The Wrong Man

12

The room they let us use at the Boyd Center reminded me of a large playroom for children. There were stations for board games and a sitting area around a television and a desk with chairs. The walls were painted with that same orange color, and the carpeting on the floor was thick, if a little dingy. Not the traditional setting for an attorney-client visit, but budgets were tight, and this was also the room for family visits.

Tom Stoller was in limbo. He needed serious psychological assistance from the state, but he wasn’t getting it, because this was the same “state” that appeared in the caption State v. Thomas Stoller, the same “state” that wanted to put Tom in prison for life, the same “state” that didn’t want to concede that Tom suffered a mental defect at the time of the shooting-or at all, for that matter.

I sat across the room and observed Tom with Shauna. They weren’t discussing the case. They weren’t probing his troubled mind. They were playing checkers. I’d brought Shauna along today because she was good with people, far more adept than I at establishing bonds and adjusting to the nuances of interpersonal relationships.

Sitting across from Shauna, a checkerboard between them, Tom showed the same tremors I’d seen every time I visited. His tongue was peeking in and out of his mouth. His eyes were blinking rapidly. His fingers wiggled constantly. Side effects, Dr. Baraniq had said, of the antipsychotic medication. Tom appeared to be contemplating his next move in the board game, but for all I knew he was in a faraway place, envisioning himself as Sir Lancelot to Shauna’s Guinevere.

You’d think that his mere presence at Boyd was an acknowledgment of Tom’s mental illness, but it wasn’t. The state wasn’t stupid. Boyd housed all kinds of people who presented problems to jailhouses, ranging from patients with communicable diseases, such as HIV, to notorious individuals deserving of segregation, such as gang leaders or police officers, to those with your basic “behavioral” problems.

Tom Stoller fell into the last category. He wasn’t mentally ill. He was a “behavioral” problem. Yeah. Sure. Once they convicted him, he’d go to a penitentiary and receive somewhat decent psychological services. But for now, especially with an insanity defense looming, the state wouldn’t treat him as anything but a problem inmate who could be kept compliant if they drugged him up.

Tom double-jumped two of Shauna’s checkers. “Ooh, I was hoping you wouldn’t do that,” she groaned.

Tom looked up at her and stared, expressionless, in the inappropriate way of a child. Even when Shauna smiled and broke eye contact, as would any adult, he held his stare on her.

Shauna dutifully jumped one of Tom’s checkers. “Take that,” she said.

“I had girlfriends,” Tom said. I almost jumped out of my chair. It was the first time Tom had ever volunteered anything personal.

“I’ll bet you did.” Shauna winked at him. Bless her heart, she likewise recognized the significance of the moment but played the whole thing casually.

Tom stared back down at the checkerboard, and Shauna snuck a peek in my direction. Before too much time had passed, and the moment was entirely lost, she said, “Was there one in particular? Usually there’s one special one.”

“Jenny. Jenny, but she didn’t want to…” Tom dropped his head and started mumbling.

Shauna waited for a moment. “She didn’t want-”

“I can’t think of the name of the movie.” Tom shook his head harshly, like he was removing cobwebs. “In Somalia. She didn’t like it.”

“The mov-”

“It made her sad. She didn’t like… suffering.”

I knew what he meant. It was a graphically violent film about the American Special Forces operation in Mogadishu that went south and got a bunch of our elite soldiers killed.

“Black Hawk Down,” I said, from across the room.

Tom whipped his head around at me. With one violent thrust, he jumped up and backhanded the checkerboard clear across the room. Instinctively, Shauna pushed her chair backward, and I got to my feet. I raised my hand toward the security camera to indicate we didn’t want or need intervention by the Corrections guards.

Tom stood, frozen, his gaze lost somewhere in a memory. He slowly turned and walked over to the corner, where he took a seat and sat silently, stoic except for the familiar tremors. Shauna and I looked at each other, speechless.

“She didn’t want me to fight,” he finally whispered.