1) JUSTICE

The Divine Mist - Interminable Search

   The truth is there is no justice in America for the people. And there never has been-not from the beginning. There is no justice for the wealthy surgeon at Mercy Hospital, or the scrubwoman who cleans up after him. There is no justice for the dregs of our society who plague us with their crimes, or for the workers, or for women. There is no justice even for Jerry Falwell, who loves God and votes Republican, or for the poor in the ghettos. They've never heard of it. There is no justice for the farmer who works his guts out for the banks. And don't forget the children-there has never been justice for them.

   We search for justice in fearful places-in cities encrusted with crime, in the workplace where people are mere units on the production line, in a world where justice, if it exists, has become only another commodity for sale. We huddle behind barred doors, wired to expensive burglar alarms, and when the wind blows and rattles the door in the night, we awaken, our hearts in our throats, because nothing can make us feel safe anymore. Yet fiercely we cling to old myths that give comfort-justice is out there. Somewhere.

   What has happened to justice in America? There stands the courthouse, solid, stately. Inside, we still find great judges, men and women dedicated to the law, presiding over our cases. In the courtrooms, we hear our hometown lawyers pleading to a jury of our neighbors. But there will be no justice, for a new king dominates justice in America, a sovereign whose soul is pledged to business and whose heart is geared to profit. The new king, an amorphous agglomeration of corporations, of banks and insurance companies and mammoth multinational financial institutions, maintains a prurient passion for money and demands a justice of its own, one that is stable and predictable, one that fits into columns and accounts and mortality tables, one that is interpretable in dollars, so that a little justice is a few dollars and a lot of justice many. The new king cannot deal with the soul, the fire, and the unpredictability of human justice. Profit is the lifeblood of business, and if there is no profit in justice, people are not likely to receive it.

   Like the citizens of any kingdom, we tend to take on the style of the sovereign. In this corporate world, people have become corporatelike themselves. Our hearts have become synchronized with the corporate heart that beats in dollars, and with the corporate spirit that worships dollars. In the Age of the Yuppie, we have become so insanely obsessed with things that we have willingly pawned the heritage of generations, battered the earth, and poisoned the oceans in order to possess whatever dollars will buy. We seek to become salable commodities ourselves; students pursue an advanced degree, not because they yearn to learn, but because they wish to make themselves more marketable. Businessmen buy respect with the dollars they accumulate and with which they score the game of profit. Ideas seem valueless unless they are salable. Workers have become expendable parts for sale in the ordinary course of commerce. The detection, punishment, and prevention of crime are fungible goods. Rapists and robbers and thieves and their victims have become wares that stock the system's shelves. Lawyers are too often expediters, and judges are dedicated to keeping the cases flowing in deference to the commerce of law. Our leaders are often elected because of their purchasable images on television. Even eternal salvation has become something sold in the marketplace. And justice-whatever it is, and it is different for each of us-has finally become a mercantile matter, where profit is the paramount concern of all.

   Yet a steady gnawing in the night awakens us. It is an awareness that the love of only money, and devotion to only things, leaves us as empty and dead as dollars, that the worship of only property transforms the living into the dead-dead forests, dead rivers, dead towns and deserted communities. When we petition for a human justice, one that does not sell us like so many pork bellies, we often make demands on the system to which it cannot respond. But every system must finally be judged by the character of justice it delivers, and a justice attuned to the needs of only the nonliving, to the demands of the new king, provides justice for none.

   What is justice? Clarence Darrow insisted, "There is no such thing as justice. In fact, the word cannot be defined." Darrow was right. Justice, like life, cannot be adequately defined. Justice is the divine mist, and is something inexorably connected to the state of being. But Darrow understood clearly the meaning of injustice, and all his life fought against it. The black child in the ghetto begging for his supper knows the meaning of that word, and so does the innocent man rotting in prison. Even the coyote chained to a stake near the gas pumps to entertain the tourists understands the meaning of injustice.

   Yet justice usually fails without law, for it is the office of the law to restrain the powerful. The black child, given power, may, in turn, starve the children of his oppressors, and the innocent, once freed, may, given power, kill those who have wrongfully imprisoned him. Justice is not a willow in the wind; justice is the great tree that stands immutable against unjust forces, and the law, the massive trunk of the great tree, must resist the tempests that storm upon it.

   Most of us maintain vague notions of justice, but its precise meaning escapes us until we are deprived of it. As long as the coyote was free to roam the prairies, and as long as the child was fed and loved, neither understood very much about justice. The human organism can withstand unspeakable physical pain. It can be starved. It can endure grief and bear all nature of misery. Yet the human soul cannot tolerate injustice. We must have it. We beseech God for it. Why, we demand, do You claim to be just and yet deal our fate so willy-nilly? Job, that devout and righteous man, confronted God, and in his sublime suffering exhorted God to reason with him and to be just: "Here is my signature, let the Almighty answer me, " he cried. "Thou knowest I am not wicked ... yet thou dost destroy me ... !" Nowhere is there a clearer cry for justice. But God often stands silent.

   I knew a man who lived on the Wind River and helplessly watched his wife and children turn to char and cinders while their small cabin burned. They say he cursed God. They say he would have killed God with his bare hands if he could have found Him. Being helpless to obtain justice, he did the only thing he could do-he disavowed Him. If God exists, he argued, He would be a just God, for man cannot worship an unjust God. After the fire, he lived alone and grew very old. At night he played his guitar to himself until he fell asleep, and in the morning he tended his garden like a living scarecrow. He said he grew certain high-altitude corn and squash he himself had perfected, not God.

   Whether at the hands of man or God, the deprivation of justice drives human beings to insane places. In each of us, there is a smoldering terror that injustice will descend upon us as it did on Job and the old hermit of the Wind River. "God is always watching," my mother said. God has made paranoids of us all.

