undertone of accusation, and that is all John needs. The soft face of forty-two-year-old John Banion crumples in upon itself like a rotting apple; he grows flush and, just like George’s sons twenty-five years ago, begins to sob without control, initiating the same guilty, flustered moment when George is suddenly beyond his comfort zone in the world of adult justice.
“It’s not me,” John says then. “It’s not me.”
Against all reason, George finds his heart lighting up.
“Who then?” he asks. But John is crying too hard to hear him.
“It’s not me to do something like this, Judge. It really isn’t. It isn’t.”
John must repeat those words twenty times, continuing even after George has finally taken all this in and said more than once, “I know.
“I just don’t understand why, John.”
Banion gasps then. “That’s why,” he says and wails again.
“What’s ‘why’?”
“Because you didn’t understand.”
“What didn’t I understand?”
“You made me watch!” John cries, stiffening in his vehemence. “You made me watch that awful, disgusting tape. You couldn’t stand to see it, and so you made me watch it. Me! Ten times, twenty times, so I could describe all the most horrible things. It was disgusting!” Banion utters the last word with such fury he spits. Collapsed in the black wooden armchair in front of the judge’s desk, he is a spitting, shaking, weeping mess. His skin is the color of a sunrise, and his face is wet all the way down to his chin. But he is a new man in George’s eyes, not because he’s crying-you couldn’t deal with John without sensing sorrow. It’s the depths of his anger that are shocking.
“How could you do that to me?” John is more or less shouting. That too is a novelty. “You didn’t make her do it. But me? You didn’t even ask if I’d mind. And you told me to watch it again and again.” ‘Her’ is Cassie, of course. And Banion is right- right about a lot.
George drops his face into his hands for some time before finally turning to the window and peering down to the canopy of treetops in the parkway five floors below. No matter how equable and kind he aspires to be, how Christ-like in the way his father taught, he knows himself well enough to have predicted that his reaction to John was going to be anger. Worse, outrage. The sad man weeping in that chair betrayed the judge’s trust, including by revealing himself as an outrageous nut. And he also committed a serious crime, wreaking havoc in George’s life at a time when he was already on his heels.
But he feels very little of that. Instead, still his father’s son, he finds he is chastening himself. Because he failed mightily. He was too upset by his own secret crisis to consider anything besides escape. Knowing the profoundly disturbing quality of those images, he inflicted them on John without a second thought about the consequences. And the judge sees that his failures are not without their harsher ironies either. Pivoting under the weight of the bad old past, he nonetheless remained its captive; it was vestiges of old-fashioned chivalry that made him put aside any thought of asking Cassie to take on the task. And the truth, as John has clearly sensed, is that Cassie would have been far better equipped for the job. She might not have buffed her nails or microwaved a bag of popcorn while she watched, yet Cassie at some level is the worldliest person in these chambers when it comes to the subject of women and men. The tape would have infuriated her, fed her certainty about the proper outcome in the case. But she would have handled the tape far more calmly than John for one overriding reason: it would not have told her anything she had long tried to avoid knowing about the human universe-or herself.
“And you actually want to let those boys go,” John cries. “You’re willing to let them do all of that”-he is looking for a word, but it defies him- “all those terrible, terrible things, and you are actually thinking about letting them go when they have to be punished.”
“John,” Judge Mason says. He steps around his desk to comfort the man, but a protective pat on the shoulder is as far as he feels safe to go. “John, you should have said something.”
“That was worse!” John heaves a gale and bawls harder. “Judge,” he says, “Judge, I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
What sense do human beings ever make? George thinks. All of us. Each of us. The iron-headed logic of the law, which George has blithely mouthed, is that John should have spoken up. But to fully contemplate John’s situation for a moment is to recognize how impossible that was. Could insular John Banion, so shocked and overwrought by what those images stimulated in him-could that man have admitted as much to anybody else? No wonder he felt certain that the judge would have been disappointed in him.
And there was one further rub: saying something would have required Banion to stop watching the video.
“John, I’m very sorry,” the judge says and is struck at once by how much he means it. This is clearly the worst part: in his blindness, George has laid waste to a perfectly useful human being. Left to himself, John might have avoided forever what the judge forced him to confront. “Truly, John, I am sorry.”
He realizes that there is probably not a word he can say that will be right, but his apology makes Banion howl again.
“Don’t be noble!” he shouts. “You always want to be the best person. I’m the one who’s sorry.” The cycle plays out again here as it undoubtedly has in private for weeks: rage, then shame. Banion enters another prolonged period of weeping, then with his livid face and running eyes, suddenly looks straight at George for the first time.
“Forgive me,” he says. “Please, forgive me. Can you forgive me, Judge?”
Forgiveness, George thinks. Confession alone might not be good for the soul. But forgiveness always is. What a slender, simple thing it is that has chased around these chambers for weeks like a yearning spirit.
“I forgive you, John,” he says. “I do, I truly do.” He pats John’s shoulder one more time. Banion, in the chair, is now spinning his thin brown hair.
“I’m just no good at this,” he tells the judge.
“At what?”
Banion weeps and weeps before he says, “At being a human being.”
21
NO. 94-1823
IN THE COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD APPELLATE DISTRICT
People of the State)
Appeal from the Superior)
Court of Kindle County vs.))
Jacob I. Warnovits)
Kellen Cook Murphy)
Trevor Witt)
Arden Van Dorn)
Before Mason, Purfoyle and Koll, JJ.
Justice Mason delivered the Opinion of the Court:
This case comes before the Court on the appeal of the four defendants from their convictions on charges of criminal sexual assault and the resulting six-year penitentiary sentences imposed on them in the Superior Court of Kindle County. For the reasons stated below, this Court affirms.
As crimes so often do, this case has riled passions, broken hearts, and left behind a wake of lives forever disturbed. At its core, it asks us to reconsider a question the law has long pondered: how long, and under what circumstances, punishment may be delayed before the balance of justice tips against it?
[Cassie, pls insert your draft’s Statement of Facts here.]
The statute of limitations in our state generally bars felony prosecutions brought more than three years after
