Storytelling for Lawyers (9 page)

“Young Apperson”

[D]o you remember young Apperson sitting there
[indicating]?
You remember his open face—I liked him a lot—an open, honest boy—blond, curly hair—you remember him, two and a half months ago? He said, “Thirty percent of the pipes weren't welded when I came, when the plant was opened. Thirty percent of the pipes were welded after the plant was in operation, and I was there and I saw those old welds.” And he wasn't a certified welder himself, and he was teaching people in an hour or two to be welders themselves—not a certified welder on the job. “There was things leaking everywhere,” he said. You remember how he was describing how he was there welding the pipe and they jerked the oxygen out, and he had to gasp for air—the contamination—to survive the moment? Jim Smith talked about the valves breaking up from the acid. So much for the design of the plant.
⁴¹

Each description of character and recitation of testimony is discrete, shaped in relationship to the other pieces of testimony, elliptical pieces, part of a careful overall arrangement. These are all parallel constructions. Each begins with a visualization or imagistic depiction of character, then a summary of testimony, ending with Spence's rhetorical flourish and an almost unnoticeably ironic commentary as Spence moves outside the images and sits alongside the jury observing the witness and providing a throwaway comment. For example, Spence observes that Mr. Utnage's indifference to and ignorance of the notion that loose plutonium causes cancer is “like mayonnaise.” Or after recounting testimony by young Apperson, who sees the “things leaking everywhere,” Spence observes ironically, “[s]o much for the design of the plant.”

This elongated initial movement provides the “setup” for the confrontation between the melodramatic hero (Silkwood) and the archetypal villain (Kerr-McGee and its evil minions) to save the townspeople and the community from destruction. This slow initial movement frames the clearly marked pattern of the classic heroic rescue narrative also presented in
High Noon
and
Jaws
. Unlike the heroes in those films, however, Spence's Silkwood will never do successful combat in a final climactic battle; she will merely provide her warnings of the future and die in the process of attempting to rescue the community. It is then for the jury to intervene and complete the hero's journey by writing the proper ending to the unfinished story.

Finally, after proceeding through much additional testimony and evidence, Spence signals his transition to the next stage of the plot (the dramatic
confrontation). Again, Spence keeps the pieces (the sequence of the plot) discrete, suggesting the relationship between narrative sections not through a clear and explicit linear chronology, but as if by principles of cinematic montage. For example, he reintroduces snippets of testimony from another witness, “Hammock, the highway patrolman” (formerly a Kerr-McGee employee), to whom Kerr-McGee allegedly shipped defective fuel rods that, in Hammock's words, “had a bad weld, or too large a weld sealing in the plutonium pellets.”
⁴²
And then he jumps back into the jury box, as if sitting next to the jurors. “It just turns my guts,” Spence observes, as if psychologically he cannot refrain from doing so, “[t]hey were shipping defective pins to a breeder reactor knowing they were defective, to Washington where the people—the State of Washington—where the people are going to somehow be subjected to the first breeder reactor in this country.”
⁴³

Spence comments forcefully to the jurors in the first person, marking that this preliminary piece of his argument is near completion and that he will finally be moving on to the next stage in his story structure. He is now a moral commentator and guide for the jury upon what he has presented so far:

I couldn't get over it—I couldn't sleep—I couldn't believe what I had heard. I don't know how it affected you. Maybe you get so numb after a while—I guess people just stand and say, “exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure—cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer,” until you don't hear it anymore. Maybe that is what happens to us. I tell you, if it is throbbing in your breast—if cancer is eating at your guts, or it's eating at your lungs, or it's gnawing away at your gonads, and you're losing your life, and your manhood, and your womanhood, and your child, or your children, it then has meaning—they are not just words. You multiply it by hundreds of workers, and thousands of workers, that is why this case is the most important case, maybe, in the history of man. That is why I'm so glad you're on this jury, and that we are a part of this thing together.
⁴⁴