   Justice requires atonement, and justice demands reform. It teaches its lessons and insists that we change. I remember when our small Wyoming town was stunned by the death of one of its most exceptional progeny-a beautiful young woman I'll call Donna. She was a gifted and popular student, and a loving daughter. She died in the wreck of a new car her father had given her for her birthday. The manufacturer's own tests had shown that the car went out of control under certain braking conditions, and we were prepared to prove these conditions existed in her case, that the company knew of the defect but had refused to correct the design before the car was marketed to millions of unsuspecting drivers. The evidence I saw supported our allegations (and those made by hundreds of others in similar court cases) that the manufacturer's haste to market the car, despite its knowledge of the dangerous design, was motivated by its desire to beat the Japanese to the marketplace. It was the same old story-profit over people. We filed suit on behalf of the girl's stricken family. All they wanted, they said, was justice.

   A few days before the trial, we settled. These are, indeed, hard cases to win. The car manufacturer has teams of experts selected not so much for what they know but for their ability to convince jurors of whatever defenses the company may raise. It has skilled trial lawyers and huge support staffs. For my part, I dreaded dragging the parents through the agony of their daughter's death again, this time amid the glare and clamor of the media. Even if they won, there would be the expensive and lengthy appeals, and, in the end, the only justice they would receive would be, of course, money. At the last minute, faced with the strain of the upcoming trial and offered a sum of money by the company that permitted them to argue that they had at least won something, the parents opted to end the war. People usually do.

   But the manufacturer's offer required that the amount of the settlement remain confidential. Hundreds of similar cases waited in the wings. Millions were at stake, and the company wanted protection. We could argue to the parents, and did, that we had beaten the company. The company claimed this was the largest settlement it had ever paid in this kind of case. Yet we did not win. There would be no punishment of the corporation, or of its officers, who had known from the beginning that the car was dangerous. There would be no admission of guilt. To the contrary, the settlement papers specifically recited that the corporation admitted no wrongdoing of any kind. Only the gross payment of money to the living for the dead marked the transaction. When the company paid up, it did not even flinch. To thus punish the manufacturer for exposing thousands to injury and death was as satisfying as getting even with the United States government at income-tax time by slamming the door at the post office.

   I think of those nights I dumped myself heavily into bed and lay listening to my heart while I fought through the case. I think of the months my staff hunted down the facts and the law. I think of the family's grief, and that all of this human pain and striving should come down to a mere accounting entry made on the company's computer in some obscure room by a bored operator waiting for "Miller time."

   Now that the case was settled and the money in my clients' hands, they didn't know what to do with it. How could they take money in place of their child? They did not get justice. They were delivered, instead, a bagful of guilt. A few days after the settlement, one of the dead girl's sisters wrote me:

   "It's all over. It's gone, and [Donna] is too. What's left? An empty feeling with nothing to do about it ... the money is nothing-pocket change to a corporation that makes billions of dollars. What bothers me is that we settled and that one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality. It is an admission of guilt on their part, but a secret admission. It's as if they are saying, 'Let's settle this now-we were wrong-here's some money-now let us get back to business as usual.'

   "'Business as usual-the business of making automobiles profitably, not safely, and hoping no one finds out that one of the decisions made in a big corporation is to make cars they know will kill. It's just not enough. Part of our lives is gone; revenge is impossible; the perpetrator is too strong ... our silence was bought, and we all lose-all of us."

   The other sister addressed another side of the issue.

    "I think the settlement was definitely in my parents' best interests. I dread to think what a long ugly trial would have done to them and to me.

   "All of us had ideas and dreams of how we would get justice or revenge on the company. As you know, in different ways, we were somewhat disappointed that we couldn't really make the company pay by adverse publicity, and such. However, it dawned on me ... that although we were unable to get justice as we know it or want it, there is, after all, divine justice. God sees all, and these people will pay, whether it be in this world, or the next. There is justice. This I know to be true, and it gives me a sense of hope, and resolution, and comfort."

   A pity, I thought, that in America we must wait until the "next world" to receive justice.

   Even though, as Darrow insisted, justice cannot be defined, it is something that can be felt. But the feeling of justice requires that the wrong be righted. The Old Testament ideal of an eye for an eye speaks to that need. We no longer hold vengeance among the most worthy of human emotions, yet vengeance, too, is found at the heart of justice. It is not enough to free the innocent who has been wrongfully imprisoned for many years; he requires something more. The money the family receives from the manufacturer for the wrongful death of a child will never satisfy them. Something is missing. Daily we deal out our own justice in small ways that are more satisfying. When a careless driver cuts us off by a left turn from the right lane, we slam on the brakes, but we give him the horn and perhaps the familiar sign. In the office, we avenge slight slights with small snubs. No insult goes without its tit for tat. At home, a wife extracts her own justice against an errant husband-she may withhold sex or civility or overspend the family budget. A child, believing he is mistreated by a parent, may reciprocate outside the home and become a delinquent. Some psychologists contend that even some forms of psychosis are retaliatory in nature. Humans are specialized in vindictive behavior. Ah, revenge! "Sweeter far than flowing honey!" exclaimed Homer. But vengeance is like salt. Sprinkled in the oatmeal, it lends body and flavor, but salt alone is not food nor is vengeance justice.

   In most societies, including our own, revenge is the state's sole prerogative. Were it otherwise, we would live in lawlessness. Victims may look to the law for justice, but in criminal cases many report that getting satisfaction in the nation's justice system is equivalent to leaving the Church in charge of sex. We are taught, correctly, that forgiveness is sublime, but often forgiveness leaves us unjustly suspended in emotional conflict. When the state mumbles its bland rationalizations about reforming and rehabilitating those who have harmed us, and when vicious criminals are coddled and turned loose on the streets to again pursue their commitments to evil and to injury, we, the victims, feel abandoned, and, worse, we feel injured again. While we could not live in a society where the citizen is free to torture and kill at will to gratify a vengeful heart, try to explain that to a husband whose wife has been brutally raped and murdered. The state's bargain for clemency is yet another crime against him. The husband craves revenge. He must have it or his sorrow will spoil like milk left in the sun.

   I can no more precisely define that phenomenon we call justice than could Darrow, or Justinian, who himself was able to come up with no better definition than "delivering to every man his just dues." Yet I have learned certain things: I know that the human need for revenge and the mysterious powers of forgiveness that oppose it have waged their battles, one against the other, throughout the history of man, and in my career they have proven to be inseparably entwined. Nowhere was that terrible war fought so hard and with so little as in the case of a young woman I'll call Maria. Let me tell you her story, for, although I don't fully understand its lesson, it speaks eloquently of the elusive, the mysterious, the magical qualities of what we call justice.

