Left for Garbage

my daughter’s – and, I think, my - trial without giving it some inflammatory name.
    Spea king of O.J, that’s the latest Internet humor regarding Denise: some asshole photo-shopped her leaning against O.J. and it says ‘Perfect couple’. It’s kind of them, don’t you think?
    At any rate I’m glad they discovered that this particular fame vulture had almost wormed her way onto Denise’s jury , and booted her from the list.
    But the problems in jury selection haven’t stopped there because it’s an open courtroom , and even though people usually aren’t interested in the part where the jury gets picked, this case is the exception. Charlotte Hope, and anyone else with a show, is covering it ‘gavel-to-gavel’, as they cleverly say, and the general unwashed masses don’t want to be left out of the greatest show of the year … oh, sorry, I mean of the millennium … so they are there, too, filling the spectators’ seats up.
    Today som e crazy young woman screamed, “She killed a baby, anyway.” The judge went easy on her, as it turned out that she had just been released from an institution, and he found her defense that she had failed to take her medicine before court was in session, and that, besides, she was homeless and liked the air-conditioning system, to be viable enough not to arrest her. That idiot Salvatore immediately called for a mistrial, only to be reminded by a suddenly less sympathetic judge that you couldn’t ask for a mistrial until the trial actually begins. I think Salvatore’s mail order law degree isn’t working out for him as well as he hoped it would.
    With all these sorts of shenanigans , it seems they are having trouble selecting an unbiased jury. That’s hardly surprising with all the non-stop, high-profile publicity my daughter’s case has drawn, and unfortunately, it’s about to get more.
    It’s been a while now, well over a year at least, since I first began hearing the whispers, and understanding that Denise was scheming how to make Margaret and me her fall guys for Deeley’s death - me more so than Margaret, since it was both Margaret and Denise who had begun telling Salvatore and his people about how I had sometimes spanked her when she was little.
    At the time , when I questioned Margaret about, it she brushed me off in annoyance. “Keith, we are simply building a defense, and everything to do with her childhood that might have upset her and caused her to react badly to stress is helpful here. Could you for once just try and think of your child instead of yourself, do you think?”
    Of course , the tales of a few spankings grew because maybe a spanking alone couldn’t quite explain just how far off the charts Denise’s supposed stress was. Nope, the spankings became brutal beatings which had put Denise in daily fear for her life. What do I know? Maybe that’s how a small child sees a spanking, at least that’s what Margaret said Denise said to her new therapist, and what the new therapist said to Margaret, but I’m still not convinced, since I can count on one hand the times I spanked either of my kids when they were little, and I never did it unless I felt it absolutely necessary to get their attention. You tell a little kid to stay away from a busy street and to look both ways to wait to cross, and they still keep running out into the street after a toy, and sure I swatted their little butts then, but it was only then, and never hard and never in anger.
    So there you have it , my so-called abuse of my kids.
    Worse , though, than these exaggerated ‘Daddy hit me’ tales were the stories I started hearing about my son Seel and Denise. You can’t insinuate or exaggerate those kinds of things. I knew, and Seel knew, and worst of all his mother knew, that Denise was basically calling him a sex offender, and nobody stopped it. His own mother, what kind of woman … but then at the end of the day it was Denise who was talking; all Margaret was doing was looking away.
    I want to believe my daughter but then I’ve always wanted to believe my daughter. I do believe my son. My daughter, on the other hand, is a known liar; indeed, she is the most famous liar since Pinocchio, actually, and as the media and their experts say, she’s a pathological one.
    Maybe she’s completely making up the stories about her brother being in her bedroom in the middle of the night years ago, or possibly something happened that she is now using to build on like she did the