Raising Cubby (44 page)

“You don’t really know the defendant,” she charged. It seemed to me that she was grasping at straws.

He looked at her and smiled gently. “Yes,” he corrected her firmly, “I do. I’ve known him since he was ten. We passed many nights talking by the campfire, at Chesterfield Scout Camp and at events.”

The jurors watched the exchange silently. I was hopeful, but also nervous. It was becoming clear to me that Perry intended to bully our witnesses when their responses did not serve her case.

Retired Mount Holyoke chemistry professor Ken Williamson was our next witness. Jack first met him a week after the raid, after he received a letter in the mail from the older chemist. Williamson is a kind older man, seasoned by forty years as a college professor. After hearing his qualifications—which included a doctorate in
organic chemistry, authorship of several chemistry textbooks, and almost fifty years on the Mount Holyoke faculty—Perry attacked his qualifications as a witness.

“How many courses on explosives have you taken?” she asked.

We had heard from the state troopers and ATF agents, all of whom were qualified as experts on the basis of government training programs. It takes a little more than that for a college professor to learn his trade. “Explosives are part of organic chemistry. I haven’t taken courses on explosives per se; they are just one part of my training.”

She didn’t want to hear that. “So you have never taken any courses in explosives?”

He didn’t know what to say. After a lifetime as a chemist, he didn’t expect his legitimacy to be challenged because he hadn’t taken a six-week bomb tech’s course. He tried to explain, but she cut him off. The whole exchange was just revolting to watch, as she beat up the poor fellow unmercifully. I was glad when he stepped down.

She did the same thing with our next witness, Jack’s high school teacher, Mark Moriarty. “I always knew Jack as a peaceful kid with a love of chemistry,” he said.

“You don’t really know him at all,” she challenged. I realized there was no answering her questions. He said he did, and she denied the statement. It was a mean, ugly thing, the way she treated Cubby’s witnesses.

The irony that she accused Cubby’s friends and teachers of “not knowing him,” when she herself had never spoken to him, was not lost on me. I wished there was a way to share that fact with the jury.

With Moriarty’s testimony done, we had reached the end. We didn’t have anything else to offer; there were no other witnesses to call. I’d felt good about our position earlier in the trial, but Perry’s relentless assault and the sheer weight of testimony had me badly discouraged.

It was time for our best and last shot at winning—time to put Cubby on the stand. We’d talked about it before the trial, and we’d all been in favor of it, provided my son felt strong enough. “I can do it,” he said now.

I hoped he was up to the task. Defense attorneys are always wary of letting their clients testify, because their words may open the door to unwanted questions that blow their own case to pieces. Hoose decided our best bet was to let him speak and give jurors a chance to see his peaceful, geeky self.

We had just watched Perry brutalize one witness after another, so Cubby knew it would be tough. He took a swig of Maalox and stepped up to the witness box. With a bit of a start, I realized this would be the first time the two of them had actually spoken. Taking his seat, he looked at the jurors and back at me. He was scared, but brave. Hoose stepped up to begin the questioning. He asked Cubby why he’d left high school.

“I wasn’t really involved in the high school system, and I didn’t like the courses that were being offered to me. I decided that it would be better to start taking college courses at HCC, so I took the placement test and started taking courses there. I started with calculus and anthropology.”

I could see the jurors looking at him appraisingly. The real-life Cubby before them wasn’t sounding like the monster portrayed by Perry over the past few days. They moved on to his interest in chemistry.

“I’ve been interested in some form of chemistry since I was very small. I first got interested in rocketry in elementary school. I learned about it from the History Channel, from my mother, and from doing amateur rocketry. There was a hobby store that sold rocket kits near us. Eventually, I started building my own rockets and I even started constructing my own engines as well as the rocket tubes themselves, and I stopped using kits entirely.”

Then he talked about his other interests.

“I have an active interest in computer science and programming of various sorts. I have an interest in the outdoors like camping, hiking, and walking around outside. I’ve recently had an interest in biology and the mechanisms of antidepressants and antipsychotics.” He spoke clearly and precisely.

He talked about going to Mexico with his mom and learning about fireworks down there. From there, they moved on to Cubby’s online forums and how he taught himself the necessary web programming. He told the jury he called his forum De Rerum Omnis, Latin for “About Everything.”

“I decided I’d like to have a website that covered far more topics than just chemistry—a universal science site. I had topics relating to the major fields of engineering and science, as well as other stuff like
Doctor Who
and cooking. I’m a big fan of
Doctor Who
and cooking.” Some of the jurors laughed, but others looked puzzled.

“Who is
Doctor Who
?” his lawyer asked.

Cubby explained that it was a science fiction program on BBC television. “It’s been on the air about forty years and I like it a lot.” Any jurors who weren’t smiling before were smiling now.

Hoose continued asking Cubby about his forums and the rules Cubby had posted to govern the site. He seemed puzzled by some of the forum rules. “In one of them, you said people must speak in proper English. ‘The first letter of a sentence and pronoun
I
must be capitalized. If you don’t do this you will not be allowed to participate on this site.’ Why would you have a rule like that?”

Cubby was unperturbed. “Well, I like grammar, but also because of the type of conversation that was there, there’s potential for misunderstanding somebody’s post. In science, if you misunderstand somebody, you can have dangerous consequences, so I wanted to eliminate as much risk as possible.”

From there, Hoose moved on to Cubby’s chemicals and experiments. He asked how explosives were made, which Cubby was happy to answer in a long and technical narrative. I smiled as I saw jurors
shaking their heads. Cubby told them how he kept his experiments safe, and then he talked about finding places to set off test explosions.