   I have piled hundreds of cases over her memory, and yet even now her open, cheerful face peers through, not the face of a child, but of one who struggled for innocence and nearly won, Maria said she loved this man I'll call Leyland. She loved him in ways that were never quite clear, but one does not demand explanations in matters of love. Leyland was even younger than she, or perhaps he only seemed to be. He was the son of a decent and enterprising self-made millionaire, and because his father underwrote his son's business, Leyland had the means to follow his hollow passion-"the art of fun-seeking," as he actually was to call it.

   Leyland drank excessively, I suppose not only in his quest for fun, but to fill a certain restive emptiness that haunted him. Frequently, Maria held him and listened and counseled as any good mother would a son. I thought I understood that. We have all been hurt at some time, or felt lost, and there are times when we all need to weep. I tried not to be judgmental. Every plant in the forest is not the mighty Douglas fir. For reasons peculiar to Maria, she was attracted to the irresponsible child in Leyland that characterized his behavior and that also exposed, especially when drunk, the dangerous side of him. Before she opened the door to his house that terrible night, she knew he was drunk and that he had a gun, and she must have known that drunk, he was no more trustworthy than a three-year-old.

   He shot her. He claimed it was an accident, although later the officers found the gun in the garbage can. Why would he intentionally kill her? He said he loved her, and he wept.

   The bullet slashed the spinal cord in Maria's neck. Leyland tried to stop the blood. He tried to phone for help. Crying with real cause, he begged her not to die. He prayed. There is an old saying: Be careful what you pray for, lest your prayers be answered.

   Later, she said that when the gun, a .357 Magnum, exploded, she felt as if the bullet had taken off the whole side of her face: "I thought if I could hold myself up, I wouldn't die. Everything got kind of dark. I went down on my knees. It was pretty peaceful, because I knew that I would be with my favorite aunt, who had just passed away."

   Maria's life hung in the balance for a long time. The prosecutor announced that if she died, he would charge Leyland with first-degree murder. There was no doubt he shot Maria. But were the essential elements of first-degree murder present-malice and premeditation? Too many prosecutors overcharge an accused-with murder, say, when he is guilty only of manslaughter. It is the frightful technique of intimidation. Often, in panic, the accused will admit to the lesser charge without a trial. He thinks he will save himself from being found guilty of the greater crime he did not commit (even though the prosecutor may well know that's true). Some argue the abuse is an acceptable part of the justice game. If so, no one should condemn an attorney for pleading his guilty client "Innocent," and thereafter holding the state to its burden of proof.

   I didn't like the case from the beginning. Although the charge of first-degree murder was properly defensible, I felt uneasy about representing Leyland. Perhaps I should have left the case to another lawyer. But I felt a certain pity for his parents, who had done everything they knew to insure the success of their son. I have sons of my own.

   I tried to argue away my misgivings. Wouldn't any doctor worth his salt labor fervently over the bleeding body of a heinous killer to save his life? No one would condemn the doctor. He acts out of the most humane ethics of his profession. Why, then, should lawyers be called to task for protecting the rights of the accused under the Constitution? Is not the highest calling of a lawyer to defend the damned? Still, the facts repelled me. I made further arguments to myself. I always do. Perhaps Leyland's heavy drinking had hurled him into psychosis. Perhaps I could enter a "Diminished Capacity" defense on his behalf. But cases, like people, change when you get to know them better.

   In Leyland's case, the more we investigated, the worse it got. We interviewed scores of witnesses, one being Mabel, a woman who owned a watering hole favored by Leyland and his fellow "fun-seekers." "When he was sober, he was one of the nicest people in the world, and when he was drunk, he was the meanest son of a bitch I ever met," said Mabel. "He was a very violent person. You could see it in his eyes. I see a lot of drunks. Some go to sleep and some get silly, and then there's the kind who get mean. There's a look they all get-just black in their eyes. One second he'll be fine, and the next he'll get that black look."

   Mabel said Leyland and his friends, including one called Jamey, didn't have anything to do in this world but to sit around and play cops and robbers. "To them, it was a game, and those two had very large feelings of inadequacy. They carried guns because it made them feel important." That's the nicest thing about bartenders nowadays: They'll not only listen to your problems but psychoanalyze you, too-all for the price of a drink.

   One night, they say, Leyland came to Mabel's bar with five guns, and Mabel's bouncer had to take the guns off the guy. "Leyland sat there and screamed that he was going to kill my bartender," Mabel said, "and he carried on and climbed over the bar, and they had to physically hold him down to the floor." Then, she said, he went out to his car, and came back with a submachine gun and waited a while in the lobby for the bartender to come out. The next day, Maria came to the bar and retrieved the guns, and Leyland and Jamey brought Mabel a big bouquet of flowers and said their sorrys, but she barred Leyland from the premises anyway. Leyland sent notes begging her to let him come back, and the other fun-seekers threatened to boycott the place if she didn't. Finally Mabel relented, upon Leyland's solemn promise that he wouldn't drink on her premises-not a drop.

   One time Maria told Mabel how Leyland had come to her home, put a gun to her cheek, and pulled the hammer back. He'd done it more than once. "Why do you let him in if he's going to do that?" Mabel asked.

   "Well, he'll come to the door and say, 'I just want to talk to you. Everything's cool.' Then, later, we'll have a hassle and he'll pull the gun, and when I freak out, he just looks at me and says, 'I won't hurt you, you know I won't hurt you.'"

   "You really don't believe Leyland will ever pull the trigger?"

   "I believe he's capable of it," Maria answered. "I told him that until he got his life straightened out, I wasn't going to see him again. But he's been so upset over his wife, he just can't get it together." Then she quietly said, "I have really high hopes that Leyland will get his life together and we'll be able to do something." Something.

