Chapter 28: Arraignment
They arraigned me by video at two in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth.
There is a room with eight plastic chairs bolted in a row, a camera on a bracket, and a monitor mounted too high.
Everybody on the screen appears to be looking down at you.
I do not think that was designed. I think it was where the bracket fit.
You sit in the third chair. There is tape on the floor showing where the third chair goes.
The chair was two inches off its tape, and I had to sit on my hands.
The monitor showed the courtroom from a corner. The judge, part of a clerk, the top of somebody's head in the gallery.
Judge Pelham. Sixties. Reading glasses low on the nose.
He talked through documents while he read them, so that every sentence sounded as though it had already been decided.
Ruth was there in person, on the left of the frame.
She had said she would be. She was. I was surprised by how much that mattered.
The prosecutor was named Grier.
He stood with his weight forward on the balls of his feet, the way people do before saying something they have prepared.
The clerk read the charge. Assault in the second degree. A date, a name, an address.
The name was Damon Robert Ashford.
Hearing his middle name was the first thing all week that struck me as ridiculous.
Ruth entered a plea of not guilty. It took four seconds.
Then Grier spoke about bail for six minutes, and he was very good.
He did not raise his voice. He used the word violent twice.
Mostly he read, and reading is worse, because you cannot object to a document.
He read the date of my conviction. He read two years probation.
He read the phrase remained unconscious for a period of eleven days.
He said the defendant had competed at national level in judo. National silver, eighty-one kilograms.
He said the incident report described her throwing the complainant over her hip onto a hardwood floor.
He said it had happened in the family home, at dinner, in front of twenty-two witnesses.
Then he said the sentence I have thought about more than any other sentence spoken in those four months.
“This is not a woman who lost control. This is a woman who used a technique.”
The unbearable part was that I could not argue with it, not even inside my own head.
Losing control is forgivable in this country. Competence is not.
Then he asked the court for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Ruth stood. She spoke for ninety seconds, because she had told me ninety seconds.
No failures to appear, ever. Prior twelve years old and fully discharged.
Same address for three years. No passport in her possession. No income of her own.
Two hours every Wednesday, volunteering at a residential care facility.
Grier stood again, without any emphasis at all.
He said the facility was owned and operated by the complainant's family.
He said the defendant's access to it should be considered alongside the protective order the state was requesting.
That was the moment I understood that Damon had thought about all of this before the ambulance arrived.
Pelham took off his glasses and set bail at seventy-five thousand dollars.
He said it the way a man reads out a bus number to somebody who has asked for directions.
Then he granted a temporary order of protection.
Damon Robert Ashford and Margot Ellis Ashford. Stay-away provision, five hundred feet.
“Your Honour,” Ruth said, “the address on file for my client is on the same property as the second protected party's residence.”
“Then the order excludes the address,” Pelham said.
“Your Honour, that is my client's home.”
“The order excludes the address,” he said again.
He was not unkind about it. He had said that sentence a thousand times in that room, and it had always been true.
He set a bail review for the thirtieth, thanked everybody, and the screen went blue with a logo on it.
Eleven minutes, start to finish. I counted, because counting is what I do instead of the other thing.
An officer came in and stood by the door. I did not get up straight away.
I sat in the third chair, two inches off its tape, and did the arithmetic.
Seventy-five thousand means ten per cent to a bondsman. Seven thousand five hundred dollars.
I have one account in my own name, opened when I was twenty-six. One thousand one hundred and eighty dollars in it.
Everything else in my life ran through an account with Julian's name printed first on the statement.
A house I was not permitted to enter. A husband who had not called. Eleven feet of bench.
“Ready?” the officer said, and I said yes.
On the way up, my right hand came off my thigh about two inches.
I put it back.