Ten years ago last week a murder took place in my home. Someone broke in, raped and bludgeoned the baby-sitter, and left her bound and dead facedown in the water filling the bathtub. A fire the intruder then set in the basement filled the house with smoke, but a fireman who broke through a second-story window found our ten-month-old baby in her crib in time to save her life.
Journalism did what it could, putting the fresh information before the public if not before the bar. The Supreme Court’s unyielding refusal, on procedural grounds, to consider this evidence strikes me as an act of enormous insolence. It shows contempt for the media’s role as civic conscience and greater contempt for what is surely the popular assumption that justice always stands above process. If the rights the court can deny include the right not to be executed while guilt remains so uncertain, then what rights can people count on?
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So there’s a paradox. The prosecution’s case as well as the defense’s became more impressive in the years since the trial. So was it a wash? Or did all this fresh, conflicting evidence beg to be sorted out?
Lucky are the prosecutors. They alone in a criminal courtroom can disdain the pretense that a presumption of innocence is in any way due the accused. Their task is to convince first themselves and then a jury of what everyone wants to believe: that the charges are true and that with a guilty verdict both vengeance and justice will be served. For if the defendant is acquitted two painful questions must be faced: Why was he tried? And who did it?
There was never a second when I did not want Jackson convicted. I awaited the verdict with dread, and it brought me immediate joy. Now we could tell our children–we could tell ourselves–that the bad man would never come back to our house. The mother of Marybeth Duncavage told the Tribune, “She’s free to go to God now. I just thought she’d never rest.”
As for his guilt or innocence, the Roger Keith Coleman appeal made it clear just how seriously this court takes this question. It wants to execute the condemned and be done with them. Perhaps the court tells itself that it merely wants what our family wanted and the Duncavages wanted and the good people of Grundy, Virginia, wanted. But what I’d wanted was justice on my terms; I’d wanted satisfaction. If the Supreme Court has no more interest in justice than I had, we’re losing the rule of law.
