before the law

franz kafka spent his adult life writing nightmares about authority and its impenetrable nature...no-one was guilty in his stories so no-one was safe...inexplicably i found myself on the side of authority and empowered by a benevolent but periodically insane government to determine guilt or innocence...i was deeply uncomfortable...the truth may have been lurking in the courtroom somewhere but nobody was making much of an effort to find it...instead they were spending their time trying to influence me and my fellows on the panel by twisting events into wry shapes...human memory is a faulty sort of thing...when you remember something do you remember the event or the last time you remembered it? certainly the first prosecution witness friday morning had a horrible time with it...utterly contradicting a deposition he had given a few months before and insisting that the defendant's porch light had been on...gleefully the defense lawyer pointed out that there was a power outage at the time and with equal joy he asked every prosecution witness thereafter if the power had been out at the time of the incident...every one of them said yes...everyone that was called to the stand had an opinion of the defendant...the old people called as character witnesses by the defense ( they could hardly have been anything else since they were all asleep or "on the other side of the house" when the events unfolded ) all found him to be a good neighbor and a loving son...which for them he may have been...but the younger folks ( especially the women) loathed him and found him a bit creepy...clearly his next door neighbor hated him and she didn't hold back...and oddly enough she owned a golden retriever too...sparking a good ammount of suppostion amongst the jurors that the defandant didn't shoot the dog he thought he was shooting...equally unsettling were the photos of the festering wounds the defendant's dog erupted in three weeks after the events forcing him to seek treatment for his dog from another vet...she said that she couldn't estimate when the wounds were inflicted since they were well along in healing by the time she saw the dog...inflicted...when the defense, either as a pre-planned tactic or a sudden flash of desperation put the defendant on the stand he said that his dog had changed since the attack...he was listless...didn't obey commands and was avoiding his master...could those festering wounds erupting so long after the alleged attack be why the dog was reluctant to get too close? i had visions of lancets and vials of bacillus...in this twisted and distorted behavioral sump i was supposed to discern truth ( certainly not beauty ) from its competing versions...i have been called a cynic and this certainly called for a healthy dose of both it and skepticism just to survive the relentless bullshit...from seven in the morning until five thirty in the evening with an hour for lunch it droned on until the multiplicity of truth had exhausted itself and the rest was left to the seven of us dazed and abused peers...everyone was bludgeoned by the monotony of the proceedings as the judge launched into the lengthy final instruction to the jury before we retired to deliberate...in all the jumbled leagalese i distinctly remember the judge looking up from the bench to admonish us to make our decision based only on the witnesses' testimony and that we should be careful to remember that anything the defense attorney or the prosecutors had said did not constitute evidence..so the guys who asked the questions that set the tone of the testimony that framed the debate that the jurors were about to have were irrelevant...without agenda...and with no real interest in this case other than to act as conduits for the information we were to use in our decision...i found myself ransacking my psyche for untapped reserves of cynicism.