People of the jury: over the past several weeks, your eyes have been overloaded with countless exhibitions of evidence, much of it minute and technical but which, when so assembled, make a most grim mosaic of data. Your ears have heard the precise, and sometimes moving, testimony of forensic experts, investigators, eyewitnesses, and even a victim. No doubt the evidence was collected and presented to you with the utmost care; and no doubt, also, that the testimony given was done so with the fullest capable candor. None of this, for the record, is contested by the defense.
But, people of the jury, I would like you to set all that to one side of your minds, at least so long as I have you, and look at the two young men seated beside me throughout this process. I know it’s difficult, and would not be advised by the prosecution, but study them carefully, perhaps as you would a mannequin at Dolce & Gabbana, or the wax replica of a more interesting person. Consider their slumped and deferential postures, their resigned downward stares, their pale and sullen cheeks, their starkly curved frowns leaving the surrounding parts of the lower face almost like hardened rubber. And while you can’t see them from where you’re sitting, picture their eyes: dull and melancholic, losing strength under these harsh courtroom lights, all liveliness fitting to their youthful age dimmed into a compulsory maturity. I’ve witnessed their deterioration from the first day I took on their case. Let the record show that these are two sad boys.
The prosecution does not see it that way, of course. “Don’t let Mr. Defense Attorney fool you,” says the State, “for these are two of the most unhinged, the most ferocious, the most narcissistic people you will ever have the displeasure of encountering.” But you know what, jurors? Fair enough. The State certainly has them pegged, and I’m not going to say otherwise. There is no use asking you if these boys in their present state look like killers, because the answer is plain enough: they look like nothing else.
Of course killers look as the State described when they are in the act of killing. Place restrictions on their ability to act, such as putting them on trial for it, and that fervor dissipates into mere description. While the prosecution has regaled you with all the unpleasant details of their deeds, the doers of those deeds have grown morose in their mandatory abstention from that which gives them the greatest joy in the world. To be sure, the abstention has considerable benefits for the wider public, who lack the enthusiasm for their pastime but, had they not been apprehended, could just as easily have been made a part of it by its lopsidedly inconvenient nature. And these boys do not profess any desire to limit their homicidal palette. Anyone qualifies: you juror number three, you juror number eight, that court reporter, the bailiff, the stenographer, myself. But I want you to consider the mindset with which my clients sought out their passion, and I use that word advisedly. We’re always going around asking anyone and everyone what their “passion” is or what makes them “passionate.” Passionate for what exactly, I don’t know; but by that framing, you might find that there isn’t much that separates their “passion” from anything you may attach to that word.
D.H. Lawrence described the American soul as being “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” If that was even remotely accurate and not just modernist horseshit, that would put everyone here in an awkward position. But, for much of my clients’ early lives, hardly any of that seemed to apply, despite their “all-American” appearance. Family, acquaintances, even the authority figures tasked with scrutinizing them, found little foreboding, defective, or perverse about them; relative, in any event, to other males their age.
At the same time, you all remember that age well enough. And you all remember the feeling, perhaps not so acute as with these two, of being misunderstood and adrift in a society that seems insufficient to your needs, and of being lost in a culture that poses only the most vexing existential questions as to your purpose. There was only so much a loved one or a teacher could know about you or do to help you. And there was only so much you could know about yourself without finding, so to speak, your other half, a perfect reflection.
Such is what happened with these two very much sad-looking boys, whose lives, I remind you, are in your hands. Though they grew up only a few neighborhoods from each other, were similar in social background and intellectual capacity, they did not meet until well into early adulthood, at a party on holiday breaks from their respective colleges. We are told of ideas whose times had come; so it is with fateful partnerships. Having bonded like long lost brothers, and discovered enough overlaps to seem more than mere coincidence, these sad boys went off on a happy adventure—strange and twisted though it was.
The adventure did not come to them immediately, but involved a typical mutual exploration, in which potential interest after potential interest, activity after activity, was considered and rejected before the final discovery. The State has provided the diaries and personal communications between the two boys. Trading their … uhm … vivid fantasies is certainly one way of putting it. But so is articulating each other’s hopes and vulnerabilities, egging each other on to become the most ideal versions of themselves, as boys who form strong bonds tend to do. It may be, people of the jury, that I ask you not to set my clients free as such, but to give them the time to be nostalgic for this exploratory period, which manages to be more fulfilling, if not as momentous, than the final result of it. I digress, for result it did.
We know the facts. On March 27 two years ago, my clients went out into the world for most murderous purposes, which they fulfilled in full and later only in part. For as you may also be aware: passion does not instantly confer proficiency.