   The wife tried to keep a check on him. One witness claimed that in a single month she had sixty-two charges on her phone bill, all attributable to the woman's attempt to keep tabs on her husband-long-distance. Another witness close to Leyland said, "Their marriage has been very strange. In a little over three years, they haven't spent a fourth of their married life together. When she gets mad, she'll pack up and sneak out and run home to Mother. This is his second marriage. I know Leyland hates losing it."

   The day before the shooting, Leyland had been at a popular restaurant, where he and Jamey were drunk. They had a couple of toy cannons with them; Leyland fired one off the bar, and the police threw him in jail overnight. He was bonded out the next morning, but he went right back to the same restaurant and started getting drunk again. Maria tried to persuade him to go with her to Jamey's house-"Fort Blotto, " they called it-for Mexican food, but Leyland stayed put at the bar and got drunker. Finally Maria left him there and went with Jamey for dinner, and afterward she drove to Leyland's parents' home to talk to them. In the meantime, Jamey went back to the bar to find Leyland.

   "Where's Maria?" Leyland asked.

   "I think she went home," Jamey said.

   Then some loser piped up. "Come on, Jamey, tell him where she really is. What did you and Maria really do?"

   "No, she's home. I don't know. She isn't coming down here," Jamey said, trying to keep things going straight.

   "Why?" Leyland asked. He was probably getting that black look, but he was too drunk to understand, and anyway, as Jamey said later, "Maria didn't want to see him while he was this ripped." In the meantime, Leyland phoned everybody he could think of trying to find her, and later, blind drunk, he staggered home. From what Mabel said, Leyland had always been the jealous type. Once before, when he caught a woman he was dating just sitting at the bar with another guy, Leyland had threatened to kill him.

   On the night of the shooting, Leyland's wife called him about some bills a housepainter had incorrectly charged, and Leyland had exploded. The painter, a friend of the family's, was at Leyland's parents' place when Leyland came storming in trying to get the man to fight him. Leyland's father had jumped in between them, and Leyland took a swing at his father, and then the two of them backed Leyland up against the wall and held him there until he calmed down. When he wouldn't leave, his father finally called the sheriff, but before the sheriff arrived, Leyland stomped on back to the bar, and only when he was nearly comatose did he go home. He must have slept for a while and then awakened to find himself alone, perhaps frightened by certain demons, and at about one-thirty in the morning he called Maria. He demanded that she come over. Then he shot her.

   At the time of the preliminary hearing in February, Maria was still clinging to life. At the rehabilitation center, she had learned to operate a mechanical wheelchair by blowing into a tube, and the therapists had attached a device to her that permitted her to form audible words. Her mother had cut her long hair as short as a boy's. She couldn't move her head. It was in this condition that I remember seeing her as her father wheeled her into the courtroom. Only the judge would decide if the evidence presented was sufficient to bind Leyland over for a later jury trial on a charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. That charge carried a maximum of twenty years, and some thought that wouldn't be enough.

   I saw that the bullet had not dimmed Maria's eyes, but what I remember most were her arms-sticks affixed to a wheelchair-and her fingernails. They grew, while everything else seemed dead. They were longer than the claws of a grizzly, perfectly groomed and polished bright red. A polyester pantsuit hung on her bones, and on her feet someone had stuck a pair of too-large cowboy boots. Her mother stood guard at her side as she had every day and every night since the shooting.

   On the witness stand, I have taken to task the heads of great corporations and wrestled with world authorities on every subject from nuclear fission to the engineering and design of automobiles. I have cross-examined the cagiest psychiatrists, the most articulate professional witnesses-those habitually hired by the insurance companies-and, of course, the smoothest-talking of them all, the agents of the FBI. Yet this helpless child propped in her wheelchair like a rag doll, unable to move a single finger or a single toe, unable to speak without mechanical assistance, presented the most formidable witness I had ever faced. I looked at this small, huddled remainder of a woman, and all I wanted to do was to get the hell out of there. She was, of course, the state's star witness. How does a lawyer take on one so horribly wounded? She demonstrated the prodigious power of helplessness. I didn't belong there. I wanted to run. I looked over at Leyland, and he was weeping.

   Maria answered the prosecutor's questions with raspy words usually coming in clusters of no more than two or three. One had to listen carefully. The packed courtroom was as silent as snow. "We were good ... friends," she said, but he was getting serious about her and was "making accusations ... that I liked ... other people ... that I was probably sneaking . . . around ... on'~--she paused to gather the strength to get the word out-"him." There was the motive for the killing! There, as bright and clear as if it were spelled out across the courtroom in neon: He tried to kill her out of jealousy. Then the prosecutor nailed it down. He called a woman who testified that Leyland had phoned her the night of the shooting when he was looking for Maria, and when the witness told Leyland she didn't know where Maria was, Leyland had muttered, "She's history."

   Maria tried to explain why she had come to Leyland's house that night. He had called, and he was mad. If she didn't come over to his house right away, he was coming to hers, and she didn't want that. When she arrived, he was in the kitchen, pacing and storming.

   "He wouldn't ... sit ... down," Maria said, struggling with each word. I wanted her to stop, to be saved the misery, and to save me. "He had a mean ... look ... in his eye. I ... couldn't tell ... why." She said he continued to demand where she had been all afternoon. "I tried to ... settle him down. He grabbed the ... whiskey bottle, which ... I was pretty fed up ... with, " but when she got up to leave, he stomped out of the room and came back with the gun. "I put my purse ... back down. I said, 'Okay, I'll stay.Then he pointed it ... at my face ... and it went ... off."

   Her memory carried her back to that hellish place, and she shuddered. I saw her sob and begin to choke. Her mother was right there, of course, and we were afraid Maria would die. After her mother inserted a suction tube down her throat, and she seemed finally to recover, the prosecutor took her back to that hideous scene once more.

   "What did his face look like?" he asked in a hushed voice that was supposed to reflect a special level of sensitivity.

   "It was mean. Very mean. I couldn't ... believe it. It was a look of ... revenge. That's the one thing ... that stuck in my mind ... for seven months ... that face . . . and how scared I was ... when I saw it. I knew it. I knew he ... was going to." My objections would only have been overruled. I remained silent.

   The case, of course, would turn on Leyland's intent, and now she underlined it for us: "It was intentional," she whispered.

