the cop. After all, I had let Kurt himself into my life simply because he had kind eyes and a good heart, and even he couldn't argue with the results.
'What's your name?' I asked.
'Shay. Shay Bourne.'
'You're hired, Mr. Bourne,' I said, the beginning of the end.
S E V E N M O N T H S L A T ER
Shay Bourne was nothing like I expected.
I had prepared myself for a hulking brute of a man, one with hammy fists and no neck and eyes narrowed into slits. This was, after all, the crime of the century-a double murder that had captured the attention of people from Nashua to Dixville Notch; a crime that seemed all the worse because of its victims: a little girl, and a police officer who happened to be her stepfather. It was the kind of crime that made you wonder if you were safe in your own house, if the people you trusted could turn on you at any moment-and maybe because of this. New Hampshire prosecutors sought the death penalty for the first time in fifty-eight years.
Given the media blitz, there was talk of whether twelve jurors who hadn't formed a reaction to this crime could even be found, but they managed to locate us. They unearthed me in a study carrel at UNH, where I was writing a senior honors thesis in mathematics. I hadn't had a decent meal in a month, much less read a newspaper-and so I was the perfect candidate for Shay Bourne's capital murder case.
The first time we filed out of our holding pen-a small room in the superior courthouse that would begin to feel as familiar as my apartment-I thought maybe some bailiff had let us into the wrong courtroom. This defendant was small and delicately proportioned-the kind of guy who grew up being the punch line to high school jokes.
He wore a tweed jacket that swallowed him whole, and the knot of his necktie squared away from him at the perpendicular, as if it were being magnetically repelled. His cuffed hands curled in his lap like small animals; his hair was shaved nearly to the skull. He stared down at his lap, even when the judge spoke his name and it hissed through the room like steam from a radiator.
The judge and the lawyers were taking care of housekeeping details when the fly came in. I noticed this for two reasons: in March, you don't see many flies in New Hampshire, and I wondered how you went about swatting one away from you when you were handcuffed and chained at the waist. Shay Bourne stared at the insect when it paused on the legal pad in front of him, and then in a jangle of metal, he raised his bound hands and crashed them down on the table to kill it.
Or so I thought, until he turned his palms upward, his fingers opened one petal at a time, and the insect went zipping off to bother someone else.
In that instant, he glanced at me, and I realized two things:
1. He was terrified.
2. He was approximately the same age that I was.
This double murderer, this monster, looked like the water polo team captain who had sat next to me in an economics seminar last semester. He resembled the deliveryman from the pizza place that had a thin crust, the kind I liked. He even reminded me of the boy I'd seen walking in the snow on my way to court, the one I'd rolled down my window for and asked if he wanted a ride. In other words, he didn't look the way I figured a killer would look, if I ever ran across one. He could have been any other kid in his twenties. He could have been me.
Except for the fact that he was ten feet away, chained at the wrists and ankles. And it was my job to decide whether or not he deserved to live.
A month later, I could tell you that serving on a jury is nothing like you see on TV. There was a lot of being paraded back and forth between the courtroom and the jury room; there was bad food from a local deli for lunch; there were lawyers who liked to hear themselves talk, and trust me, the DAs were never as hot as the girl on Law Order: SVU.
Even after four weeks, coming into this courtroom felt like landing in a foreign country without a guidebook... and yet, I couldn't plead ignorant just because I was a tourist. I was expected to speak the language fluently.
Part one of the trial was finished: we had convicted Bourne. The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence proving Kurt Nealon had been shot in the line of duty, attempting to arrest Shay Bourne after he'd found him with his stepdaughter, her underwear in Bourne's pocket. June Nealon had come home from her OB appointment to find her husband and daughter dead. The feeble argument offered up by the defense-that Kurt had misunderstood a verbally paralyzed Bourne; that the gun had gone off by accident-didn't hold a candle to the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution. Even worse. Bourne never took the stand on his own behalf-which could have been because of his poor language skills... or because he was not only guilty as sin but such a wild card that his own attorneys didn't trust him.
We were now nearly finished with part two of the trial-the sentencing phase-or in other words, the part that separated this trial from every other criminal murder trial for the past half century in New
Hampshire. Now that we knew Bourne had committed the crime, did he deserve the death penalty?
This part was a little like a Reader's Digest condensed version of the first one. The prosecution gave a recap of evidence presented during the criminal trial; and then the defense got a chance to garner sympathy for a murderer. We learned that Bourne had been bounced around the foster care system. That when he was sixteen, he set a fire in his foster home and spent two years in a juvenile detention facility.
He had untreated bipolar disorder, central auditory processing disorder, an inability to deal with sensory overload, and difficulties with reading, writing, and language skills.
We heard all this from witnesses, though. Once again. Shay Bourne never took the stand to beg us for mercy.
Now, during closing arguments, I watched the prosecutor smooth down his striped tie and walk forward. One big difference between a regular trial and the sentencing phase of a capital punishment trial is who gets the last word in edgewise. I didn't know this myself, but
Maureen-a really sweet older juror I was crushing on, in a wish-youwere- my-grandma kind of way-didn't miss a single Law Order episode, and had practically earned her JD via Barcalounger as a result. In most trials, when it was time for closing arguments, the prosecution spoke last... so that whatever they said was still buzzing in your head when you went back to the jury room to deliberate. In a capital punishment sentencing phase, though, the prosecution went first, and then the defense got that final chance to change your mind.
Because, after all, it really was a matter of life or death.
He stopped in front of the jury box. 'It's been fifty-eight years in the history of the state of New Hampshire since a member of my office has had to ask a jury to make a decision as difficult and as serious as the one you twelve citizens are going to have to make. This is not a decision that any of us takes lightly, but it is a decision that the facts in this case merit, and it is a decision that must be made in order to do justice to the memories of Kurt Nealon and Elizabeth Nealon, whose lives were taken in such a tragic and despicable manner.'
He took a huge, eleven-by-fourteen photo of Elizabeth Nealon and held it up right in front of me. Elizabeth had been one of those little girls who seem to be made out of something lighter than flesh, with their filly legs and their
