Opening Argument
As I lay out my defense in this trial, I want you to keep one important thing in mind: context is everything.
I want that to be your mantra. To embrace it in equal proportion to how the prosecution ignored it altogether. Their interest was instead on things that really aren’t in dispute. No one doubts that my client wasted time and resources. That he manipulated the justice system for his own ends, and with no qualifications to speak of, is overlooked only by the vision-impaired. And that he simply didn’t stop there when he very well could and should have, well … I’ll get to that.
The prosecution’s context, to the extent that they care about it, is a bad one. To them it is impossible that my client could separate his skills from his intent. In every possible scenario his aim was to offend the standards all lawyers, even bad ones, cherish and subvert the moral conventions that we as citizens uphold. For him, they insist, there was no alternative. Only the drama of the trial transfixed him. The lure of the local Playhouse or any open mic night, or any similarly more appropriate setting for his gifts, meant nothing to him. He was not interested in a one-man show. He did not care to push the bounds of the stand-alone monologue beyond where Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian had already taken it. I’ll say one thing for performance artists, they know their threshold between “art” and “crime.”
The context my client and his skills ultimately fell into conjures not Spalding Gray, but Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy—the sick, prolific killer with the polite face. Ted Bundy—the impulsive necrophiliac who worked for a governor, who volunteered at a suicide hotline, and who made some effort to study law. Ted Bundy—whose own trial judge had to admit that he ended up at his courtroom having squandered considerable potential. Such a conjuring is correct as far as it goes. Bundy was double-sided. We’re all, in one way or another, double-sided. But Bundy is legendary for his ability, uncommon even among serial killers, to mask his antisocial impulses with a prosocial mask. This relates to my client in the sense that he is the inverse.
I’m not suggesting by this comparison that my client is a lifestyle necrophiliac in the same way that one might be a lifestyle book-shelver or a lifestyle cheese-eater. But rather that Bundy’s visible layer of potential is the reflection of my client’s lack of one. He cannot boast a spectacular education. Skills already present are deployed in indifference to the coherence we all adopt: “talent” being caged in “training” before being let out into the enclosure of “professional fulfillment.” By every standard set forth by the prosecution, my client is marginal—antisocial. But when I say he is double-sided as Bundy and the rest of us are, he cannot logically be antisocial in the streets and, also, antisocial in the sheets.
I would not be here if there was no evidence of a prosocial instinct beneath the feral presentation. It is, in a way, regrettable that one even exists. In every technical sense, my client’s representation in my place was grossly misrepresented. What attracts someone to lost causes and doing so pro bono every time? Someone who stupidly thinks that he is exploiting some ethical loophole maybe. Someone with next to no adult responsibilities and a malicious streak possibly. I don’t believe my client acted with malice. He acted with some stupidity, if I’m being totally fair-minded. But he did not, as far as I can tell, have any intention to leave society worse off than when he came to it.
That only leaves us one viable option: having a relative grip upon sanity. Because for a real lawyer, that thing we call the criminal code is just that: a code. It is a rigid, legal arrangement. We are bound by it. But a fake lawyer, at least the kind that my client embodied, sees the criminal code as a fluid, poetic text. Poetry can only go so far within the strictures of a courtroom and within the spectrum of crime. My client wanted to raise the criminal code to greater heights than even the most conservative among us find reasonable to reach. And it’s clear that poetry lacks performance art’s respect for boundaries. In a fit of poetry, my client found criminal mischief to be an act of good sense. And once enough hallucinogenic substance had been deposited into the town’s water supply, it was assumed that that good sense would be shared so widely as to be commonplace, and the spectrum of crime given a far broader space for accommodation.
That, thankfully, did not come to pass. Poetry for one person remains to a majority of people merely madness. And in so arguing for a legal declaration of this one person’s state of madness, it is not my aim to absolve him of responsibility of his crime, but to deny him authorship of it. For if you cherish the threshold where crime is one thing and poetry another, rendering my client not guilty by reason of disease or defect does more to maintain it than the prosecution’s desire to make his authorship a fact and bring him closer to rest of us.
“Context … is … everything.” That should go on bath mats. On phone cases.
