Chapter 112: The Fourteenth of October
A jury is twelve people who have taken a morning off.
Ours was seven women and five men.
The oldest looked about seventy and the youngest could not have been twenty-five.
Rampton told them, in the first four minutes, that they might hear I had a previous conviction.
He told them they must not reason that a person who has done a thing once has done it again.
Juries are told this.
Achterberg says they mostly obey it, and that the mostly is her entire profession.
Prosecuting counsel was called Farrow.
He opened for thirty-five minutes.
He was fair. I had expected him not to be, and he was.
He said this was not a case about a marriage.
He said the jury would hear about the marriage, and that much of it would be unattractive.
He said the question was narrow: on the twenty-fifth of December, in a room containing twenty-two guests, was the force used by this defendant reasonable.
He said the words “national level” once and did not say them again, which is how you use a fact properly.
The Crown called four of the twenty-two.
Not twenty-two. Four.
Everybody imagines a trial with twenty-two witnesses. No such trial exists.
A cousin. A neighbour. A colleague of Julian's who had been standing by the sideboard. And Damon.
The other eighteen made statements and were never required. That is normal, and it surprises everybody.
The cousin said she had seen Damon reach out and then everything happened at once and she was looking at her plate.
The neighbour said Damon “had hold of her dress at the top”.
He made a downward gesture with his hand, which the shorthand writer recorded as “witness demonstrates a pulling motion”.
Farrow did not ask him to repeat it. Achterberg asked him to repeat it twice.
The colleague said he had heard Damon say the word kneel.
He was the Crown's own witness. Farrow had to ask him what was said.
He said it, and the room got noticeably quieter.
Damon gave evidence on the afternoon of the first day and the morning of the second.
He was not wearing the splint.
Nine months had passed, and even he could not carry it that far.
In chief, he was good.
He said he had put his hand out to steady himself. He said he had been drinking but was not drunk.
He said the next thing he knew he was on the floor and could not breathe.
That last part is true.
When you land flat on your back the diaphragm stops for two or three seconds. It is the most frightening two seconds most people ever have.
Achterberg cross-examined for two hours and ten minutes and did not raise her voice once.
She did not accuse him of lying. She asked him about clothing.
The waiter in Portugal. His wife's sleeve at the christening.
A photograph from a shooting weekend in which he has a friend by the collar, laughing.
By the fifth example he had stopped saying he could not recall and started saying it was a habit.
Then she asked him what he had said immediately before he reached out, and he said he could not remember.
She asked whether he had used the word kneel, and he said he did not think so.
She said Julian's colleague had told this jury he had, and Damon said, “Then I probably did.”
At four o'clock on the second day the Crown closed its case.
I had sat in the dock for eleven hours by then, behind glass, four metres from the jury.
Margot was never called.
She had been on the Crown's list in February and was off it by August.
The reason is not mysterious.
If she gave evidence, Achterberg would cross-examine her on a background report commissioned five months before her son's wedding, and a woman who commissioned that report is a witness the Crown does not want.
So my mother-in-law never entered that courtroom.
The jury never saw her, and she did not have to say one word on oath about a floor.
That is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed, in her favour, for the eleventh time.
The defence case opened on the third morning.
Achterberg had told me the order and I had made her tell me twice.
Julian's statement was read to the jury by agreement, because the Crown did not dispute it.
Hearing a court clerk read the sentence about the door frame in a flat voice was strange beyond describing.
Then Priya Raman.
Then me.
That night I did not sleep.
At four in the morning I got up and stood in the middle of my room with my feet at hip width and my hands empty, and I did not move for a long time.