by Bri Lee
‘I hate how people blame alcohol,’ I said, and we agreed. It’s an easy way to demonise something external to the self, instead of acknowledging that the demon of disrespect lies within the man.
I should have used the opportunity of being in Southport to hear first-hand from the magistrate about how the trial was going—if he thought the specialist courts were working, and why some areas are worse for DV than others. But I didn’t. I put my hand on the receiver of the phone in my office and felt fatigued. I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say. I didn’t want to hear about why so many women and children were at risk in this casino-filled, palm-lined paradise. What if he said that the courts were really effective and we needed them all over Queensland? It would be productive, but also super fucking depressing. My misery quota had been overflowing maximum capacity since my first day of work: the first mention of a Hills hoist.
The work in Southport was stilted. The lawyers didn’t seem to have their shit together and weren’t used to a judge not letting them adjourn whenever they wanted to. It seemed to me that matters were dragging on for far too long considering that permanent judges were sitting there as well. We tried to list trials but they all fell through, so we ended up with a load of sentences.
One was particularly awful. When court commenced I saw a woman with a pram in the back of the court and immediately suspected the worst—that she was there as the new partner of a sex offender we were sentencing. She sat silently, rocking the pram occasionally to calm the quiet newborn, barely looking up. I imagined she was trying to focus on the love, on the baby, on the good.
Her partner’s matter was called. Mr Lucas had pleaded guilty for dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing grievous bodily harm, and the prosecutor launched straight into a summary of the events. Lucas had been driving for several hours straight on sparse country roads, trying to get to a different state, when he didn’t notice plenty of roadworks signage. Cars in front of him were slowing down, and he slammed straight into the back of one at over a hundred kilometres per hour. The man driving the car Lucas hit was a tradesman on his way home from work. A father of three who had to have multiple surgeries on his head and brain, who now felt ‘worthless’ and a ‘burden on his family’, who would spend the rest of his life with a steel cap over his skull that brought with it some sporadic pain, a threat of infection, and many other possible complications.
Tests had found evidence of unusual levels of prescription drugs in Lucas’s system at the time of the crash.
Then defence began submissions and the moral tennis really commenced.
‘Your Honour, on the afternoon of the incident Mr Lucas received a phone call in which he received information indicating the name and the address of the man who had abused him, quite severely, as a child.’ Lucas sat still, staring at his hands together in his lap. ‘What followed,’ defence continued, ‘seems to indicate some kind of psychological breakdown, followed by an irresponsible intake of prescription medication, and the defendant set off on an impossibly long trip to attempt to locate his abuser with the intention of seeking some kind of revenge.’
Defence listed examples of comparable sentences that didn’t include immediate imprisonment. We heard about Mr Lucas’s partner and his baby, about how he was a good father and a responsible citizen, and that Judge need not consider a severe penalty for personal deterrence, because Lucas was no risk of reoffending. It’s the job of a defence lawyer to make sentencing submissions that paint their client as the exception to the rule, but it felt as if Lucas truly was.
Judge adjourned for some minutes to consider his ruling while the rest of us waited quietly in court. The range for sentencing was wide, and there were a lot of competing interests. Lucas didn’t seem like he needed to be punished, but I could practically hear Judge’s voice in my head while he drafted, that ‘consideration has to be given to the victim’ who would never be the same. This grievous bodily harm was about as severe as it could possibly be, save for paraplegia or quadriplegia, and the father of three could no longer live the same way. He couldn’t work to provide for his family, he couldn’t enjoy sexual intercourse with his wife, and he couldn’t play with his children. He used to pick them up and throw them into the pool, just like my father did with me. Post-accident this man had been showing signs of depression. When I used to volunteer with a food van for homeless people, some of them described freak accidents like this as the beginning of the end of their former lives—a slippery slope to losing everything.
Ten minutes ticked by so slowly. The two fathers’ lives, and therefore the lives of their loved ones, were diametric forces. I drew concentric circles on my page like ripples, considering that the steel cap on the man’s skull was, in a way, on the third ripple out, the fault of Lucas’s abuser.
I thought about the ramifications of abuse and the ongoing effects of trauma. How long a secret can lie dormant before it bursts up and out, unable to be contained. A photo was circulating online, originally from ABC News, showing a class photo in which over half the children’s faces were blacked out, indicating that they had died from substance abuse or suicided. They had all been ‘cared for’ by the same Catholic priest. I got the photo up on the court computer, and then I watched Lucas again, trying to see which parts of the two of us were similar. Scanning him for signs or scars. Markers. After the abuse, Lucas had built a beautiful life, but without the foundation of closure and justice it had all come crashing down in one afternoon.
Was dealing with my abuse really inevitable? Was there any way I could control how it came out? It didn’t feel like it. Some days I fantasised about high-impact car crashes. Lucas was the first defendant I truly felt for.
‘I have decided that today there will be no actual imprisonment,’ Judge announced, but I don’t remember what he said next because the woman with the pram started crying. She held her baby to her chest and rocked back and forth, her tears splashing onto its downy little head. Lucas turned and saw her, and when he looked back up front, over my head at Judge, I saw he was crying too. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to stem the flow, and clasped his hands together so tight in front of him his knuckles went white. Judge addressed him on the severity of his offence, and how he was on a suspended sentence and so couldn’t be arrested without going straight to gaol.
