![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I could feel the fear, the hot frustration, the haunted separateness. In the beginning, I was often preoccupied, imagining how it would feel to sit there, held at the focus of scrutiny, ardently denounced before all who cared to listen, knowing that the most ordinary privileges of a decent life – common trust, personal respect, and even liberty – were now like some cloak you had checked at the door and might never retrieve. If you don’t have the courage to point, John White whispered, you can’t expect them to have the courage to convict.Īnd so I point. It was almost a dozen years ago, long before I had formed even the most secret ambition to hold John’s job myself. He was the chief deputy PA then, a hale Irishman with white hair wild as cornsilk. ![]() Ned Halsey was making the opening statement for the state, and as he gestured across the courtroom, John, in his generous, avuncular way, with the humid scent of alcohol on his breath at ten in the morning, whispered my initial lesson. The sheriff took my fingerprints, the chief judge swore me in, and John White brought me up to watch the first jury trial I’d ever seen. That was the day I started in the office. You must always point, Rusty, I was told by John White. You will decide if it proves the defendant’s guilt. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. ![]()
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