Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (42 page)

During an hour’s recess for lunch I review the “J” Board transcript. Binkie’s next witness, Mary Purvis, the student volunteer from the Rape Crisis Center, seems even younger than she did at the “J” Board hearing and readily admits her inexperience. Brushing long, unruly strands of brown hair from her eyes as she speaks, the young woman adds little, if anything, to what the nurse has already said. She admits on crossexamination that Robin had little to say to her.

Without further ado, Binkie calls Robin Perry, and the jury, which had been about to doze off, snaps to attention.

As if she were interrupting grownups to come in and say good-night, Robin shyly enters the courtroom. I realize how much window dressing other witnesses are in a case like this. You believe either the victim or the accused.

Binkie starts Robin off slowly, letting her talk about herself to give the jury a sense of who she is. Though she is trying to maintain the poise that has carried her to this moment, today she seems fragile as a glass mirror.

Doubtless Binkie is hoping she will become more comfortable the longer she talks. Gone is the confident ac tress of past performances. This is a girl, not a woman. In a trembling voice she tells the jury that her father had originally served in the Navy and that her family had moved around from base to base until she was ten. I let this go for a moment and then get to my feet.

“Your Honor, this is a rape trial. The jury can decide this case without knowing the name of the family dog. Can’t we at least start with the witness in college?”

A couple of the jurors chuckle, and Judge Franklin responds “Let’s get this going faster, Mr. Cross.”

Unruffled, Binkie asks, “What year are you in at the university, Ms. Perry?” He would have gone on for an hour if I had let him. The one advantage I have is that the jury think they already know Dade. They’ve seen him on TV, read about him. Yet, they thought they knew

OJ.

Simpson, too.

Robin answers and, more quickly than Binkie appears to like, begins to talk about Dade. As she tells about the class last spring, I notice that beside me Dade has begun to hold his breath and then release it. What if he is lying and every word she utters about what happened is true?

As she talks, despite my efforts to concentrate, a memory of an event when I was a senior begins to form at the back of my brain. I was dating a Tri-Delt sophomore named Bonnie Edwards, and one Friday night when we were both drunk I took her to my room in the Sigma Nu House. Within minutes we were naked in my bed, but just as I was beginning to enter her, she told me to stop.

Drunk, I didn’t. Did I rape her? Of course I did! Then, like a freight train bearing down on me, another long-ago moment, this one an impression more than a fully remembered event, appears at the edge of my consciousness: late one night after returning from a party where we both had drunk too much, I had insisted on sex with Rosa, who was too helpless to resist, though she made her reluctance known. She had vomited a few hours later, or perhaps it was the next day. I raped my own wife. I have begun to sweat profusely. For the first time since I took this case, I cannot avoid the feeling that whoever is telling the truth, Robin was, at some point that night, completely vulnerable. Yet, whatever he has done, I am no better than the boy sitting beside me.

“Dade tried so hard,” Robin is saying.

“But sometimes in class he’d get real nervous, and it was hard to under stand him. When we’d practice, I’d get him to slow down….”

Robin has a way of making everything she does seem innocent, and the little party on Happy Hollow Road last spring becomes, in her words, purely a favor to Shannon.

There is no mention of an attempted kiss by Dade, and I realize that Binkie does not know about it, for surely he would deal with it now, instead of letting me bring it out when I cross-examine Robin.

“Why did you choose the house on Happy Hollow Road to practice the speech?” Binkie asks, a few minutes later, his voice tightening a bit and betraying the importance of this answer.

It will be the hardest question Robin has to answer.

Why, indeed, with so many other choices?

“Now it seems the stupidest thing I ever did,” Robin says.

“But I trusted Dade. He really cared about his classes. He never horsed around at all when it came to studying. He wanted to make a good grade. I didn’t really want to go over to Darby Hall because of all that’s happened there, and boys aren’t allowed upstairs in our rooms at my sorority house, and the classrooms are usually locked.”

