First Twelve In The Box
Julieanne Himelstein
Word Count 1940
The courtroom is standing room only but it has nothing to do with me or my case involving the rape of a child, which was a loser from the get-go. Late report. No physical evidence. No tearing. No bleeding. No redness. No forensics. Mother a no-show. It’s because it’s summer in Washington, D.C. and the law school interns have arrived in their pencil skirts and flats and somehow filled up the whole left side of the gallery. They were probably told they could see a “female” try a rape case in courtroom 17. A sober-looking group of shiny police officers who look like new recruits are taking up most of the first rows on the whole right side of the gallery. It looks like the rest of the seats are filled with a mixture of local cops stealing sleep in the scratchy seats and most of them reeking of this morning’s bourbon, along with their frayed and defeated witnesses, children attached to God-knows-who curled in chairs waiting for the worst to happen, homeless people seeking air conditioning, lawyers from other courtrooms looking to kill time before their cases start up again, just plain old members of the public yearning for drama, oh yeah, and other prosecutors hoping to see me go down in flames.
I usually stand next to juror numbers Seven and Twelve, the jurors at the very end of the first and second rows of the jury box, closest to the gallery. But even I can smell the vodka from last night radiating out of my pores. God knows how my makeup survived the all-night drinking and carryings on with a cop, as usual, on a night before a trial no less. If I can smell the vodka, Seven and Twelve can smell it too.
You have to know, jurors see right through everything no matter how much some prosecutors like to make things better than they really are, like dressing up their witnesses like they are going to church when really they are toothless meth ho’s. That’s why I don’t believe in all the juror questionnaire shit and striking jurors based on how they are dressed, or what they are reading, or what kind of neighborhood they live in. Some prosecutors don’t take lawyers (too analytical) or scientists (too exact) or anyone under 30 or this one or that one. I take the first twelve in the box.
So I move away slowly and into the well of the courtroom where no one can smell me and find me out.
“Krista”, I ask the eight-year old girl on the stand who looks so small in the courtroom, like she had been swallowed whole.
“Tell us what Uncle Buddy did to you.” My voice sounds crackly, like I haven’t used it for a while.
I move a couple steps back so that I am standing right up against the railing between the gallery and the jury box. The juror’s faces are shimmering with pride like proud parents watching their own child climb up the ladder to the diving board for the first time.
But the kid just stares back at me. Nothing is coming out of her mouth. Now she’s staring at her hands, which look old to me. It’s probably only been a minute, but it feels like ten. Her body suddenly turns inward as if she was just punched in the tummy. She puts her hands to her mouth and looks at me again for the second time since I asked her that question. I know she’s going to say it. She’s going to blurt it out any second, like she did in my office last week. The only evidence I have is her words but nothing is coming out of her goddamn mouth.
Krista looks at the Judge who hates my guts. The Judge smiles at her and then scowls at me.
Krista looks at the courtroom deputy. He had brought her a box of tissues and a glass of water when she first sat down in the witness stand. Now, he’s fixing his eyes on me as if I am the abuser in the room.
Right about now most prosecutors would ask for a recess or do something in the midst of this catastrophe. Call the victim advocates. Ask for a continuance of the trial. Do something.
Not me. I just stood there in silence.
You probably hate me too. Leaving that kid on the stand all by herself. I don’t coddle any witnesses, even eight-year-olds. Look, if the jurors think I am taking care of her, why should they? I stand as far away from her as I can get, and let her fall, so that they see her falling, with no one to catch her, except them, the jury. With their guilty verdict.
The jurors are turning on me one by one. Instead of looking longingly at Krista, their necks start to swivel around to find me, the culprit who is leaving this little girl out to dry. Number Three looks like she’s screaming, “Why can’t you save her?” and “Do something!”
It must be ten minutes now because the defense attorney stands up and booms as if he was the one who was going to protect the child, says, “Objection ! How long are we going to let this go on? Obviously the witness doesn’t want to testify. I move for a mistrial!”
Before the Judge could say anything, I say, “Just give me a minute, your Honor.”
The Judge knows me because I have tried at least ten of these in her courtroom. She’s one of those old-school, proper and by the book judges and most prosecutors don’t want to mess with her. She called my boss during a recess in my last rape trial, to tell her that I looked sluttier than my victim. I heard that the judge told her, “She needs to dress more conservatively. She’s a prosecutor for God’s sake”.
The judge calls us to the bench and puts the noise muffler on so the jurors can’t hear that she’s ready to toss this case.