Finally, the heroine Silkwood is cast back onstage. “How does this all tie in with Karen Silkwood?” Spence asks.
⁴⁵
After yet another digression, or zigzag, back to his legal theory of damages, “if the lion gets away, they have to pay,” Spence reintroduces the protagonist Karen Silkwood, characterized as a moral and religious person, a union organizer, deeply concerned about her
fellow workers, who has been silenced and slandered by Kerr-McGee at trial. As with his initial setup, Spence is extremely patient and deliberate in developing Silkwood's character as a heroic protagonist, in opposition to the image of Silkwood presented by defendant's witnesses. Spence goes far back in time and begins his depiction of Silkwood as a child:

Who is Karen Silkwood? Who was she? Well, it's a fear that sometimes the whole truth doesn't get to you. What would have happened in your mind about Karen Silkwood if all you ever heard was
[Kerr-McGee supervisor]
Longaker, who was full of his own vindictiveness against her? You would have believed, by his statements: “Karen Silkwood was [an] uncouth, moody, unreliable, vindictive, sloppy woman, a miserable hate monger, and tried to get even with the company by intentionally contaminating herself—that is what she was, she was an unmitigated moody bitch,” to put it plainly. Is that who she really was? You know yourself, and you know your friends, and you know me by where we come from. She was a happy child, a good child, she was correctly reared by the church, and she had her life in the church, and she loved church, and she was a scholarship student, and she was a chemistry major. She was bright, she could understand. But, more than anything else, she cared. At that corporation plant there was somebody who cared, and it was Karen Silkwood. Somebody who cared a lot about others.
⁴⁶

Here, Spence resurrects Karen Silkwood and brings her actual voice into the courtroom—through edited audiotape segments—so that the jury can hear her and put an identity to answer the question of who she was (whose version of Silkwood is to be believed). These excerpts are parallel (almost identical) in length to the excerpts from the various witnesses' testimony that Spence previously quoted to the jury. Each is a parallel yet elliptical piece of an organized ensemble or arrangement of voices of the community, with Silkwood now placed at the center. At the end of each edited taped excerpt, Spence repeats her final phrase in her own voice for emphasis, providing a final rhythmic “beat” before moving on. These pieces are carefully arranged, akin to a tightly ordered sequence of building-block scenes in the storyboard constructed for a movie.

[Spence] You know, I got this here so that you could hear her voice once more. This is the voice when she was talking to
[union representative]
Steve Wodka. She never knew it would be played in a
courtroom with her bones rotting in the grave. But her voice is still quite alive. Now you judge for yourself who Karen was.
[Reporter's note: The following portion of a cassette, Plaintiff's Exhibit 31, played in open court
.]

Karen Silkwood [her voice]

And, I've got one here that we're still passing all welds no matter what the pictures look like. We either grind down too far—and I've got a weld I would love for you to see just how far they ground it down till we lost the weld trying to get rid of the voids and inclusions and the cracks. And, I kept it.

[Spence repeats] “And I kept it.”
⁴⁷

Spence similarly frames other taped excerpts:

[Spence] And I had Wally get this other part so that you could hear it.
[Reporter's note: The following portion of a cassette, Plaintiff's Exhibit 31, played in open court.]

Karen Silkwood [her voice]

Ah, in the laboratory we've got eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, you know, twenty and twenty-one, I mean, and they didn't have the schooling so they don't understand what radiation is. They don't understand, Steve, they don't understand.