Binkie has to decide whether to ask her to clarify what she means about Darby Hall. It won’t help him, but it can’t do Dade any good either. Binkie uncharacteristically takes his hands from his pockets and grips the side of the podium.

“Why didn’t you get a conference room in the library?”

Robin cocks her head, embarrassed by the question.

“I

had forgotten you could. I didn’t even think about it.

Dade just suggested we go to his friend’s house, and I said okay.”

“Did you drive together?” Binkie asks, knowing she still has some explaining to do.

I steal a look at the jury. They are interested. If she is so pure and good, why not meet in public where she can get some Brownie points? Robin sighs audibly.

“No, I told him I’d meet him there. I know it doesn’t make sense, but my father has told me over and over never to let myself get in a situation I can’t get out of. I just figured that if Dade tried to get fresh, I’d leave. It never occurred to me that he would rape me.” Her voice becomes tiny here, though she doesn’t cry.

Despite the welter of emotions building in me, I rock my chair and roll my eyes, communicating to the jury that this explanation is garbage. Fresh? Nobody uses that word. The fact is, Robin could have seduced her professor, fucked him happily on a weekly basis in my motel, and now she’s worried about Dade being “fresh.” The lawyer part of me wants to get up and scream at the jury that Alice is disappearing through the looking-glass, and what remains is a first-class liar. Do I believe this? I don’t know what I believe.

Binkie ignores me and tells Robin to continue.

“What happened next?”

“Well, I got there sometime around eight, and he was already in the house. For the first few minutes he acted okay, but then he came over to the chair where I was sit ting and grabbed me by the arm. I just froze. He said he wanted to take a shower with me. I remember asking him if he were crazy. Then, I smelled beer on his breath and knew he had been drinking. I said, “I have to leave,” but he said, “Don’t make me have to hurt you.” He pulled me up and took me into the bathroom and told me to take off my clothes. I started crying and told him to let me go home. He just shook his head. I could tell he would hurt me if I didn’t do what he said.”

Robin stops and begins to cry, her first tears of the day.

As her roommate has done, she reaches inside the sleeve of her sweater and pulls out a tissue and wipes her eyes.

Sighing heavily, she begins again, this time looking down at her lap but making sure her voice is loud enough for the jury to hear.

“I took off my clothes and did what he said. He did the same and got in with me and made me wash him. Afterward, he took a towel and dried me off and then made me get on the bed in his room. He put his penis inside my vagina and made me have sex with him. I was scared not to. He had this horrible look on his face.”

“Did he ejaculate inside of you?” Binkie asks.

“Yes.”

“Was he wearing a condom?”

“No” “How long did this take?” Binkie asks, his hands twisting inside his suit pockets.

“About thirty minutes from the time he made me take off my clothes and get in the shower with him to the time when he rolled off of me and let me go.”

I watch the faces of the jurors, who are paying close attention Unfortunately, Maria Chastain, the one black juror, seems more engrossed than anyone. I’ve got to give Robin credit: fearful or not, she can captivate an audience

“Did he hurt you?” Binlde asks.

“No,” Robin says, looking up at him.

“I did what he wanted.”

“Did he say anything or did you say anything in those thirty minutes?”

“I was crying,” Robin says, sniffing.

“I think he said some other things but I don’t remember.”

“What did you do after he was finished?” Binkie says, his voice stoical. He doesn’t like rape cases, his manner suggests.

“I put on my clothes. He watched me and said that if I told anybody, nobody would believe me, and he’d spread it all over campus that I was a slut.”

“Did you say anything?”

Robin dabs at her eyes.

“I was too afraid.”

“What happened next?”

Robin sighs as if she knows she has finished the hard est part and says, “I drove straight back to the sorority house and went up and took a shower and got in bed.”

“Did anyone see you?” Binkie asks.

“Did you speak to anyone?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t want to see or talk to any body. I just wanted to be alone.”

Robin’s voice is tense with anxiety. Beside me, Dade is shaking his head. He whispers urgently in my ear, “She’s lying and she knows it! She wanted to get in the shower. I didn’t tell her no such thing about hurting her or her being a slut or anything!”

