Chapter 27: Prior
At eight fifteen a woman in a suit said my name at the cell door, as a question.
About my age. Shorter. She stood with her weight even, which nobody does in a corridor like that.
Ruth Adeyemi, public defender. A folder in one hand, a paper cup in the other. She gave me the cup and said nothing about it.
They put us in a room with a table bolted to the floor and two chairs. Mine was bolted too.
“Before anything else. Have you spoken to any officer about what happened?”
“They asked if I wanted to give a statement.”
“And?”
“I said no.”
She looked up. “Why?”
“Because the last time I explained myself to a police officer I was twenty-two. The explanation went in the file, and the file is why I am sitting here.”
She wrote one word and put the pen down. I learned later that this is what she does when something matters.
“Tell me about the record,” she said.
So I told her. Twelve years ago. Nineteen, seven months off the national team, working nights in a bar off Aldon Street.
A man on the pavement outside. Words. Then a shove. Then my hands did what my hands do.
He went over my hip and came down badly.
Pavement is not tatami, and he did not know how to fall, and there is no reason on earth he should have.
He was unconscious for eleven days. He woke up. He recovered.
I pleaded guilty because I was guilty. Two years probation, discharged at twenty-four, permanent entry.
“Did you have a lawyer?”
“For about forty minutes, on the morning of the hearing.”
“Did he raise self-defence?”
“He asked whether the man had hit me. I said he pushed me. He said that won't do it.”
She wrote that down too. Then she said “Okay” and turned a page, and the room got colder.
“Here is your exposure. Your brother-in-law has a fractured scaphoid in the left wrist and a diagnosed concussion.”
“There are photographs of the back of his head taken at eleven forty last night.”
“He posted out with the left,” I said.
“You always post out on the side you are going down on. That is the hand that breaks.”
“Do not say that in a courtroom.”
“Why not?”
“Because you just explained his injury using the word always. Always is a pattern.”
I did not answer that, because there was no answer that did not make it worse.
“The charge is assault in the second degree. It is a felony.”
“Because of the prior, the prosecutor will say serious violent history inside his first thirty seconds.”
“And everybody in that room will hear a woman who has now done this twice.”
“It was twelve years ago.”
“That is not a defence. It is mitigation, and mitigation comes at sentencing, which comes after conviction, which is the thing we are trying to prevent.”
I asked her what the difference was between last night and what anybody does when they are grabbed.
“Proportion,” she said. “And training.”
“Training?” I said.
“You are a former national-level athlete in a combat sport, and you are the only person in the room who is.”
“That will be in his opening. Not because it is fair. Because it is true.”
I looked at the table. Grey laminate, the edge picked at by somebody who sat there before me.
Here is what I understood in that room, having arranged twelve years of my life around it without ever once saying it out loud.
A record does not sit in the past. It sits in front of every later fact and decides what that fact means before anybody has finished the sentence.
They do not have to prove I am dangerous. They only have to say the year I was twenty-two.
“He took hold of my dress,” I said. “At the collarbone. And he pulled up.”
“Did that hurt you?”
I thought about it properly. “No.”
“Did you believe he was about to seriously injure you?”
The truthful answer is that Damon Ashford has never been capable of hurting me, and both of us have always known it.
“No.”
She put both hands flat on the table.
“Then we do not have a clean self-defence case, and you should hear that from me now rather than from a judge in April.”
I asked what we did have.
“Context,” she said. “Context is slow and expensive, and it does not fit inside a bail hearing.”
Then she asked if there was anything else she should know. Anything at all, she said. However small.
I want to be accurate about this part, because it matters later. I thought about my knees. I thought about the fourteenth of October and the oak boards.
I opened my mouth and what came out was: “No. Nothing.”
Twelve years of keeping my body quiet had built a habit, and the habit answered before I did.