Speaking in Tongues

said that the most righteous requests are answered in the silence of the deed. I’m not asking for hollow words, ladies and gentlemen. No, I’m asking for your courageous deed—finding this dangerous killer sane, finding him guilty and recommending to the court that he pay for young Joan Keller’s life with his own. Thank you.
    Orator Tate Collier had done everything right in the closing statement. It was short, colloquial, filled with concrete imagery. He’d referred to Peter Matthews as “the defendant” and to the girl as “Joan”—depersonalizing the criminal, humanizing the victim. The reference to the “needle”—getting the jury used to the thought of the needle used in lethal injections—was a particularly good touch, he’d thought.
    He’d even added the request for the death penalty because that was something they could bargain with in their minds—trading the boy’s life for a finding of sanity and a long prison sentence.
    And that was exactly what happened.
    He won, the boy was found sane and guilty. And was sentenced to life without parole. Which had been Tate’s goal all along.
    And a week later the young man who’d beaten capital punishment was executed by a far more informal means than lethal injection—a dozen prison inmates, identities unknown, had used broomsticks and sharpened spoons to carry out the sentence. And it took them three hours to do so.
    Justice?
    After he’d heard of Peter’s death, Tate had sat at his desk for a long moment, wondering why he felt so troubled at the news. Then he walked into the commonwealth’s attorney’s file room and read through evidence in the case once again.
    They were the same files and documents he’d read before the trial, of course. But he examined themnow untainted by the passionate drive to convict the young man. He looked more carefully at the picture they painted of the boy—not “the defendant.” But Peter Thomas Matthews, a seventeen-year-old boy, a resident of Fairfax, Virginia.
    Yes, Peter had a collection of eerie comics and Japanimation tapes. But many of them, Tate had learned in preparing for trial, were best-sellers in Japan—where they’d taken on an artsy cult status and were reviewed seriously and collected by young people and adults alike. What was more, the boy also had a collection of serious science fiction and fantasy writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Peter had spent hours copying long, poetic passages from these books and had tried his hand at illustrating scenes from them. He’d also written sci-fi and fantasy short stories of his own, which weren’t bad for someone his age.
    Yes, some psychiatric evaluations called the boy dangerous. But others said he merely had a paranoid personality and was given to panic in stressful situations. He had no history of violence.
    In getting ready for the case, Tate had also learned about Joan Keller—the victim. The girl had been sexually active since age twelve. She’d experimented with “weird things,” possibly erotic asphyxia. She’d seduced older men on several other occasions and would have been the complaining witness in at least one statutory rape case, except that she’d refused to cooperate. She’d been treated for being a borderline personality and had been suspended twice forassaults—against both girls and boys at her school, including one involving a knife.
    Peter had abrasions on his face and neck when he was brought to the lockup. He claimed that Joan had struck him with a rock when she got tired of his awkward groping—after she’d taken his hand and slipped it into her panties.
    And the statement the boy had made—about how Joan “had to die”—was disputed by a local fisherman near the scene of the arrest. He claimed the boy might have said, “She never had to die . . . She shouldn’t have hit me.”
    But silver-tongued Tate Collier had managed to keep all of this damning evidence out of the trial or had shattered the credibility of the witnesses presenting it.
    Your Honor we will not try the victim in this case Your Honor a well-written short story has no probative value in this case whatsoever Your Honor that fact is immaterial and has to be stricken please instruct the witness . . .
    The defense lawyers had come to him with a plea bargain request: criminally negligent homicide, suspended sentence, three years’ probation and two