‘Yes, your Honour,’ Lucas said, again and again, nodding his head. ‘Yes, your Honour,’ his voice breaking.
When the bailiff signalled court was adjourned, I didn’t follow Judge out immediately the way I was supposed to. I couldn’t look away. I watched Lucas turn from the dock and stride toward his family and take them in his arms, and they all cried together. Relieved but unable to celebrate. Reunited, against the odds, but stifled by the overwhelming unhappiness of everything around them. All that awful context.
The prosecutors and duty lawyers gave them a wide berth and exited the room quickly, and I became aware of my own voyeurism. I gathered my pile of files and left the family to just be together, when it could have gone the other way. My final image of Lucas’s family was them holding each other, but I couldn’t picture the victim’s family. How would they feel when they heard the news? It probably wouldn’t be enough for them, but it never could be. At the end of our first week in Southport, the pile still heavy in my arms, I thought to myself, This is the world you live in now: a world of awful context.
The walk from that courtroom back to chambers took me across a kind of bridge that allowed me to look down several storeys to the courthouse foyer. I stopped to people-watch. The bridge was a telling architectural feature—nobody down below would ever have reason to look up at this particular spot, and yet I could watch them all from up high.
On the other side was a glass window, and sitting on a beam outside it was a bird’s nest with two eggs inside. I looked at the eggs in awe, incredulous at how odd they seemed, so out of context next to the hard steel and glass, like a baby in a courtroom.
When Vincent arrived at the hot
el on Friday evening, I got giddy and ran up to him yelling it was going to be the best weekend ever.
‘Wow,’ he said, dropping his bag and looking around the apartment.
‘I know,’ I replied, gazing out to the beach, ‘but this is definitely the nicest so far.’ I snorted. ‘I didn’t invite you to the Roma Motor Inn. Circuit isn’t always paradise.’
He turned to me, taking me in his arms. ‘Anywhere is paradise when I’m with you,’ he said in a faux-sexy voice, and I groaned and we laughed, and he kept his arms around me, kissing my neck.
‘Hey, I just have to give you a tour of the place,’ I said, pulling him toward the bedroom.
‘Oh yeah, what, ah, what kind of room is down here?’
We stayed hugging and waddled down the corridor together.
‘I, ah, mentioned this to you on the telephone,’ I said, pretending to be casual.
‘Hmm, really? I don’t recall.’
We bumped into the doorframe.
‘Oh,’ I said, dropping my arms, ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter then,’ and went to turn around, but he grabbed me from behind and I let out a tiny squeal. He knew I loved to be chased, needed to be affirmed.
The next evening we went to see Mad Max: Fury Road at the cinema, and I lamented that more feminist films didn’t have explosions or, rather, that more films with explosions weren’t very feminist. We stopped to have beers at a German restaurant where a live band was playing what I could only guess was traditional German music, and we watched on, laughing, as drunk men got up and moved awkwardly with the professional dancer. Everyone was clapping along loudly and shouting encouragement. One guy started doing handstands on a chair in between pints, and Vincent and I cringed, the lawyers in us kicking in; we jested estimates of how much a settlement would be if he broke his neck.
It was a crisp but beautiful Saturday night, and we held hands walking along the fancy strip of shops and restaurants. I asked if Vincent wanted an ice-cream and he said ‘no’ so I didn’t get one.
‘You want an ice-cream, get an ice-cream!’ he said, standing outside the shop. I hadn’t told him I’d vomited up my dinners at least three times that week.
‘No, I’m trying to be good.’
He gave me a look and kissed my forehead, and we walked home.
In court the next week, in one otherwise boring sentence, a man convicted of punching another man presented a certificate of appreciation for being a foster-dog carer while in prison. I was so desperate for a good news story, so genuinely surprised by the loveliness of the thought, that I was squirming in my chair with excitement and happiness. That huge, tattooed, thick-necked man in front of me had cared for a pound puppy. I madly googled the name of the program on my court computer and found a story about it in the paper where the reporter said, ‘When you’re walking a dog out on the oval, you could be anywhere in the would—at least for a couple of minutes.’ The story was about how those tough, oftentimes brutal men used the dogs as an excuse to be gentle. The animals were a conduit for a special love and affection they weren’t otherwise able to express in prison.
I finished the paperwork for the sentence and thought about prison. Dad had told me that child sex offenders got raped and beaten in prisons and often had to be sent to high-security facilities for their own protection, but that the same wasn’t true for rapists of adult women or men who beat women and girls. I wondered where all those men in gaol, collectively, drew the line. How old did a woman need to be before it was okay to forcefully penetrate her? After she had ‘become’ a woman because she got her period—that age-old absurd marker for growth, simultaneously signifying impurity and fertility? It couldn’t be. Some girls are only ten or twelve when they get their periods, and of all the offenders I’d seen so far, I couldn’t imagine any of them checking if their targets had met Aunt Flo yet. No, it must be situational and societal. Maybe cultural. Definitely learned. People learn how to treat others from what they experience in their home (or lack thereof) and their schooling (or lack thereof) and society (often lacking).
