything,” Shan non insists.

  “She never told you the details of what happened between her and Dade the night she said she was raped by.

  him, did she?” I ask.

  “Not really,” Shannon says, her voice defensive.

  “Just that he raped her.”

  Suddenly, it hits me that Shannon probably is the type of person who didn’t want to know the details. She may not have ever really asked Robin, and this was why Binkie never got specific with her in his questioning. I tell the judge I have no more questions and sit down be side Dade.

  Binkie confirms my suspicion by having no more questions for Shannon. He introduces Robin’s medical records through Joan Chestnut, the nurse from Memorial who saw Robin. Binkie and I have agreed that since Dr.

  Cowling had no time that day to do more than a physical examination, his nurse will read into evidence his brief entries that he observed no trauma and will be allowed to explain that the doctor was called to an emergency in Springdale before he had finished talking to her.

  As I have feared, Joan Chestnut bristles with competence. She explains that in her long experience there is no typical rape victim.

  “How a woman reacts after having been raped depends on many factors,” she says in a strong, careful voice that needs no amplification.

  My only consolation is that today she does not look like a nurse. Apparently unable to resist the possibility she might be photographed or filmed, she has piled her blond hair on top of her head and is wearing a fancy sequined black dress that would be more appropriate for a cocktail party than a court appearance. Binlde must have died when she showed up at the courthouse not wearing her scrubs. She repeats substantially what she told me earlier, yet, here again is an absence of specifics, which Joan Chestnut shrugs off as normal. She tells Binlde that having to repeat me step-by-step actions of tee perpetrator simply force
s the victim to relive the honor of he event and is beyond some women’s power to do so soon afterward.

  “It’s all some women can do to say something like, “He forced me to have sex with him,”

  ” she says didactically.

  “I might have been suspicious if she had come up with some elaborate story which took her thirty minutes to tell.”

  “As a nurse giving care to a patient, you weren’t immediately concerned with investigating whether Robin Perry might have been making up this story, I presume?”

  I ask on crossexamination.

  Joan Chestnut crosses her long, not unattractive legs and swings her left shoe, which has a four-inch heel, Maybe she has a date after she is through testifying.

  “If a person is making up symptoms, for whatever reason, and it happens occasionally,” she says, her tone now droll, “it’s just as important that we be alert to misinformation as opposed to real symptoms. As you are surely aware, these days a hospital’s resources are severely restricted.”

  Though she has mentioned a subject most people don’t have much sympathy for, I beat back an urge to spar with her. She has admitted that some people who go to a hospital lie, and I’m satisfied with any little bone thrown my way. People like nurses, even if this one looks like an aspiring Junior Leaguer.

  During an hour’s recess for lunch I review the “J” Board transcript. Binkie’s next witness, Mary Purvis, the student volunteer from the Rape Crisis Center, seems even younger than she did at the “J” Board hearing and readily admits her inexperience. Brushing long, unruly strands of brown hair from her eyes as she speaks, the young woman adds little, if anything, to what the nurse has already said. She admits on crossexamination that Robin had little to say to her.

  Without further ado, Binkie calls Robin Perry, and the jury, which had been about to doze off, snaps to attention.

  As if she were interrupting grownups to come in and say good-night, Robin shyly enters the courtroom. I realize how much window dressing other witnesses are in a case like this. You believe either the victim or the accused.

  Binkie starts Robin off slowly, letting her talk about herself to give the jury a sense of who she is. Though she is trying to maintain the poise that has carried her to this moment, today she seems fragile as a glass mirror.

  Doubtless Binkie is hoping she will become more comfortable the longer she talks. Gone is the confident ac tress of past performances. This is a girl, not a woman. In a trembling voice she tells the jury that her father had originally served in the Navy and that her family had moved around from base to base until she was ten. I let this go for a moment and then get to my feet.

  “Your Honor, this is a rape trial. The jury can decide this case without knowing the name of the family dog. Can’t we at least start with the witness in college?”

  A couple of the jurors chuckle, and Judge Franklin responds “Let’s get this going faster, Mr. Cross.”

  Unruffled, Binkie asks, “What year are you in at the university, Ms. Perry?” He would have gone on for an hour if I had let him. The one advantage I have is that the jury think they already know Dade. They’ve seen him on TV, read about him. Yet, they thought they knew

  OJ.

  Simpson, too.

  Robin answers and, more quickly than Binkie appears to like, begins to talk about Dade. As she tells about the class last spring, I notice that beside me Dade has begun to hold his breath and then release it. What if he is lying and every word she utters about what happened is true?

  As she talks, despite my efforts to concentrate, a memory of an event when I was a senior begins to form at the back of my brain. I was dating a Tri-Delt sophomore named Bonnie Edwards, and one Friday night when we were both drunk I took her to my room in the Sigma Nu House. Within minutes we were naked in my bed, but just as I was beginning to enter her, she told me to stop.