I couldn’t tell what the jurors were making of Cubby, but he sure looked like a geeky science enthusiast to me, and I hoped they felt the same. When he talked about setting off blasts in my backyard I could see a few jurors nod. I hoped they were remembering that we still have some property rights in this country and we should be able to do what we want on our own land.

When Perry stepped up to cross-examine Cubby, she could barely contain herself. “Mr. Robison,” she said, “you left Amherst High School because essentially you didn’t like the kids there, is that right?” I wondered whether calling him “Mr. Robison” was an attempt to mock him, or perhaps hide the fact that he was still a teenager. And I wondered whether her comment about his not liking the kids at his school was an attempt to portray him as a loner. Later, in her closing statements, she would call him an “enigma.”

Cubby just looked at her quizzically and said, “No. I left because the way the classes worked didn’t really work with me, and college classes were much better suited to me.”

The courtroom in front of him was full of kids; they were all Cubby’s friends from Amherst High. A moment passed, and the judge called for a short recess. The prosecutor started walking toward the door. As she walked out of the court I heard a shout. “Jack does too have friends!” It was Cubby’s girlfriend, Nicole, sticking up for him the only way she could.

When Perry walked back in and court resumed, she looked enraged.

“Isn’t it a fact that one of the people that you have been communicating with goes by the username Bomb Boy?”

“No,” Cubby said. I couldn’t believe that she would bring up Bomb Boy. I knew, and I was sure she did too, that he was just someone who’d commented on Cubby’s online forums; my son had never met him.

I could see the jurors’ eyes moving from the prosecutor to Cubby, and to his many supporters in the audience. With each baseless accusation and each calm reply, you could almost see her case unravel. She must have sensed that too, and it seemed to make her even wilder.

At one point, she asked whether he had considered the “thermal heat scorching of people in the woods.”

“People in the woods,” Cubby repeated, puzzled.

“Yeah. People walk through the woods. Did you ever consider children playing in the woods when you’re setting these explosives, sir?” She was practically shouting.

“There were no children present,” Cubby said.

“You guarantee that, is that right, sir?”

“Yes.”

Having failed to place children at the scene, Perry moved on to a red fox. “Now, you had some postings after this, sir, on the Internet, and one of the postings that you had, sir, was the detonation and explosion of a red fox, is that right?”

“That was not my video,” Cubby explained. “That was a video made by a user on YouTube named Axstram from Australia.” Even after Cubby had made it clear that he had nothing to do with the video, she pursued the question.

Perry’s hostility stood in stark contrast to Cubby’s placid geeky demeanor. I saw the jurors looking at the two of them, back and forth, and I wondered what they were thinking as she made each fresh accusation. I hoped they saw her for what she was. If they didn’t, we were lost.

And then it happened. Until then, the witnesses’ testimony had matched the written reports and my own memories of the scene. I knew because I had been on high alert, listening intently to every word. But as the prosecutor questioned Cubby, I heard her speak the words “… sitting on your bookcase next to a hundred pounds of PETN.” A hundred pounds!

Cubby spoke right up. “Well, it wasn’t a hundred pounds, it was a hundred
grams
, big difference in scale.”

Was it an error or was it intentional? The fact is, there’s a huge difference. One hundred grams is equivalent to a quarter-pound hamburger patty or a stick of butter. One hundred pounds of high explosive is a serious matter. A quarter-pound of powder in a lab tray isn’t. The slip wasn’t lost on the jurors.

The prosecutor looked furious and corrected herself.

In the end, if there was anyone who seemed oblivious to her own actions and to how she might be perceived, it was Perry. I couldn’t tell whether she truly believed Cubby was dangerous, or whether she was simply trying to make a name for herself. Either way, I knew I would never forgive either her decision to prosecute the case or the way she had gone about it.

After what felt like hours of testimony, all of which kept the jurors riveted, the questions came to an end. The judge looked at my son and said, “Mr. Robison, you may step down.” Cubby looked at the prosecutor, snorted slightly, and walked slowly back to his seat.

It was time for closing arguments, and for that Perry waxed lyrical. “If you close your eyes for a second and you think about the quiet and the beauty and the stillness of the woods, you can almost feel the sun on your face, that’s a human experience that we all have, you’re walking through the woods, you might have a child with you, and then there’s a huge explosion. That’s what this is about.”

So there it was: My son had disturbed the peace and quiet of the Amherst woods, and for that she asked the jury to send him to prison with four felony convictions. I don’t know how many explosions disturb the peace of Amherst every year, but it’s a lot. We have steady blasting in two rock quarries just over the Granby line. We’ve got a couple of shooting clubs in town, and much of the land is rural, and walked by hunters every year.

Finally, it was the judge’s turn. She turned to the jurors and
thanked them for sitting through the trial. Now, she said, it was time for them to go to work. They had to discuss everything they had heard, and reach a verdict on each of the charges. To convict my son, they had to believe—beyond a reasonable doubt—that he’d done some sort of tangible damage to property and that he’d acted with malice. They filed out of the room to begin deliberations. We started pacing and wondering how long we’d have to wait for the verdict.

We weren’t the only ones cooling our heels. The local television stations had camera crews lurking in the halls, and reporters from the newspaper had staked out two prime benches in the foyer. Thousands of cases move through our county court every year, but only fifteen “big cases” make it all the way to superior court trial. Cubby’s case was one of them, keeping company with a murder, some robberies, and an arson or two.

At 3:45, the bailiff called us back to court and announced there was a verdict. As much as I wanted the trial to end, I cringed at those words. This jury had taken less than two hours to make up its mind, and I’d read that speedy decisions often signal conviction.