   Automatically I got up to object, but again I caught myself and sat down without a word. Now, Maria began sobbing and choking, and her father and her mother were crying. It was horrible. Leyland was sitting beside me, and he was sobbing, too. Then the prosecutor, satisfied, said, "I have no more questions."

   It was my turn to cross-examine. What could I say? I stood there feeling ugly and out of place, a large man towering over this crumpled child. I asked the judge if I couldn't sit down to examine her; I think he felt my discomfort and wished to hold me to it. "You know the rules of this court, Mr. Spence," he said.

   As I looked down at Maria, I remembered the small deer I had wounded as a boy. My bullet had broken its back, and the deer lay helplessly in the snow, paralyzed, bleeding, staring up at me with round, soft eyes in which I could see the reflection of my own face. I looked insane. "Get up!" I screamed, and it did! The poor creature lifted itself up on its wobbly front legs and then dragged its hindquarters behind it. After it staggered a step or two, it fell back down in an awful heap with a groan and lay at my feet panting. I shot the poor beast in the head to save it from its misery, and me from mine. That much was the least expected of a hunter who had made a bad shot. I felt the same pressure now. There were certain expectations of me.

   "Maria, I wish neither one of us were here," I began in a very subdued voice.

   "I do ... too," she gasped through her talking machine.

   I know my job isn't nearly as hard as yours. It's easier for me to ask the questions than for you to answer them, and I wish I didn't have to ask them. Do you hear me?"

   "Yes, sir. "

   "You don't need to call me 'sir.' We are just two human beings struggling through this thing together."

    "All right," she said through her raspy machine. Then she told me she hadn't been looking for any permanent connection with Leyland, just friendship, because in a few months she was going to work for Western Airlines as a stewardess. "But he needed somebody. "

   "I suppose he shared his feelings and his life with you?"

   "Yes," she said. But he loved his wife and wanted her back. Maria even called his wife, who said if Leyland would stop drinking, she would come back. Maria testified that she said to the wife, "Oh, please ... I will do ... anything. I will help ... you. Just come back . . . because he really ... loves you." She claimed she had worked very hard with Leyland toward that end. "We got to ... do this," she told him. "Number one ... we got to quit ... drinking. You got ... to get away ... from these girls ... that your wife ... is hearing about." But after she convinced Leyland's wife to come back to him, Leyland had gone to meet her at the airport-drunk! That's when Maria gave up.

   I asked, "Did Leyland ever suggest to you that one of the reasons he got drunk was because he really didn't want to go back to his wife? "

   Suddenly she began to choke again, and her mother rushed forward once more to stick the suction tube down her throat. I felt a cold sweat. I was disgusted by the sound of my own voice. After minutes, her answer came.

   "No."

   She admitted that once she had gone antelope hunting with Leyland, and that she had shot an antelope and broken its back and that Leyland had had to finish it off. When she told of that, the visions of my own wounded childhood deer returned, and I wondered why those same avenging fates hadn't struck me down as they had Maria.

   Maria also admitted that Leyland had pulled a gun on her maybe fifteen or twenty times before, sometimes in the presence of others. He used the gun when he wanted to make her stay with him, and he used it when he wanted to make her go with him. I wasn't quite sure what their game was. He hated being alone, she said. The guns seemed to give him the power he needed. He was obsessed with them, and as his drinking mounted, she saw his personality begin to change-for the worse.

   "What would you say was the most obvious change you saw?" I asked.

   "Insecurity," she said.

   "He got more and more afraid?"

   "Yes."

   "In your whole life, Maria, had you ever heard or known of anybody who was so wrapped up in this strange use of guns as Leyland was? "

   "No, sir."

   "And it was strange, wasn't it?"

    "Yes, sir."

   Later, she testified that when she saw Leyland in the bar the night of the shooting, he was glassy-eyed drunk. "He really wouldn't ... look at you. It was like ... he was staring ... into another world." That was the launch I needed into the defense of "Diminished Capacity"-insanity.

   "And would he say strange things on such nights?"

   "Yes."

   "Could you give me examples, Maria?"

   "'I am going to ... get them,' he'd say."

   "And who was he talking to?"

   "Nobody."

   "Did you ever ask him who he was talking about?"

   "It was the people ... after him. But there wasn't ... anybody after him." And she said that on such occasions he also had "that mean look on his face," but not nearly so mean as he'd looked on the night of the shooting.

   Maria said Leyland would shout, "I have to get them for talking about me."

   "And you would comfort him?"

   "Just by a very ... nice talk ... soothing talk ... reassuring him ... that nobody was trying ... to hurt him," she said, struggling to breathe and to speak.

   Near the end, I asked if at any time after the shooting she had been given any message from Leyland about his continuing love for her.

   "No."

   "No?" I asked, surprised. "Did you know he tried to get that message to you?"

   "How?"

   "He wanted to come to see you and wasn't permitted to do so. Did you know that?" She looked confused, stunned.

   "Did you know he was asked not to come to the hospital by your parents?" The prosecutor objected. "Irrelevant!" he hollered.

   "Your Honor, this has something to do with her understanding of what this man intended. She has probably come to some wrong conclusions about his intent. I think that if I were Maria, lying there this way, and there was this man who had previously professed his love but who had never come to see me and who had never spoken to me afterward, it might be easy to conclude he didn't care. In fact, Leyland tried very hard to see her in the hospital, but was always prevented from doing so."

   The judge sustained the prosecutor's objection, but I had said to Maria what I had wanted to say, and what I said was true. I looked over at Leyland. There were large tears welling up in his eyes again.

   "I have no further questions," I said.

   The judge's antagonism toward me had grown as the case proceeded. No matter how I tried to be gentle and caring, I was still that large man with the deep voice leaning over that defenseless child. Nothing could make the contest fair, and the judge had reacted to it. Now, it was time to argue to this judge that Leyland ought not be bound over to the district court for trial. That such a task was impossible was no reason for an attorney not to give his best.