Watching the jury, I nod, realizing he didn’t deny he raped her. Binkie leads Robin through the reasons why she didn’t go to the police or hospital immediately. She says nothing that is not in her statement or in the transcript of the “J” Board hearing.

“I just couldn’t face going through it then,” she concludes tearfully.

“If it hadn’t been for Shannon, I might not have gone. I knew it would be horrible, and it has been.”

Binkie turns to me and says sternly, “Your witness.”

I take my time getting up. One of the reasons I’m convinced that Robin didn’t tell anybody for nine hours is that she was worried that her escapade the past summer would come out, but if I ask about it the judge will de clare a mistrial and probably would throw me in jail and bury the key. From beside the podium, I ask, “Where is the house you went to that night, Ms. Perry?”

Robin runs the fingers of her right hand through her hair.

“About two miles east of campus.”

“Is it in the city limits?”

Robin hunches her shoulders.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you recall if it has a well beside it?”

“I remember seeing a well, but I think it’s boarded up.”

“Does it have a house across from it?”

“No” “Immediately on either side?”

“No.”

“In fact, the house you went to that night is at the end of the road there. You can’t go any further, can you?”

“No.”

“Would you agree that some people might consider the house somewhat isolated?”

“Yes.”

“What are you majoring in, Ms. Perry?”

“Communications,” she answers, her hands beginning to twist a bit in her lap.

“You get almost straight A’s, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, undoubtedly schooled by Binkie to make her answers as short as possible.

“Are you planning a career in the theater?” I ask, as snidely as I can, not caring how she answers.

Binkie objects, however, and I withdraw the question, knowing I’ve made my point on the jury.

“Had you ever dated an African-American before Dade?”

Too sharp for her own good, she answers vehemently, “I didn’t date Dade.”

I take my time and return to the table and pull out a copy of the local paper and bring it back to the podium.

“Let me read you a quote attributed to you from the Northwest Arkansas Times from October twenty-third.

This was at a rally on campus where you addressed several hundred students and others.

“I want to thank every body for their support. I can’t tell you how many other girls have told me that they have been a victim of date rape since this has occurred. It is a crime that most girls still do not talk about, but it happens much more frequently than we are aware. Thank you for being here.” Do you deny saying those words?”

“No, but that’s not what I meant,” Robin contends.

“We never had a date.”

I fold the paper and take it back to the table and hand it to Dade. When I return to the podium, I ask, “That’s an important distinction to you, isn’t it, Ms. Perry?”

“I don’t understand,” she says, feigning ignorance or hoping I’m talking about something else.

“It’s important to you that no one think you dated Dade, isn’t that correct?” I ask.

“I’ve already explained that my parents are very conservative she says.

“They asked me not to date anybody who wasn’t white and wasn’t from the South.”

“So you won’t deny that during your first visit last spring to the house on Happy Hollow Road with your roommate at one point you and Dade were back in the kitchen alone and he tried to kiss you, but you wouldn’t let him.”

For an instant Robin’s face reflects the unmistakable ambivalence that all witnesses experience when they don’t want to answer a question they suspect might help them. She purses her lips, then bites down on her lower one before finally answering, “Dade didn’t try to kiss me last spring.”

I let her words hang for a moment.

“Now you wouldn’t just be answering this question the way you did to please your parents, would you?”

“No!” she says, her face flushed.

I am certain she is lying, but the jury has no real reason to believe she is. I move on to other areas of her testimony but don’t come close again to breaking her compo sure. She is no longer crying and is quite believable in her insistence that she was afraid that Dade would hurt her.

“He didn’t leave a mark on you, did he, Ms. Perry?”

“He didn’t have to,” Robin says.

“I was scared to death.”

“We just have your word on that, don’t we, Ms.

Perry?” I ask.

“Yes, you have my word.”

I return to my seat, knowing the rest is up to Dade.

Binkie says that the state rests, and after the judge denies my routine motion for a dismissal of the charges, I tell the bailiff that I call Harris Warford to the witness stand.