Once the first victim had been dispatched as the crime scene photos have shown, they deposited his corpse into a stream. This was prudent insofar as it degraded crucial evidence but less so in that the stream led into a park ground where the body was discovered without difficulty by multiple joggers, dog-owners, and urinating vagrants, two days after the incident and one day after the missing person report was filed. You have seen the library card found on the victim’s person, later linked to one of these two heartbreakingly sad boys, and you have been told of the check-out history filled with true crime, the most heinous horror fiction our literature has to offer, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
This discovery shortened their dismal collaboration, not that it was progressing very well on its own. The State has shown that on April 5, my clients acquired a second victim, who managed to escape their designs. It will be difficult for you to forget her harrowing testimony of their incompetence. And if I had framed my defense differently, I and my clients, in addition to being massively screwed, would look very inconsiderate.
I did not accept this case because I believe my clients to be innocent of abominable acts, or even basically good people. Frankly, I find them unseemly even if they’d harmed no one. I would not in a million centuries even let them bag my groceries. Rather, the circumstances of the case posed a perplexing dilemma about the conflicts between personal potential and the rule of law. Just as a murderer has no limitation on victims, save the ones he self-imposes, personal potential has no limitation on the range of activities it can affect. Is the law obligated to restrict those potentials that pose a public threat? Maybe. But to what extent are we to punish people for reaching, or trying to reach, that potential? Are we vested with the power to redirect someone’s demonstrable if still-maturing promise to something incompatible with his interests because it makes the surrounding society safer?
Is not murder a valid craft in spite of its problematic characteristics? Consider the words of Thomas De Quincey on this very subject:
When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense, and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat it morally. But suppose it over and done … suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose … what’s the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. … Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance.
The law, being insensitive to notions of taste, disapproves of the killing of one person or persons at the hands of another or others. You would be hard pressed to deny that the potential of my clients in doing just that has been irreparably stifled. This leaves us to speculate on its trajectory had it gone unhindered. The evidence before us gives strong hints that it wasn’t going anywhere. And indeed, it may have come to pass that they’d already reached the precipice of their skills and turned back to less legally questionable distractions. On the other hand, they could have righted themselves, as all committed craftsmen do: learning from their mistakes, becoming more sophisticated, more discriminating, less cruel. True, history shows us that this is not the case exactly. But who knows? They may have been sui generis, rife with innovations to expand the range and nuance of homicide. Alas, their potential is very much a closed book. Your potential, people of the jury, is another matter.
If the prosecution prevails with a verdict of guilty, the inevitable must then follow. These two sad boys will be sadder still by having to pay for their unmet promise with a sentence of execution. The follies of private killing would, on the face of it, be corrected by the efficiency of public killing. I repeat: on the face of it. “[M]an has not grown less cruel with the passage of that illusory thing called time,” Charles Duff wrote in his Handbook on Hanging. “I have reached the conclusion that no people can point to a method which is more beautiful and expeditious, or which is aesthetically superior to time-honored British practice of breaking their necks by hanging.”
By demanding this outcome, the State wants to attach you to this awesome responsibility of maintaining public order; of keeping alleged third-rate sadists like my clients off the streets. But whether the State knows it or not, it also risks nurturing the very empathy with the defendants it expounded so much of its momentum to discourage. Who’s to say that you, people of the jury, in sending these two sad boys to whatever execution method we now use, will not discover a potential in yourselves for this very craft of life-taking? It is not impossible to find yourself going away from sentencing with a newfound purpose. You may reorder your entire life to perfecting this one practice: imposing your citizenship from state to state; making yourself available for jury service on as many murder trials as will have you. God knows there will be no shortage.
I don’t know, jurors: sometimes I lay up at night wondering if D.H. Lawrence isn’t so full of shit after all. Maybe Americans do have an urge to kill that knows no bounds to an exceptional magnitude. Maybe that’s our curse rather than our genius; and maybe this trial is only a prologue. But I know one thing to which Americans have an inborn allergy: irony in all of its nefarious manifestations. No American of robust spiritual health and well-stocked patriotism will ever succumb to irony’s glittering deceptions.
Though clearly the prosecution is putting all of its hopes on your weakness in this regard. The State wants nothing more than for you to be so frenzied with irony as to make you swerve from the road to justice and into a muddy ditch of ill-repute from which you may never extract yourselves. Nothing technically or constitutionally prevents you from doing that, and few will judge you or envy you for making that choice. But once you do there’s little stopping the United States from becoming both a killer society and an ironic society. All I’m asking you, people of the jury, is to pick one, and to pick wisely.