   I began quietly. "There has been an unspeakable tragedy here. But this tragedy is contagious. There is only one victim so far-Maria, a young woman without fault-innocent, decent, loving. She was healthy and happy. She was useful. Her parents and the people who knew her were justly proud of her. Then, one morning, this young woman lay in the hospital a hair from the grave, totally helpless.

   "The outrage of seeing a child transformed from what she was to this-by a single crass and purposeless act-causes outrage beyond description." I looked at the judge. His eyes were squinted, hot. "At this point, we might feel justified to drag this man away to some dark place and leave him there forever.

   "Now, Your Honor, how can I look you in the face and argue that a crime wasn't committed here? If my child were run down by a driver in a Mack truck who sped through the school zone, I would surely think a crime had been committed. But it wouldn't be a crime under the charge in this case unless there was a malicious intent, and what I want to talk about now is whether a preponderance of evidence establishes such a malicious intent."

   I reviewed the evidence, and argued, of course, that there was none. As to Maria's testimony, how could she know Leyland's mind? And her statement that he intended to kill her had no probative value under the law, and couldn't be considered by the court.

   "And so, Your Honor, if you bind my client over for trial to the district court, I will understand. If I sat in your chair, I might do the same. But what I ask you to do is to take a courageous step, one that won't be popular. The people up and down the streets of this community want Leyland's blood. The citizens who sit in front of their television sets want his blood. The people who read the newspapers-all want his blood. Everybody I have talked to wants him crucified. Give him to the mob! It is the easy, the popular, thing to do. Every person on the street will pat you on the back. Every person who knows of this case will crown you the hero if you bind him over." Then I told the judge I was sorry we had to present this painful case to him, and I sat down.

   Now the judge looked over at the defendant and opened his eyes very wide, as if to release all that had been dammed behind them. "Would the defendant please stand up?" he commanded. Leyland rose, stiff, self-conscious, afraid. His face reddened.

   The judge's voice was hard. "It will be the finding of this court that there is probable cause that you did commit the offense as charged, and I bind you over to the district court for trial." He said nothing more. He didn't need to. Leyland would now plead his case before a jury of his peers, and, as I saw it, the judge's ruling was Leyland's sure ticket to the penitentiary. Thereafter, Leyland entered a plea in the district court of "Not Guilty" and "Not Guilty by Reason of Mental Deficiency or Illness," which includes both the medical and legal notions of insanity. The pleas would put the state to its proof, and that is as it should be.

   This was just the beginning of Leyland's problems. The total cost of Maria's hospitalization, the months she had spent in rehabilitation, the special nurses, the attendants and equipment she required, had already totaled nearly $100,000. Her father ran a small, successful business, but he was by no means able to satisfy the endless demands of her medical expenses. Such cases cry out for multi-million-dollar verdicts, and, naturally, her father hired one of the leading trial lawyers around, who now filed a civil suit against Leyland for damages.

   Considering the severity of Maria's injuries, and the likelihood that the jury would add a large award to punish him, I thought Leyland's exposure to liability could total as much as $10 million. How could he pay her? Although he ostensibly ran his own business, all of his assets were fully encumbered. He did have a homeowner's insurance policy that provided him with liability coverage for his negligent acts in causing injury to his guests. Maria was his guest, all right, but the policy contained a standard provision that denied any protection to Leyland if his acts were intentional, and no one, least of all the insurance company lawyers, could forget the well-publicized testimony of Maria. At the preliminary hearing that "I know he ... had meant ... to do it.... It was intentional." By telling it as she remembered it, Maria had seemingly hurt herself badly. Although she could doubtless obtain a very large award from the jury, under the terms of Leyland's insurance, which were the only substantial monies she could get from him, the company would not be required to pay any sum as damages resulting from Leyland's intentional acts. Moreover, the total amount of Leyland's insurance policy was $100,000. I demanded that the company pay it to Maria immediately.

   To an insurance company, every penny is its dearest offspring, and no company will surrender any of its children without a terrible fight. In the home office of one of the nation's largest insurers, there were, however, broad and confident smiles, for Leyland's company had a clear way out-Leyland had shot Maria intentionally, and therefore the company had no liability under its policy. To make sure, however, that the company was fully protected, its lawyers sued Leyland in what is known as a declaratory judgment action, the object of which was to obtain the court's finding that Leyland had, indeed, intended to shoot Maria, thus excusing the company's nonpayment of any sum to anybody for anything.

   I had already concluded that Maria's testimony-that she knew Leyland intended to shoot her-would never be permitted at trial. The law does not empower one to read another's mind. On the other hand, every person charged with a crime is entitled to testify to his own intentions. I thought these simple rules of law would leave the insurance company facing Leyland's uncontradicted testimony that the shooting was purely an accident. He had no intent to shoot Maria. The jury could conclude otherwise, of course, but gradually the insurance company lawyers began to realize their position wasn't as solid as they had originally thought.

   What the company hadn't anticipated was the counterclaim I filed. That launched a new and dangerous war against them. I alleged that the company knew that the "injuries to Maria are so horrible to behold and create such pity for her and such hatred against the defendant that any jury will be outraged and will punish him by convicting him." Then I called the insurance company's game on the public record. "It is the tactic of the company to refuse to pay [Maria] the just sums due her, hoping, instead, that [Leyland] will be found guilty of the criminal charge." I alleged this placed the company in conflict with its own insured. An insurance company is supposed to protect its insured, not injure him. Here, the company had hired one set of lawyers to do him in with a declaratory judgment action, and another to defend him in the suit brought by Maria against Leyland for her damages. Proof by the insurance company in the declaratory judgment action that Leyland had acted intentionally could aid the state in convicting him, not to mention that it would relieve the company of any obligation to pay Maria the $100,000-which, of course, so far as the company was concerned, was the object of their game. My counterclaim against the company alleged both the company's bad faith and its intentional violation of Leyland's civil rights. I asked for $1 million to compensate him for his pain and suffering, and $10 million to punish the corporation-punitive damages.

   Now, those calling the shots for the company began to realize that the whole damn case was getting too risky. What if the jury found Leyland was insane or that his capacity was otherwise so diminished by drinking he could harbor no intent? What if the jury believed it was an accident? Accidents are not intended.

