Doing Time

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sandwich sitting on a stone wall outside the fortress-like gray building, enjoying a few last moments of warm afternoon sun. Then it was back through the metal detector, back to the claustrophobic room with hard wooden chairs and the scratched Formica-topped table. Back to the sweating glass pitchers of water, whose ice had melted, and all of the remarkable people in whose company I’d spent my morning.

I’d gotten to know them a little bit as hours passed and the conversation looped around and around, picking up steam. Two physicists sat at each end of the rectangular table, and along the sides were a grade-school teacher, an agency director who had battled breast cancer, a state lobbyist, a furniture designer, two engineers. A former theater owner on my right; next to her, a grocer hugging a giant denim carryall as if it were a baby on her lap. Directly across from me, a serious young medical assistant with a thick purple pen, who I assumed was doodling all morning but turned out to be carefully diagramming everything we’d discussed. Somewhere in the room, I felt, lurked a thirteenth juror—an unmistakable presence not physically apparent but engaged and listening nonetheless: the spirit of the Law.

We reviewed the details again, starting from scratch. An angry man, the defendant, had sped a blue Buick down a dirt road onto a family’s ranch property, after a verbal argument with the ranch owner on the street downtown two days prior. As the ranch owner’s young daughter Nancy watched with alarm from a nearby pasture, he drove his car into the front gate so hard that he knocked down a pole and part of a fence, denting his Buick and terrifying the horses so badly that they reared up and galloped away. Then he spun around and left the way he had come, tires squealing, a dust storm in his wake.

Malice aforethought? Reckless driving? Vandalism? The angry man claimed it had all been an accident; he’d just wanted to talk. He said he didn’t realize he’d collapsed a fence or scared anyone. But the frightened ranch owner felt the man had meant to hurt them all. Just the morning before, his daughter had been playing in the same spot, throwing her jacks down into the dirt next to the now-ruined gate. What if a Buick had raced through just twenty-four hours before it actually did, sending Nancy to her death?