Closing Argument
When Ted Bundy went on trial in 1979 for killing and maiming four Florida coeds, he represented himself. This in the face of all but certain conviction. In the face of eyewitness testimony that placed him at the scene. In the face of bite mark forensics that placed his teeth on the victims. In the face of a defense strategy driven on the one hand by a sociopath’s resistance to admit his guilt and on the other hand by his desire to relive the details of the acts that all but confirmed it. In the face of all that, no acquittal was possible.
My client, once again in stark contrast to the infamous murderer, is not representing himself. He didn’t even broach the possibility, from which I would have dissuaded him and from which the judge might have forbade him from doing for his own good anyway. But I admit a bizarre situation when I say this. Bundy’s unhinged courtroom theatrics resisted sound legal advice. My client, the most theatrical of fake lawyers, seems to have resigned himself to letting the professionals carry on. By that simple appearance, nothing would indicate a more robust sanity, yet here I persist in trying to prove that insanity is a major component of this case. In fact, this case not only justifies the plea of “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect,” it unmoors us from our conventional, narrow understanding of it.
When we think of a defendant who makes this plea, and find them genuine in doing so, we are prone to think of them as like an antenna receiving a signal. And having received it, either by genetic inheritance or trauma or whatever, the antenna proceeds to behave in an insane manner, doing insane acts that are often illegal. Some of you may see grounds for seeing my client in this manner. Certainly in the sense that I am serving him not as his legal representative, opening and closing arguments in defense of his allegations, but as his editor or a sympathetic critic prefacing and appending his Collected Works.
But “reason of mental disease” does not automatically place the onus of the actual mental disease upon the defendant. For if insanity can be received it can also be transmitted, and some antennae are more empowered to do the latter. The act of tainting water for mass consumption with LSD betrays nothing less than an urge to transmit. It also betrays an impatience with its outcome. But he is distinguished from the majority of reform-minded people only by his proactivity.
My client hardly needed to hurry things along. While the insanity that he transmitted by his original efforts spread only moderately, it was far more effective in stripping off social veneers. Case after case won new “moral” victories, and always at the expense of the subject of the case he was tasked with defending.
The testimony of his clients conveys this strange result. No one served the interests of these criminals more poorly than the man presently on trial. Yet none of the clients who testified could register any trace of resentment against him. Our system provides options to rectify even casually defective counsel—they took none. And you should not have overlooked the sheer confusion they felt at having to be called at all. Not only did they have no apparent desire to hold the defendant accountable, they seemed entirely converted to his mission and were content to have served their part in furthering it. And I was just as perplexed as you were when I was first told this. Those witnesses who noticed took care to warn me in advance how easily I would come around to knowing what they knew, and how normal it would seem in due course.
My client has said not a word throughout this trial, very much unlike the ones that he “worked.” And yet I’ve had to rebut one claim after another—by prosecutors, by reporters, by my own staff—that he was speaking through me. These insinuations offended me so much that I didn’t even care to know what they meant. (He hasn’t even taken any notes!) Of course it was my wife who had to say it flat out. Something did change in my idiolect. My cadence became grander and my thinking better structured, while at the same time my logic was more contorted and my imagination more morbid. Before this case I knew absolutely nothing of murders unrelated to my client docket. Yet Ted Bundy and other demonic intrusions just kind of appeared into my head unsolicited and unprovoked.
A good lawyer always—always—compartmentalizes his work from his regular thoughts and life. But this influence is on an entirely differently level. A signal has been transmitted to me. I committed no crime; I am merely imprinted by it. I am responsible insofar as I must commit all my legal and intellectual acumen to resisting it. “I am not the servant of this freak,” I tell myself, “I am a good fucking lawyer.” I must, because it’s just as possible, I think, for an antenna like myself to be of such power as to pass the signal onto other antennae. Antennae like you, people of the jury.
I said in my opening argument that I believed that my client had no intention of leaving society worse off than when he found it, and still hold that to be true. But I believe also that his very well-meaning conduct managed to deteriorate the mental health of everything in his wake. It’s this collision of intention and outcome that gives dimension to the madness I’m trying to describe. With that in mind, your decision rests on which of the following is more likely: that my client discovered a signal and based his actions around it, as the prosecution believes; or, as I am trying to argue, that my client’s pre-existing signal was given the widest possible range through this particular medium after others had failed. Either way it’s clear he has to go somewhere where that signal can be weakened if it can’t be extinguished. And someone needs to cover my therapy expenses going forward.