I didn’t think I wanted a rapist in prison to be allowed a puppy, but I also knew that rehabilitation had to come first. Repeat offending doesn’t help anyone.
In another sentence, Judge and I learned about a man who’d taken a steak knife to a petrol station then a Domino’s, threatening staff and demanding money—but then he used the money to buy sandwiches, lollies and a taxi home.
We heard evidence that he would have stolen barely enough money to cover the cab. It seemed he wanted to go back into custody—he’d even turned himself in—and the prosecutor said he would have been dealt with by the mental health court if he hadn’t also been drunk at the time of the offending. He desperately needed support services and couldn’t get them out in the real world.
‘Don’t worry, I’m nervous too,’ he’d said to the shaking cashier.
Did that man deserve to be locked up with the rapists? Did he deserve a puppy? Was there even such a thing as ‘deserving’ or was that just another word we allocated to a concept to make the system seem less idiosyncratic?
AFTER SOUTH PORT I MOVED OUT of home and into a Paddington share house that was about a twenty-minute walk from the Brisbane courts building. Mum kept asking me why, and the only answer I had for her was ‘it’s time’. I lost two kilos within a fortnight of new ‘good habits’ that involved walking to work, getting a long black, then not eating until dinner, and if Vincent wasn’t around, vomiting that dinner back up in the bottom of the filthy share-house shower.
I didn’t have any proper markers of success to cling to, and as the year crept onward—and I grew unhappier with the prospect of being a lawyer forever—I despaired at the thought of having to tell Judge what a disappointment I was. And as I thought more about telling people about my abuse, I was terrified I would never again be desirable to Vincent. I would sit on the back deck smoking a cigarette after work, and think: At least I’m thin.
We began a new trial that had been on the books for a little while because it required a Mandarin interpreter. It was a rape case, and when I flipped through the depositions I realised that it would be messy. Neither the complainant, nor any of the witnesses, would be testifying in English. What would normally be a three-day trial would easily blow out to double that length. The jury would grow frustrated. It would be harder than necessary for the complainant. In court when the Crown kicked things off, I knew it’d only get worse. There was a bisexual love triangle. There was alcohol involved and a question of the consciousness of the complainant. There were gossipy phone calls made and texts sent between witnesses both before and after they gave police statements on the night.
I pulled the names out of the barrel and almost snorted at one of them. The name was something like Christopher James Williams, and he was a fitter and turner from Capalaba in his fifties or sixties, white, with a beard, a slight belly, and wire-framed reading glasses. It was as though I’d drawn out the prototype juror: the ‘average Australian’ who supposedly most represented a ‘fair cross-section’ of society. He seemed calm but authoritative and I felt vindicated for my snap judgement when he emerged as the speaker for the jury a few hours later. I looked across to the rest of the jurors and examined their mostly white, mostly older faces. It would be an uphill battle. I couldn’t tell just by looking at their faces which among them feared the ‘Asian Invasion’ enough to vote for Pauline Hanson.
Judge, in his ever-patient manner, pre-emptively warned the jury of the stilted translation they would be hearing, apologising in advance that their task was perhaps trickier than normal. He made light jokes with them and put them at ease in a way that I think gave them trust in him, and in the system.
In cases where consent was a question, Judge would often give the jury a warning that it’s not a he-said versus she-said question: there is a level to which any jury needs to be convinced of the complainant’s account, and that is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. But mostly, I think, Judge’s warning fe
ll on deaf ears. The jurors had seen it all on TV and at the movies; they knew the courtroom was a battleground. They wanted to hear the clashing accounts like crossing swords.
The following year I would watch Pauline Hanson get re-elected to the Senate and commiserate with my Asian and Muslim friends. We longed to know who among us—on the train, at the supermarket, in our workplaces—had cast that ugly vote.
I looked at the jurors’ faces, lodging a small and silent prayer to something, I didn’t know what. Please let these twelve people not be racist or sexist. But I looked out the window at the palm trees in Roma Street Parkland, and the constellations beyond, and was filled with dread.
That afternoon Judge sent the jury home after opening addresses and we finished a little early. A few of the associates were congregated outside the elevators, bubbling with whispered chatter. I sidled in beside Jonathon, an associate normally in Beenleigh who was smart and gentle.
‘What’s up?’ I asked everyone.
‘We’re waiting for Alice’s verdict to come back,’ Hugh, a strapping young R.M. Williams walking billboard replied. Alice was normally in Ipswich with her judge.
‘Apparently it’ll be any minute now,’ someone else chimed in.
I turned to Jonathon. ‘What have I missed? Why do we all care about this?’
Jonathon explained to me, in a sombre tone absent from the others’ excited replies, that the defendant in the rape trial was from an elite inner-city private boys’ school. Vincent had gone to that same school, and he and I had gotten into disagreements previously when I mentioned the bad reputation the boys at that school have.
‘Well, he’s at uni now, they both are, but I think it happened in their final year of school,’ Jonathon clarified.