[Spence repeats] They don't understand, Steve, they don't understand.
⁴⁸

And then, Spence answers his own rhetorical question as to who
he
thinks Silkwood is, identifying her as “a prophet”:

Who was she? I say she was a prophet, an ordinary woman who cared, and could understand, doesn't have to be anything other than an ordinary woman who cared and understood in order to be a prophet. I don't mean that she's anything, you know, biblical—I mean, she was an ordinary person who cared, and she prophesied it this way: “If there is something going on”—this was an actual quote—“If there is something going on, we're going to be susceptible to cancer, and we are not going to know about it for years.” She says this to you, ladies and gentlemen: “Something has to be done.”
⁴⁹

From this point, Spence develops the melodramatic conflict and confrontation between Silkwood and the forces of antagonism posed by Kerr-McGee. Spence contrasts the testimony of Kerr-McGee's witnesses against Silkwood's own voice. Spence begins to intimate what
really
happened to Silkwood to counter the defendant's story (pointing the “long, white, bony finger” of blame)
⁵⁰
that Silkwood intentionally smuggled plutonium out of the plant, poisoning herself to take revenge on the company, effectively committing suicide (although there is scant evidence to back up this theory). Spence's more likely counterstory implicates a dark conspiracy by Kerr-McGee to rid themselves of the union organizer, Silkwood, who has collected evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the corporation (including, perhaps, doctoring images of fuel rods shipped to a breeder reactor in Hanford, Washington).

Spence paints his villainous characters with vivid brushstrokes, usually recalling witnesses with a description of a single detail and then connecting this physicality to the next depiction of villainy. Here, in a sequence, Spence emphasizes how the defendant's evil minions (including Morgan Moore, Silkwood's supervisor at Kerr-McGee and Kerr-McGee's attorney, Mr. Paul) point the “bony finger” of blame at Silkwood: “What did
[Kerr-McGee supervisor]
Morgan Moore do? How does he fit in the picture? He accused her from the beginning—pointed his finger, didn't have any evidence then—and five years later in this courtroom was still willing to point his finger, his long, white, bony finger at her. It is easy to blame.”
⁵¹
Spence then connects this to how Mr. Paul, defendant's attorney, attempted to put his fingers in the pocket of his coat during his opening statement, intimating to the jury that Silkwood had secreted the plutonium into her pocket, smuggled the plutonium out of the Kerr-McGee plant, and spiked her own urine samples; her apparent motive was to take revenge on the corporation:

Mr. Paul, you remember him walking up to you in the opening statement and telling you how he blamed Karen Silkwood? He didn't have any more evidence then than he has now. He said first access—first access—you remember he said about her “she had access to it, to her apartment.” “Who could get into her apartment?” “Well, she could get into her apartment.” The next point is an important one—I'm sure no one of you has wondered about it—“the opportunity to remove small quantities of plutonium from the plant.” Then he did this business with his pocket, trying to get your mind ready to blame her and
to join the “company line.” … [A]nd even you remember this business about how he really tried to explain to you that “she did it intentionally to herself.”
⁵²

And then it is back to Morgan Moore, and his “long, white, bony finger” of blame that points to the “only defense they have … the mud springs.”
⁵³

Morgan Moore says: “All I have is suspicions. I can't prove a thing.” … Now, I think it is shameful to point the finger in accusation, and know, as Mr. McGee knew clear back in 1975: “It is not likely that the source of her contamination will ever be known.” He knew that. The AEC had come in and never came to any such conclusion. They investigated it. Morgan Moore said, “All there are are suspicions.”
⁵⁴

[I]t is the only defense they have, and they hope to drag you into the mud springs.
⁵⁵

While the defendant “make[s] reckless accusations and destroy[s] and desecrate[s] the good name of a decent, honorable, person,”
⁵⁶
these are not actions that fit the character of a heroic protagonist; her motivations were to protect the workers at the plant, not to poison herself and endanger others by smuggling plutonium out of the plant:

Her mother said she was crying—she was nervous, something was wrong—she knew something was wrong: “She wouldn't tell me what was wrong. She was afraid of something at the plant. She was contaminated—she said she thought she was going to die. She wanted to come home. She wanted to get away from it, but there was something wrong.”
⁵⁷

Likewise, Silkwood's sister recalls that not only is Silkwood profoundly upset about her contamination but that she has knowledge about wrongdoings at the plant and must be careful: