Authors: John Milliken Thompson
“When I am reminded of the powerful forces aligned against the prisoner—the full police force of the city of Richmond, the representation of commonwealth’s attorneys, the zealous detective service of Jack Wren, and the sympathies of the men and women of Richmond—it is with pleasure that I address a Virginia jury who remember the obligation they assumed when upon their voir dire they declared that they were above the influences of the surrounding community, and that they were prepared to hear impartially and to decide impartially as between the commonwealth and the prisoner.
“He came here in January on business, to see the auditor for his aunt and attend a meeting of Dwight Moody, the evangelist. You may say it’s a strange coincidence that Lillian Madison was here at the same time, but where is the proof of their meeting here? He had dinner that night at the home of his friend Tyler Bagby, a stalwart citizen …”
After an hour or so, Crump wipes his perspiring forehead and holds the bar. Aylett, seeming genuinely concerned, half rises to offer him a glass of water. Crump waves him off, but accepts a glass from his son. “And now,” he continues, “we come to the strangest business in this case. The finding of that key. We are asked to believe that all day Saturday that glittering, bright key lay in the grass, while person after person combed the entire reservoir grounds. If it was there, someone would’ve seen it as sure as there is a God in heaven. Nor did any key turn up on Sunday, nor the rest of that entire
week
, until the following Monday. Then a laborer comes before the court claiming he found it—
eight days earlier
. Gentlemen, this is too much to believe. That key was never in the possession of the prisoner. It is alleged that the prisoner was carrying it on his watch chain and that it snagged as he crawled through the hole in the fence. With his overcoat buttoned on a cold night, how could he have snagged his key? Accept the testimony of Mr. Lucas if you will—he seems an honest man. But whether as a prank or in deliberate malfeasance, someone placed that key there later.
“In a remarkable development, the defense brings forth a note allegedly written by the deceased to the prisoner. Her signature is nowhere on the scrap of paper. The only eyewitness to the sender of a possible previous note cannot be found. A bellboy named William Lane says he received it from a mulatto boy, who has mysteriously disappeared. I don’t believe that for one minute. He has certainly been secreted. Surely the detective hired by the commonwealth, a man who knows every sewer in this city and every rat in it, could find that boy. Instead, he produces a woman of ill repute, with whom he has had a liaison, to impugn the character of the prisoner.
“The only letter found among the belongings of the deceased written by the prisoner is of an innocent nature. The prosecution will have you believe there was a lively correspondence between these two. But where is the proof? There were plenty of letters from others, but not from him. The old legal maxim declaring that that which does not exist shall be held never to have existed is simply inverted. What kind of argument is that to address to twelve gentlemen sworn to act upon the facts of this case? They produce some blank envelopes and say he was scheming with his paramour. This is the sort of proceeding where you try a man at the crossroads, you convict him with a shout, and hang him with a hurrah.”
Having brought his speech to a climax, Crump, florid-faced and sweating, decides to take a break, leaving the jury poised for act two.
Lucas slips out now—he was already pushing his luck with Mr. Meade by asking for more time off. He is grateful to Mr. Crump for saying he was honest, but now he feels ashamed for ever thinking that young man capable of killing the girl. The whole trial has been a mistake and he wants no more part of it.
Willie goes outside for a smoke, a habit he has recently developed. He walks around to Rum Cut Alley and leans against the brick front of a grocer’s, watching people and staring a “mind your own business” at strangers who appear to recognize him. The odors of horse manure and coal smoke mix with those of nearby gardens and women’s perfume to make a not unpleasant smell. But the noise is something he has never gotten used to: the constant tread of carriage wheels and hooves, the shouts of grocers and newsboys and truant children, the clanging and banging of buildings going up or coming down. It’s all right for a few days, but he cannot understand how Tommie would like it here so much. Sometimes it’s all one can do to keep from being run over by a speeding carriage or wagon. At home there are no blaring fire-engine horns and no eye-stinging fumes, no ladies with red paint eyeing you greedily, no sad old men with stumps for legs sitting on stoops, caps held out for coins. Only the smell of growing things and wood smoke and that clean fertile scent of the river as the tide shifts, and the quiet that lingers in between the song of the thrush and the bobolink and the bittern. In the city it is as if you are walking on the graves of a thousand thousand people—all stone and concrete and the ghost of an older city that was built, in turn, upon some earlier version of itself. At home you walk on land that feels cleansed by the tide and the rain and the dew, the earth opening like a hand to feed you, if you know how to coax it.
Willie finishes his cigarette and throws the butt into the street, then turns back toward City Hall. He takes his place beside Aunt Jane and squeezes her hand. Crump rises to continue his speech. It is brilliant, everything you could want, Willie thinks, but as he studies the motionless faces of the jury, he doesn’t know if it will be enough. Did Tommie make a mistake he could not live with? Willie thinks back to the mistake he himself made when he was six years old, and how he will have to live with that for the rest of his life.
Crump is drawing to a close. “My friend on the other side says the people of Virginia should rise up as one man to demand the conviction of the prisoner at the bar. But we are not here to carry out the demands of the people of Virginia. Demands of that sort are unreasonable and unjust. Such demands may result in the sacrifice of the innocent. Since the day that the maddened mob cried at the heels of the Savior, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ no reliance is to be placed upon the demands of the impassioned mob. Prejudice runs away with them.
“But, gentlemen, I shall detain you no longer. My physical strength has been exhausted, and I shall conclude my remarks by reminding you that to violate the living temple which the Lord hath made—to quench the fire within a man’s breast—is an awful and a terrible responsibility, and the verdict of ‘guilty,’ once pronounced, is irrevocable. Speak not that word lightly; speak it not on suspicion, however strong, nor upon moral conviction, nor inference or doubt. I tell you that if you condemn that man lightly, or upon mere suspicion consign him to death, the recollection of the deed will never die within you.”
Crump takes his seat, the hush of the crowd hovering like the uneasy, conscience-stricken silence in church. Tommie can feel the tide turning in his favor and he glances over to the jury—certainly they’re impressed by Crump’s overpowering logic and wisdom. Even if they wanted to convict him, how could they in good conscience now? Mercy and truth appear ready to triumph over bloodlust and ignorance.
But Crump has spoken for so long, and the exhaustion in the courtroom is so palpable, that Meredith requests they reconvene tomorrow so he can have a chance to condense his speech. Crump scoffs under his breath, “Hmmpf. That’s a good one. He wants fresh ears. But it’s his prerogative.” The jury agrees to the adjournment, and Hill says Mr. Meredith can commence his argument in the morning.
Tommie cannot force himself to eat that night. He decides to fast, to purify himself for what lies ahead. Tomorrow either he’ll be a free man or his troubles will be just beginning. He thinks of Lillie’s line, “O if suicide were not a sin.” To have the ordeal over with now, out of the public eye, would be a blessing. But by what method? The idea of hanging himself turns his stomach, and it brings to mind the picture he has successfully banished, except on the worst nights—the rope dangling from the gallows. But there it is again—the wooden frame, the rough hemp around his neck, the barbarity of it. He tries to tamp down the fear by imagining it in detail—the fibers scratching his soft skin, the moment of hot pain, the air beneath his feet, a knot that slips, his feet perhaps his last sight on earth, and then the release. Into what? Would it at least be quick? And again the darkness of his cell smothers him, and he breathes loudly just to hear his body working. He puts his hand on his heart to feel its life. A tear rolls down his cheek. Isn’t he too young to die? “God,” he whispers, “please, I beg of you to spare me. I’ll devote my life to your service.”
He dreams again he’s standing beside the ocean, which is vaster than anything he has ever seen, excepting the night sky, the waves a perfect green scroll unfurling at his feet and withdrawing like the ceaseless inbreathing of the earth. He stands alone before the sea, and, despite its incomprehensible depth and breadth, there is no deeper mystery than the very fact of his own existence there at the edge of the infinite and the eternal. Then farther down the shore he sees a girl with long brown hair and bare feet. She begins walking into the water, her white dress clinging to her legs, and she doesn’t have to turn for him to understand she’s beckoning. All he wants to do is follow—it seems so easy—but he’s afraid. He’s anchored to the shore, and she keeps moving out into the sun-rippled water.
“I thought today of all days you’d be awake, sir,” says the guard.
So he wakes to the final day of his trial, and dons a new gray serge suit. He eats a little breakfast so that he won’t faint, and he tries to keep that picture of the vast sea in his mind on the way to the courthouse. But then he remembers the girl, and a strange feeling of both terror and peace spreads through his body. He clears his head and watches the people pointing at his carriage along the way.
Meredith takes the floor for the final speech. He speaks elegantly, without the bombast of Aylett or Crump, and as confidently as if he were addressing the general assembly. His voice is oddly warming, and Tommie imagines if not for the sense in them the words might have given him strength.
“I venture the assertion,” he says, “that not a man among you did not have in his heart when this case began the earnest hope that the young man who stands at the bar might come forth acquitted. I do not censure you for it. But I submit now that the day for hope has passed …” Tommie drifts away, finding his place again beside the sea.
“Gentlemen, the defense has tried to frighten you with cases of circumstantial evidence that have resulted in miscarriages of justice. I could undertake to cite case after case where men have been unjustly hanged, not upon circumstantial evidence, but upon direct evidence. Is it because men err that men shall not do justice and do the best they can according to their judgment and their consciences? The wheels of justice are necessarily imperfect, but for this reason are they to stop turning? Because a man dies in a factory explosion, are we then to shut down all factories? As in battle, innocent people sometimes die for the common good.
“Yes, there have been cases of wrongful conviction. But let me assure you, this is no such case. Seventy-eight witnesses have been produced by the commonwealth, and the character of not one has been attacked legitimately.
“The defense would have you believe Miss Madison committed suicide, but why would she come all the way to Richmond to kill herself? And why go out to the reservoir to do it? She could have committed suicide easier from a hundred other places. And you are asked to believe that a woman in her condition—a woman but nineteen inches higher than the fence—could have gotten over the fence. Possible, but improbable. How much easier it would be with someone—a larger and stronger person—to assist her. Mr. Crump said she could have opened the latch on the picket fence gate—also possible, but so could some other person carrying her …
“In regard to Mr. Jack Wren, I have here a letter endorsing him, signed by every bank president in the city and many of the leading businessmen as well. As for him going into the sewers and ratholes of the city—he does it so that others may keep their hands clean. Do you expect him to find criminals in church congregations? Of course he receives pay for his work. Lawyers who stand up in court to defend murderers also receive pay for their services.
“We have before us a prisoner, who at least a week before coming here last March, plotted to take the life of a young woman. He mailed her the fake letter that she, in her innocence, believed would unite them here in Richmond. It did unite them, but for what sinister purpose she was unaware. He had the motive, the means, the conduct, and the opportunity to murder her on the night of March the thirteenth. And so, gentlemen, as difficult as I know it is, you must not now shrink from your duty.
“Gentlemen, the commonwealth does not seek revenge, nor ask for outrage and anger; the commonwealth simply seeks to find an answer to a crime and to deal with it justly. There is no one else remotely suspected of the crime, and every circumstance laid down for your guidance points clearly and directly to the prisoner. We have contended for murder in the first degree, and if you should find such, we ask that you return a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Again a hush overhangs the courtroom, but this time the crowd cannot contain itself, and the tension that has built up for weeks bursts forth like a dam in clapping and shouting and foot stomping. It is quickly taken up outside, where men are standing on tables and chairs for a closer ear on the proceedings. Hill, his face flushed with the heat of the room, turns to the officers, who begin shouting for order. Aylett rises and shakes hands with Meredith as he resumes his seat, and after a minute or two order is restored. A deputy sergeant brings in two bouquets, one for Mr. Aylett, the other for Mr. Meredith. A card in a flowery hand is attached to Aylett’s: “With thanks for his beautiful oration in defense of the dead Lillian.”