Presumed innocent

SPRING

Opening Statement

This is how I always start:

"I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt."

"This man-" And here I point.

You must always point, Rusty, I was told by John White. That was the day I started in the office. The sheriff took my fingerprints, the chief judge swore me in, and John White brought me up to watch the first jury trial I'd ever seen. Ned Halsey was making the opening statement for the state, and as he gestured across the courtroom, John, in his generous, avuncular way, with the humid scent of alcohol on his breath at ten in the morning, whispered my initial lesson. He was the chief deputy P.A. then, a hale Irishman with white hair wild as cornsilk. It was almost a dozen years ago, long before I had formed even the most secret ambition to hold John's job myself. If you don't have the courage to point, John White whispered, you can't expect them to have the courage to convict.

And so I point. I extend my hand across the courtroom. I hold one finger straight. I seek the defendant's eye. I say:

"This man has been accused.-"

He turns away. Or blinks. Or shows nothing at all.

In the beginning, I was often preoccupied, imagining how it would feel to sit there, held at the focus of scrutiny, ardently denounced before all who cared to listen, knowing that the most ordinary privileges of a decent life-common trust, personal respect, and even liberty-were now like some cloak you had checked at the door and might never retrieve. I could feel the fear the hot frustration, the haunted separateness.

Now, like ore deposits, the harder stuff of duty and obligation has settled in the veins where those softer feelings moved. I have a job to do. It is not that I have grown uncaring. Believe me. But this business of accusing, judging, punishing has gone on always; it is one of the great wheels turning beneath everything we do. I play my part. I am a functionary of our only universally recognized system of telling wrong from right, a bureaucrat of good and evil. This must be prohibited; not that. One would expect that after all these years of making charges, trying cases, watching defendants come and go, it might have all become a jumble. Somehow, it has not.

I turn back to face the jury.

"Today you-all of you-have taken on one of the most solemn obligations of citizenship. Your job is to find the facts. The truth. It is not an easy task, I know memories may fail; recollections may be shaded. The evidence might point in differing directions You may be forced to decide about things that no one seems to know, or to be willing to say. If you were at home, at work, anywhere in your daily life, you might be ready to throw up your hands, you might not want to make the effort. Here you must. "You must. Let me remind you. There was a real crime. No one will dispute that. There was a real victim. Real pain. You do not have to tell us why it happened. People's motives, after all, may be forever locked inside them. But you must, at least, try to determine what actually occurred. If you cannot, we will not know if this man deserves to be freed-or punished. We will have no idea who to blame. If we cannot find the truth, what is our hope of justice?"