  Drunk, I didn’t. Did I rape her? Of course I did! Then, like a freight train bearing down on me, another long-ago moment, this one an impression more than a fully remembered event, appears at the edge of my consciousness: late one night after returning from a party where we both had drunk too much, I had insisted on sex with Rosa, who was too helpless to resist, though she made her reluctance known. She had vomited a few hours later, or perhaps it was the next day. I raped my own wife. I have begun to sweat profusely. For the first time since I took this case, I cannot avoid the feeling that whoever is telling the truth, Robin was, at some point that night, completely vulnerable. Yet, whatever he has done, I am no better than the boy sitting beside me.

  “Dade tried so hard,” Robin is saying.

  “But sometimes in class he’d get real nervous, and it was hard to under stand him. When we’d practice, I’d get him to slow down….”

  Robin has a way of making everything she does seem innocent, and the little party on Happy Hollow Road last spring becomes, in her words, purely a favor to Shannon.

  There is no mention of an attempted kiss by Dade, and I realize that Binkie does not know about it, for surely he would deal with it now, instead of letting me bring it out when I cross-examine Robin.

  “Why did you choose the house on Happy Hollow Road to practice the speech?” Binkie asks, a few minutes later, his voice tightening a bit and betraying the importance of this answer.

  It will be the hardest question Robin has to answer.

  Why, indeed, with so many other choices?

  “Now it seems the stupidest thing I ever did,” Robin says.

  “But I trusted Dade. He really cared about his classes. He never horsed around at all when it came to studying. He wanted to make a good grade. I didn’t really want to go over to Darby Hall because of all that’s happened there, and boys aren’t allowed upstairs in our rooms at my sorority house, and the classrooms are usually locked.”

  Binkie has to decide whether to ask her to clarify what she means about Darby Hall. It won’t help him, but it can’t do Dade any good either. Binkie uncharacteristically takes his hands from his pockets and grips the side of the podium.

  “Why didn’t you get a conference room in the library?”

  Robin cocks her head, embarrassed by the question.

  “I

  had forgotten you could. I didn’t even think about it.

  Dade just suggested we go to his friend’s house, and I said okay.”

  “Did you drive together?” Binkie asks, knowing she still has some explaining to do.

  I steal a look at the jury. They are interested. If she is so pure and good, why not meet in public where she can get some Brownie points? Robin sighs audibly.

  “No, I told him I’d meet him there. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my father has told me over and over never to let myself get in a situation I can’t get out of. I just figured that if Dade tried to get fresh, I’d leave. It never occurred to me that he would rape me.” Her voice becomes tiny here, though she doesn’t cry.

  Despite the welter of emotions building in me, I rock my chair and roll my eyes, communicating to the jury that this explanation is garbage. Fresh? Nobody uses that word. The fact is, Robin could have seduced her professor, fucked him happily on a weekly basis in my motel, and now she’s worried about Dade being “fresh.” The lawyer part of me wants to get up and scream at the jury that Alice is disappearing through the looking-glass, and what remains is a first-class liar. Do I believe this? I don’t know what I believe.

  Binkie ignores me and tells Robin to continue.

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, I got there sometime around eight, and he was already in the house. For the first few minutes he acted okay, but then he came over to the chair where I was sit ting and grabbed me by the arm. I just froze. He said he wanted to take a shower with me. I remember asking him if he were crazy. Then, I smelled beer on his breath and knew he had been drinking. I said, “I have to leave,” but he said, “Don’t make me have to hurt you.” He pulled me up and took me into the bathroom and told me to take off my clot
hes. I started crying and told him to let me go home. He just shook his head. I could tell he would hurt me if I didn’t do what he said.”

  Robin stops and begins to cry, her first tears of the day.

  As her roommate has done, she reaches inside the sleeve of her sweater and pulls out a tissue and wipes her eyes.

  Sighing heavily, she begins again, this time looking down at her lap but making sure her voice is loud enough for the jury to hear.

  “I took off my clothes and did what he said. He did the same and got in with me and made me wash him. Afterward, he took a towel and dried me off and then made me get on the bed in his room. He put his penis inside my vagina and made me have sex with him. I was scared not to. He had this horrible look on his face.”

  “Did he ejaculate inside of you?” Binkie asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Was he wearing a condom?”

  “No” “How long did this take?” Binkie asks, his hands twisting inside his suit pockets.

  “About thirty minutes from the time he made me take off my clothes and get in the shower with him to the time when he rolled off of me and let me go.”

  I watch the faces of the jurors, who are paying close attention Unfortunately, Maria Chastain, the one black juror, seems more engrossed than anyone. I’ve got to give Robin credit: fearful or not, she can captivate an audience

  “Did he hurt you?” Binlde asks.

  “No,” Robin says, looking up at him.

  “I did what he wanted.”

  “Did he say anything or did you say anything in those thirty minutes?”

  “I was crying,” Robin says, sniffing.

  “I think he said some other things but I don’t remember.”

  “What did you do after he was finished?” Binkie says, his voice stoical. He doesn’t like rape cases, his manner suggests.

  “I put on my clothes. He watched me and said that if I told anybody, nobody would believe me, and he’d spread it all over campus that I was a slut.”