“I didn’t rape her,” Dade says softly.
With as much contempt as he can muster, Binkie shakes his head at Dade and returns to his table and sits down. For once, I don’t feel a need to rehabilitate Dade.
He has done as well as he can do.
“Your Honor,” I say quietly, “I’d like to recall Shannon Kennsit.” I can only hope that Shannon and Robin have obeyed the instruction not to discuss their testimony.
Wideeyed as a small child, Shannon returns to the witness stand. Her eyes narrow into slits as I remind her that she is under oath.
“Robin has told you, has she not,” I ask abruptly, “that at the party you and she went to on Happy Hollow Road last spring Dade had tried to kiss her while they were in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” Shannon admits in a soft voice, but there is no mistaking what she has said.
“But she said she didn’t let him.”
“No more questions,” I say, having rolled the dice and won. Maybe it is small-time craps, but if this case is about telling the truth, it will be something to argue to the jury.
Binkie shrugs as if I had stopped the trial to pick a piece of lint off my jacket.
“No questions. Your Honor.”
At precisely four-thirty Judge Franklin instructs the jury that for them to find Dade guilty of rape, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he engaged in sexual intercourse with Robin and that he did so by forcible compulsion. Putting on a pair of reading glasses for the first time all day. Franklin reads, “Forcible compulsion means physical force, or a threat, express or implied, of death or serious physical injury to, or kidnap ping of, any person….”
When he finishes. Judge Franklin looks down from the bench and says formally, “Mr. Cross, you may give the first part of your closing argument to the jury.”
As Binkie gets up and slowly walks to the jury rail, for the first time since noon I look at Sarah, who is sitting with Lucy. I wonder what kind of bond has been forged between them. So far as I know they have not talked until today. Is it race that they have in common or the fact that they are women? More probably, it is simply the two imperfect men in their lives sitting at the defense table.
Sarah tugs anxiously at her hair and glances up at me with a wan, scared look on her face. Are things that bad?
Probably. I can’t read this jury at all. I look at the sole black juror. Her dark, brooding face is a study in concentration as Binkie, jamming his hands in his pants pockets for the time being, begins.
“Ladies and gentlemen, when we began this morning, I said you’d be tempted to throw up your hands and say it was too hard to decide whom to believe in a case like this,” Binkie says, positioning himself at the middle of the jury rail. He has stopped in front of the oldest retiree and wags his head from side to side.
“But after hearing the testimony, I don’t think it is really all that hard if you use your common sense. Why would Robin Perry, a varsity cheerleader, an outstanding student, a girl who is from a deeply conservative family, tell a story this humiliating and embarrassing to herself if it wasn’t true? For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a minute that she consented to the sexual act. Why claim she was raped, when all she had to do was keep quiet? If Dade started talking about it, she merely had to deny it. Nobody was there to see. It was her word against Dade’s. Common sense tells you that if she denied it vigorously enough, most people would have chalked it up to sexual posturing on a young man’s part, assuming Dade would even have talked about it. After all, by both accounts she left as soon as it was over. There wasn’t much to brag about.
What we tend to forget in our concern with the judicial system and justice and due process for the accused is the victim. It is excruciating to go through this. The fear, and shame, and emotional pain are terrible. Some of you may be thinking that Robin Perry can’t be believed because it appears she didn’t tell the truth to you about an attempted kiss that she resisted by the accused. I ask you to consider what realistic alternative she had if she hoped to convince you she was telling the truth about what happened the second time she went to the house on Happy Hollow Road. If she admitted the man who later raped her had tried to kiss her even months earlier, you would think she couldn’t have possibly driven out to that house alone unless she had changed her mind about him. So, like many of us, she told you a lie when she would have been better served by an embarrassing admission that, in fact, shows she was pathetically naive and trusting. She thought she and Dade were friends. She thought she could trust this boy that she was helping. This kind of faith in human nature is so oldfashioned, Robin herself knew it would make you doubt that a girl can actually be this naive in this day and age. Well, you heard her tell you. Her parents are so conservative they didn’t want her even dating someone who wasn’t from the South. A different race was out of the question. Robin went along with it, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help somebody who needed it. Mr. Page told you that you didn’t have to check your brains at the door, and I couldn’t agree with him more….”
As Binkie talks, my heart sinks. At least two of the damn jurors are nodding, and all are listening as if he is saying the most obvious thing in the world. Sweet, innocent Robin lied to make the truth believable. I helplessly watch faces as Binkie grinds his argument into their gullible brains. Unfortunately, I find myself believing him, too. What could be worth the hassle of saying you were raped unless you were? Binkie tells the jury that all his witnesses’ testimony pointed to rape.
“Not one person who saw her afterward, whether it was her friend and roommate Shannon Kennsit, or three strangers, including an experienced nurse and physician, had any doubt mat Robin had been forced against her will to have sex. We haven’t heard one word from a single witness today that anyone questioned her story except the accused….”
Dade has begun to sink inside his suit coat and I wonder what I can say to counter Binkie. He can think on his feet better than I can.
When Binkie finally is done, I begin my argument standing by Dade.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard the old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Well, the prosecutor desperately needs to explain away Robin Perry’s lie, and he has come up with as good a rationalization of it as you’re going to hear.”
I walk over to the jury rail.
“The trouble with lying is that one leads to another and we all know it, because at one time or another everybody has told a lie about some thing. Granted, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Robin Perry could be lying about one thing and telling the truth about another, but what her lie tells me is how conflicted she was about Dade Cunningham. He was the forbidden fruit, and Robin had been warned away from it. What I think probably happened that night is that Robin told herself another lie, and one that was perfectly understandable. She and Dade were going to work on a speech, but what she was really going out there for that night was to do something she had wanted to do back in the spring and that was to kiss Dade Cunningham.”
I stop and catch the eye of the unemployed waitress, who has begun looking sympathetic.
“What happened next was that these two very attractive young people ended up making love, but when it was over, the guilt Robin Perry felt was intolerable to her. She left immediately, and finally after nine sleepless hours decided that the only way she could handle her feelings was to tell another lie and that was to say she had been raped.”
I stop and walk back to the podium to give them a moment to absorb what I am saying. I’ve got everyone’s attention, but a couple of the retirees on the jury are frowning. Hell, this argument is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t need them all. I’ll take a hung jury at this point. I pick out the professor and start again: “When it comes to sex, none of us, at a given moment, likes to admit what we’re really thinking, even to ourselves, probably because we’ve been told much of our lives our feelings are bad and wrong, and so we lie. It’s human nature. Part of the problem is there’s so much freedom these days, and it’s hard to accept the consequences of it.