   At the last minute, the company caved in. Don't forget, a jury might hit the company big for having run wild and loose with Leyland's rights, in which case some claims supervisor could end up in Nome, Alaska. But now the company men made another bad move, precipitated, I think, by the panic that often sets in once the enemy is routed and in full retreat. So desperately did the company want to save its pennies that, after paying its $100,000 to Maria, it completely withdrew all its attorneys from all of the cases, leaving Leyland without any representation in Maria's damage suit against him. Some company big shot didn't think that one through, because the company had a duty under its policy to provide Leyland a defense, including an attorney, at the company's expense. The way I read the situation, company strategists probably thought I would enter the case for Leyland, and when I didn't, the company was wide open for the moves I would now make to force the company to pay Maria beyond the limits of its policy.

   I asked Maria's attorney to make Leyland an offer of settlement. As soon as the judge had set Maria's damage suit for trial, her lawyer did just that. He offered to settle her case for $5 million. I wrote the insurance company a nasty letter. The company had turned its back on Leyland, I wrote. His defense required skillful attorneys, and now he had no one to defend him. The company had no right to first throw its attorneys into the battle, and then, after it paid Maria, "to run and hide, leaving Leyland defenseless. The law will not permit that. It is outrageous conduct." Didn't the insurance company want to take a fresh look at what it had done? But as is often the case with large corporations, the company now seemed unable to make a decision at all.

   Because Leyland had pled "Diminished Capacity," the law required that he be sent to the Wyoming State Hospital for observation, and after that institution had discharged him as sane and tryable, we hired our own psychiatrist to examine him in a private sanitarium. Now that Leyland was sober, the horrible dimensions of his act began to close in on him, and, more than anything else, he longed to make whatever small amends he could. He gathered up all the property he owned-his guns, his home, everything-and sold it, paying the proceeds, some $13,921.37, to Maria. Further, he agreed to pay her $1,500 a month so long as she should live, and to assign to her the net proceeds, if ever any, from his suits against his insurance company. In turn, on the advice of her parents and her lawyer, Maria agreed that any judgment she might obtain against Leyland in her lawsuit against him would be satisfied if he fully performed his agreement.

   The day of the trial, I stayed home. No one appeared on behalf of Leyland, and a default was, of course, entered against him. Now I wrote the insurance company attorneys another letter. "Your company has one last chance to set aside the default and to try to keep the damages down. You don't have much time. Won't you please get on the telephone and tell the company to help Leyland? It will be a lot easier for the company to do what should be done now rather than make technical, legal, mealy-mouthed, lawyer-type arguments to the jury later on when Leyland sues your company for his damages resulting from the company's failure to act now, as they should." The company buried its head.

   A short time thereafter, the judge set Maria's damages against Leyland at $6,598,172 and I filed suit in the state court against the company for this same amount, and I demanded punitive damages as well. Now the company was in the soup, and its attorneys promptly removed the case to the federal court. On January 13, 1980, facing an impending trial, the insurance company entered into a settlement with both Leyland and Maria for an undisclosed amount. All of the money was paid to Maria. The settlement agreement provided that its terms would not be divulged, and, bound thereby, I am to this day unable to reveal what additional sums of money Maria received, but I can tell you that the amount was, under the circumstances, agreeable to Maria's parents and to her lawyers and, most certainly, to Leyland.

   In the meantime, Leyland, still awaiting trial on the criminal case, was finally permitted to visit Maria. He pled with her to believe him when he swore it was all a horrible accident. How could he have intended to kill her? He loved her. I could hear Maria gasping, one word at a time, one sob at a time. I could understand her conflict. In her heart, she knew that if Leyland had not been drunk, he would never have harmed her. She knew of the great lengths to which we had gone to force Leyland's insurance company to pay not only its policy limits but much, much more. And bound by her own Christian ideals in that ungodly conflict between forgiveness and revenge, she had no choice. Whatever her reasons, Maria now interceded on Leyland's behalf with the prosecutor.

   My associate in the case, Dallas Laird, a bright young lawyer whose talents were then just beginning to be revealed, had convinced the trial judge in the criminal case that much of the state's evidence, including the gun, was inadmissible as having been unlawfully seized without a warrant, and the court's ruling would cause all the scientific tests performed on the evidence to be excluded as well such as proof that the gun in the state's possession was the gun that was used to shoot Maria. How much this actually weakened the state's case I don't know. But a little over a year after the shooting, the state dismissed its criminal charge against Leyland. The prosecutor spoke to the press, claiming he was "surprised and dismayed" that Maria had changed her mind about prosecuting Leyland. He said, "It is apparent the testimony she would give at the trial would not support a criminal conviction." As I saw it, the criminal charge would have been very hard, if not impossible, to defend, with or without Maria's testimony. There had been over thirty articles appearing in the local paper reporting the most morbid details of the case, not to mention a constant barrage on television. Every citizen had seen that picture of Maria being rolled into court in her wheel chair. I had moved for a change of venue, but the judge had denied my motion despite the widespread furor in the community against Leyland. A jury wouldn't care if the act was intentional or not. The jurors would convict Leyland and demand his punishment. But finally, even the prosecutor himself must have been reluctant to force Maria into court to testify against the man she had now forgiven.

   The state's dismissal of its case deprived me of the chance to deliver my final argument to the jury, but Maria probably knew that any argument I might have made would fail to save him-that only she in her powerlessness had such power. Perhaps she chose to save herself from what she foresaw as the ravages of vengeance. Some may think her change of heart was connected to her desperate need for the money she would receive, but I think she simply had to forgive him. What else could she have done? I have no doubt she loved Leyland, maybe more as a mother, but that is worse, since mothers must forgive, and mothers do. Always. Even as her son swings on the gallows, a mother loves him and has already forgiven him. And yet Maria must have despised the day she met this man. She must have hated him for what he had done to her. And pitied him. She could never have revenge, for the more she sought justice, the more she would be hurt by it.

   One month after Maria withdrew her charges against Leyland, she died.