“I’ll give you five minutes but if the witness doesn’t say anything, we’re done here. Do you understand me?” The Judge scolded.
“Yes, your Honor.” I am walking all the way back to my counsel’s table.
It’s time to pull out all my tricks. If she doesn’t tell the jury what happened to her, I‘m going to lose because the only evidence I have here is her testimony and “Uncle” Buddy, who is really one of her mother’s boyfriends, will saunter right out of the courtroom and crawl into bed with the mother and do exactly what he did again to Krista as if nothing happened.
I walk right up to the witness stand, lean into her and I whisper loud enough for the jurors to hear but think they are eavesdropping.
“Do you want to whisper it?”
Krista scans the gallery. I look back to see if her piece of shit mother finally appeared. She hasn’t.
“Do you want to say it with your eyes closed?”
She is still scanning the gallery.
“Do you want to say it real fast and then it will be over?”
Krista drops her head all the way down. Her forehead is flat on the witness stand. I imagine her eyes open down there, smelling her own breath, feeling the cold wood on her face, tasting a tear.
The judge is looking at her watch. My chest begins to tighten as the alcohol is wearing off. Regret sloshes back and forth in every artery, up and down, like toxic water. Why did I fuck that cop. Why did we go to the second bar.
I’m fucked. I look behind me at all those spectators in the gallery, still no mother. I can tell that those interns and everyone else can see through me and see the smudged eyeliner and my shaky hands and they can smell me too. Fuck all of them. I walk back to counsel slowly so that maybe it won’t count against my five minutes.
Then from the witness stand, I hear a tiny voice.
“Ma’am, can I write it down?”
A trial is alive on its own. It breathes. A moment in trial like this one is as if the whole courtroom is on its side on top of a flowerpot on a windowsill on the forty-third floor when it is windy and lightning and earthquakes and sonic booms shaking the ground below. It doesn’t need the wind to knock it over, to unbalance it, to make things go bad, it could be anything, it could a phone going off, a witness from the trial next door wandering into the wrong courtroom letting sounds of the hallway push it over the cliff, the judge taking an untimely recess, it could be anything to make this fragile and beautiful moment take a nose dive.
I sprint back to my table to grab two sheets of clean paper and a red magic marker. On the way back to her, amid all the chaos in my head, I say to myself with calm and resolve:
Slow down.
Breathe.
Put one foot in front of the other.
Don’t look left.
Don’t look right.
Don’t look at Krista.
Don’t you dare look at the jury.
One false move.
Please no one walk into my courtroom at this moment.
Krista takes the paper with one of her small hands and then takes the marker. She bites her lip and then puts her cheek against the paper and begins writing. I back up all the way back to Seven and Twelve so that each juror can see Krista writing on that paper all by herself with no help from me. Let them listen to the squeaking of the marker. Let them smell the vodka.
The courtroom is frozen. The usual rustlings from the audience like the courtroom doors opening and closing, whispers between lawyers, the occasional cell phone going off, all of those noises that are just there during every trial, is no longer. The only sound is a squeaking sound from that big red marker on the sheets of paper. Every eye in that courtroom is on her. Mine aren’t. I can’t risk jinxing the moment. I lean slightly against the rail and stare at the floor. Still. I’m not breathing.
“Ma’am”, Krista peeps.
I walk toward her to retrieve the pieces of paper. On my way back to counsel table, my hands are trembling but I don’t know if it’s pure joy or the alcohol wearing off.
I stop in the well and read the words silently to myself. Uncle Buddy’s head is bowed toward the table. I search the gallery once again for the mother who once told me the kid was a liar and kept Uncle Buddy in her bed for months after Krista told her what happened, until he was arrested. She’s still a no-show.
“No further questions.” My voice is still cracking.
In closing argument, I stand in the well of the courtroom and fix my eyes on each and every one of the jurors.
I walk over to counsel table and retrieve the two pieces of paper and pinch the top of both pages in each hand and hold them up so they could see the words, in red, bleeding from the paper.
Uncle Buddy put his pee-pee in my poo-poo.
Mommy told me not to tell.
The knock on the jury room door and the guilty verdict is so fast, I haven’t even packed up.
Julieanne is a former federal prosecutor from Washington, D.C. She prosecuted numerous cases involving sex crimes against women and children. She also played a leading role in the prosecution of one of the leaders of the attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya. Julieanne lives in New York City with her husband, an FBI agent, and is writing a novel.