6
With Olivia’s departure, Andy and I adjourn for a couple of minutes to allow me to go take a leak and find us both some coffee. At the front desk Julia has a smirk on her face that says my own IQ is so low it may not be testable as she reminds me that there is free coffee in the break room, which is only one door down from the conference room. She is dressed (except for a denim skirt) in what I’d call a Hell’s Angels biker outfit, complete with jackboots, and snarls through her peephole of a mouth, “Reminds me when I was a kid of my dog nearly starving one time. Blitz, our boxer, he whined at the front door for a solid day when all he had to do was walk around to the side and go through the garage.”
I study her face, wondering where a bullet would cause the most pain before it killed her. I do not want to mar her precious childhood memory, but I mutter, “That’s really fascinating.” Applying mauve nail polish to the bitten-off stubs on her right hand, Julia stops and smiles sweetly.
“It helps me sometimes when I can find something to identify with.”
Thank you, Julia.
“That must be difficult,” I say with an equal amount of venom and head back toward the break room. Before eastern Europe totally embraces capitalism, maybe it’s proponents should come take a look at Julia. What have I done to make this woman hate me? I don’t usually have this effect on people. I wonder what a cattle prod would do to her.
Armed with two steaming paper cups of coffee, I find Andy waiting for me in the conference room with his own coffee. I shut the door in case Julia has gotten up to roam the halls.
“Olivia may be the difference between you and a guilty verdict,” I say, hoping my comment will get back to her. “Would you have tried shock if it had been another parent?”
I ask, hoping he will answer honestly. I am not ready to ask if there is a sexual relationship between them, but if he wants to volunteer, that will be fine with me.
“The parent has to be behind you totally,” Andy replies softly, peering down into his coffee.
“I don’t know the first thing about what you do,” I admit, seeking a place to begin. From my years representing mentally ill patients in civil commitment hearings when I was a public defender, I know something about the mentally ill, but mental retardation calls up a harmless, beautiful male giant from my childhood in eastern Arkansas who had a brain the size of a pea. This once stubborn memory has been gradually replaced with a TV image of valiant, lovable children somberly trying to cope with the simplest of tasks.
Andy nods briskly, his manner businesslike, now that Olivia is gone. He instructs, “You’ve heard of behavior modification?”
“As in B. IF. Skinner?” I ask, recalling a psychology course at the University of Arkansas when I was a sophomore.
“Skinner was a prophet,” he says reverentially, fixing me with a stare made more intense by his slightly magnified eyes, “who was so honest that few could stand his message.
He demonstrated over and over again that free will is an illusion. In a society as out of control as the United States, it’s lucky he wasn’t lynched.” With this last phrase his voice is tinged with irony.
I lean back in the comfortable swivel chair, wishing I could steal it for my office, and scratch the middle knuckle of my right hand. The permanently swollen joint is a souvenir of too many balls that bounced off the tip. A nearsighted wannabe Mickey Mantle who couldn’t be trusted with contact lenses until I was sixteen, I am lucky to have my teeth. It seems strange to hear a black say, “Sorry, folks, there’s been some kind of awful mistake all these years. You only think you’re deciding what kind of cereal you want for breakfast each morning.” I hate to tell Andy, but this decade, freedom is in. Even the most devout Marxist is trying to make a buck.
He reads my skepticism and adds, “I know what I’m saying is anathema to the legal profession. There’d be a major recession in this country if you lawyers couldn’t peddle free will.”
I can see a jury shaking twelve heads at once. Surely he accepts the rules of the game, or he wouldn’t be in my office.
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened,” I say, already bored with theory. Despite his profession (there is a lot of bullshit in this area), I can’t help but like him. He is obviously a bright guy, yet unpretentious. Blacks who are as educated as this guy like to use a lot of big words. Andy reminds me of a good teacher, patient as a coyote and without the sarcasm and condescension that some otherwise competent professors can’t manage without.
In no hurry to get to the meat, he rests his hairy chin on his fingers.
“In order to fully understand my situation, you are required to accept the proposition that behavior modification is a science and proceeds on that basis.”
I tap a Flair pen against my legal pad. Sure it is. Shocking a child with a cattle prod is right up there with a cure for polio. I don’t blame him for not wanting to talk about what happened.”
“I ‘we no doubt it was an accident,” I say, smoothing his path. Rockets blow up all the time. If I can get this knocked down to a charge of negligent homicide, I’ll be earning my pay.
Behind his glasses, Andy squints as if he is trying to picture the event.
“It happened so fast that it still seems unreal.”
Poor guy, he didn’t have time to change his mind. Though he is tired, he needs to go through this. I plunge ahead.
“We need to talk about what happened. What I know about electricity won’t fill up a thimble,” I confess.
“Did you accidentally shock her in the chest, or what?”
Chapman rubs his head as if he still can’t understand it. “What happened was that she grabbed the handle of the prod with her right hand, I suppose to push it away,” he says slowly, ‘and according to the doctor who pronounced her dead, the current passed from one of the electrodes touching her left thigh and traveled through her chest and heart down her right hand, which was touching the handle.
It happened so quickly I didn’t realize she was grabbing at the handle.”
Without realizing it, I have brought my hands together. A complete circuit. I have jumped smack into the middle, but I can always come back for details.
“Didn’t you have her hands tied?”
“Leon Robinson-he’s an aide-was trying to hold her,” Andy says, “but it was hard to keep her still, I guess.”
“Was it really a battery-powered device that’s used on animals?” I ask, praying it wasn’t. When I was fourteen, I worked on a cousin’s farm and watched a cattle prod used on sheep. I remember thinking that even through all that wool it hurt them. Of course, that was the point.
“Let me explain about that,” Andy says, his voice rising for the first time since I ‘we met him. “Once you start learning about this procedure, you’re going to find that there are commercial products available you can send for to use on individuals.
The problem was that I knew if I asked, I wouldn’t get permission to try shock on Pam. I thought that if I showed the administrator, David Spam, what could be accomplished with Pam, he would back me and let me work with her.
Shock works incredibly quickly to suppress self-abusive behavior, and both Olivia and I were convinced that he would go along with it once he saw Pam for the first time in years not hitting her head. Shock works like a miracle, and all that bullshit about it being too aversive comes to a screeching halt when, after years of keeping a child in restraints or on drugs and trying everything under the sun, you see the kid not hurting herself. Of course, it’s a last resort, but the scientific literature is clear: shock works. And someone at the Human Development Center knew it at one time, because that’s where I found the equipment I used. All it needed was new batteries.”
I try not to squirm with impatience. You can’t expect a jury to be sympathetic when you have to tell them that your client took a device you use on an animal and used it on a human. It has to hurt like hell.
“Surely no one has used a cattle prod before.”
Stubbornly, Andy, his lips pursed, shakes his head.
“Sure they have. In some of the first published research in which shock was effective a cattle prod was used. What is recommended, and what I did, was wrap the metal case in insulation tape, so that even if the case was grabbed while Pam was being shocked, there wouldn’t be a closed circuit.”