   It must have been maddening to Maria's parents that Leyland should go free, and that some soulless insurance company treating this human tragedy as just another entry in its profit-and-loss statement should be permitted to stand in for Leyland-to stand in for justice. Soon thereafter, Maria's parents, long married, were divorced. Perhaps, had they been able to witness justice together, it might have been different. They had wanted Leyland punished, that much I know, and to them, the system had failed. Perhaps, finally, they had no other place to lay their anger than upon each other.

   As for me-well, once in the case, I had a duty to defend Leyland. And strangely, I still felt the need to defend myself for having done so. I had argued to the prosecutor that locking Leyland in the foulest prison would never provide the funds necessary to purchase the small comforts required to help Maria face her suffering. I admit that in aiding her to recover the monies from the insurance company, I had also helped Leyland escape punishment. But I did as the system demands: I zealously defended my client. Still, the most powerful of all defenses, the one that in the end resolved this tragic case, was forgiveness. I admit I worked to gain it for Leyland, and when I did, I hurled its might at the state and smashed its case. "To forgive is blessed," and forgiveness is as much a part of justice as revenge. Gandhi once said, "If everyone took an eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind."

   Yet the pure rage that stems from an unrepressed injury can be more fearsome than that produced by the original wrong. For any system of justice to survive, it must be respected. Too often, our Christian ideals against revenge leave the system appearing palsied. Forgiveness alone solves no human need. If I slap you on the right cheek and you turn the other, what may appear to be forgiveness is only masked anger. We shall never be friends until both your anger is dispelled and my guilt atoned. When we fail to justly punish the criminal, the community sees justice aborted. With its own ignoble voice, blood does, indeed, cry out for blood. Revenge, too, is always at the heart of justice.

   But that single bullet had destroyed Leyland as well as Maria. I was powerless to salve his guilt, but I felt my own. By helping Leyland escape punishment at the hands of the law, I had also deprived him of the right to know the healing power of just punishment. Despite the foppish shell he had presented as the leader of the "fun-seekers," I had thought there was something worth saving in Leyland, although then it was never clear to me precisely what it was. When the great spruce tree burns, its cones explode, and the seeds of a new forest are planted. I held to the faith of that metaphor-that infamous fires father new life.

   After Maria's death, Leyland moved away and tried to start over. He wandered in and out of alcohol-rehabilitation centers, and I lost track of him. But I wanted to know how to write the last chapter of Maria's story, and I found Leyland through his parents. He was glad to hear from me. His voice seemed strong.

   "I've been going to write to you," he said. "I've wanted to tell you about my life and to thank you. It's been nearly eight years since all that happened. I've always remembered that one thing you told me-you said, 'Leyland, it is your choice as to what happens to the rest of your life.' " Then he told me that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and that it had been five years now since he'd had a drink.

   "I am very fortunate, and I'm sharing what I've learned with others. I give guest lectures at the college to the Health and Education classes. I don't just cut it short and tell them I had a drinking problem, I tell them the whole story."

   "The whole story?"

   "Yes, everything. It doesn't have any impact if I just say I had 'legal problems.'"

   "Perhaps that's a part of the atonement that goes into making you whole again," I said. A modern-day version of the stocks and pillories of the pilgrims.

   "Yes," he said.

   "Do those ghosts ever sneak in and shake at you?"

   "Yes," he said. "But I don't want to totally brush them away. I want them in my life."

   "You don't want the ghosts to go away?"

   "No. They will always have a part to play."

   "You sound different," I said. "You sound mature.

   You've grown up."

   "I've made mistakes. I can't change that. All I can do is to live today to the best of my ability."

   Then Leyland spoke to me about how both his misery and his joy had been contagious. "Besides Maria and her family, the thing that hurt me the worst was the pain I brought to my parents. But one month after I stopped drinking, my father also stopped. And then my mother quit, too. We came together as a family. We are very close," he said. Leyland's resurrection and all that went with it gave me a new sense of fulfillment and became the magical legacy of Maria in her search for human justice.

   But what of Donna-that young Wyoming woman I mentioned who died in an automobile with brakes the manufacturer had known all along were defective? She was needlessly sacrificed in the company's competitive war with Japan. Despite the settlement the company paid to the family, there was no justice. There was not even an apology. Never once did her young face flash across the mind of the president or its chief engineer as they monitored the track of the company's stock. They never heard of Donna or her family. They never knew of the parents' lawsuit in a remote Wyoming court. The case was just another digit in the company's litigation portfolio that was tended to by the company lawyers. The death, the grief, the waste, were commingled in the corporation's profit-and-loss statement like a small bug mixed into the concrete of Hoover Dam. The company made no offer to change. There has been no admission of guilt. There never will be. There will be only the family's memories, and, of course, the expedient payment of money.

   At first, the grief consumed them. But the grief turned to horror with the family's realization that her life had been wasted and that nothing could be made of it, except money. I suggested they endow a scholarship fund in the name of their daughter with some of the money and some of my fee. And they did. Now, every year for fifty years, there will be a bright young woman, perhaps someone like Donna, who will go to college and who will thereafter make her contributions-and the corporation's dead money will, indeed, be transformed into something living.

   Clarence Darrow was right. Justice cannot be defined. And to the same extent that justice cannot be defined, neither can it be realized. Yet is not our great challenge to form a system that harmonizes such noble ideals as forgiveness with such a human impulse as revenge? At the heart of justice is a divine spirit. It sprouts from the same seeds as life itself. And although we can define neither life nor justice, we are able to recognize injustice, the supreme form of which is to surrender to the status quo and to sanctify the myths and fantasies that breed it, among which is the national legend that in America there is liberty and justice for all.

   I feel like a man groping through a dark and dangerous room. Even though my eyes are adjusted to the dark, I can still see very little. I stumble, although I've passed through this room long ago, often in the same places as before. I rely mostly on my feelings. I am afraid. Sometimes I recognize a danger and call out a warning. Occasionally a brief beam shines through the window denying the dark. "Justice for none" is as much a slogan as "justice for all." Still, in a society in which we are free to explore for better ways, to embrace the fiction of "justice for all" terminates the search. Though the fool seeks solutions to the unsolvable and struggles to know the unknowable, such has also consumed the souls of messiahs and saints. The providence of man is never to know, but to search-always to search. So let us get on with our business.