JUSTICE SERVED

Justice Served

By K.M. Anderson

Some folks say Wendell Payne was a no-nonsense, tough-on-crime judge. Others just called him cruel and unforgiving. Through the years he'd sentenced dozens of men and women to life in prison, and more than a few to death. In his retirement, however, Judge Payne had faded from the limelight. So, it was with some measure of enjoyment that he poured himself a second glass of whiskey and sat down to watch the television report of the impending execution of the most notorious defendant to ever stand before his bench. After sentencing and many years of appeals, the day had come.

An unemployed man by the name of Jerome Denton, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was arrested and convicted of a brutal slaying in a suburb of his city. The case had gathered nationwide media attention for its brutality and the fact that the victim was the matriarch of a local wealthy family. Payne had been the trial judge, and the case made him a prominent name in local legal circles.

As the execution hour approached, Payne took a drink from his glass and let his mind wander back to the sentencing.

"You are here today, having been convicted by a jury of your peers for the crime of murder in the first degree," he had said. "You have denied any role in the death.  You claim to be a victim of astounding circumstantial evidence and testimony. Your attorney repeated the phrase, “Jerome did not commit this crime. He is completely innocent, stood unjustly accused, and was just as unjustly convicted.”  But the jury did not believe you – nor do I.

"The sentence I impose on you today is fair, just, and righteous," he continued. "We cherish our freedoms in this country, Mr. Denton. We will continue to cherish them after today. But you will not. You have forfeited your right to those freedoms, including the freedom to live. The world will not long remember you, but it is the judgment of this court that it will be a better place without you in it. Accordingly, I hereby sentence you to death…"

As Judge Payne was pronouncing the method of execution Denton crumpled into sobs and wails, continuing to claim his innocence as two bailiffs grabbed him by the arms to handcuff him and lead him from the courtroom. Payne could still hear the man's plaintive cries and the desperate sound of his voice as he again and again proclaimed his innocence. He also remembered how quickly those cries turned to venom. 

"You'll pay for this!" Denton screamed at the judge. "You mark my words, one day you’ll pay for this!"

Now, as the clock ticked toward midnight and the end of Denton’s mortal life, the judge wondered if Denton was remembering that same moment now; wondered if it would be his last thought before the injections rendered him unconscious; wondered, fleetingly, if the man could have possibly been innocent. Judge Payne knew the case was not just circumstantial, but overwhelmingly so.  There really wasn’t any doubt, was there?

The warmth of his whiskey dulled any serious thoughts as to Denton’s possible innocence.

"The world is about to become a better place," he thought.

Hadn't the case withstood the appeals process? So what if the defense claimed that key evidence disappeared, including a surveillance tape from the victim's in-home security system? There was enough testimony and other evidence to support the verdict. Tired of those thoughts and tired of anticipating the execution he took another drink to let the whiskey lull him to sleep. 

When Payne next stirred he was disoriented and unsure of how long he'd been dozing.  He didn’t think he’d had that much to drink, but his somewhat muddled thinking persuaded him otherwise.

 He sat up to check the large grandfather clock in the corner of his study, but his eyes could not locate it. He thought he must just be groggy from having just awoken. But beyond the veil of almost-sleep he also couldn't tell exactly where he was. He knew that he must be in his own bedroom; but the room was dark, it's dimensions measurable by the only light, a thin slip of moonlight filtering through a nearby window.

He stood, stumbling slightly as he made his way to the window. Shaking off the last lingering effects of the whiskey, he moved his face closer to the glass and peered out, and what he saw made his blood run cold.

The room in which he’d awoken was strange, but the view which invaded his eyes from the panes of window glass was even stranger. The familiar brick courtyard that should have been below his window, just beyond his prized flowerbed, had been replaced with a yard of another kind. Very solid looking stone walls ringed a dirt-covered courtyard on three sides. A heavy, wooden, cross-braced door with rusted hinges and hardware dominated the center of one of the walls, parallel to the window through which Judge Payne now stared. In the center of this aged-looking arena there was a low stone or brick structure similar to that of the walls. This squat protrusion in the middle of the dirt corral resembled a bench of sorts, with a waist high back and a lower, slightly extended seat. The back of this bench had a large, rounded notch on its top, a notch large enough to rest something as large as a cantaloupe within its curve. But what caught the judge’s attention most was a large stain extending from that notch down the back of the bench. This darkened patch contrasted against the lighter colored stone as if something had leaked down its surface—leaked and dried, again and again, until the stain was larger than any single occurrence of something leaking would have or could have caused.

Judge Payne surveyed the unfamiliar scene and his mind tried to make a connection between that which his eyes perceived and that which his mind told him was fearful.  The courtyard, the bench, the notch, the stain—they were pieces of a vaguely familiar scene that stirred apprehension. The hairs at the base of his neck, as they rose and twitched, gave the feeling that his blood was cooling in his veins, and the ever-quickening beat of his heart and rapid breathing were working together to awaken a profound dread. Slowly, insidiously, recognition mingled with his mounting fear. It was with this understanding that the judge felt his initial apprehension give way to the first feelings of panic.

         Staring dumbly out the window, fear causing his muscles to weaken and his body to tremble slightly, Judge Payne’s mind struggled to understand why his comfortable study and the grounds of his home had been supplanted by such odd and foreboding things. 

As his mind picked one explanation, that he’d gone mad, and then another, that he was hallucinating, the tableaux beyond the window took life as the wooden door in the courtyard slowly opened inward.  Once open, a troupe of four figures dressed in dark, ground-length robes slowly filed in. Their faces were not visible, as they all had their heads bowed low to their chests, and their heads were covered with loose hoods attached to the robes. When the last of these dark soldiers was within the courtyard walls, they partially surrounded the stone bench, and with heads held low, presented a grim picture, adding to the scene’s surrealism. 

When these four had taken their positions, another figure entered the courtyard from the doorway. Also dressed with a dark robe and hood, he somehow projected an even greater sense of darkness and doom. Adding to his dreary physical appearance, that last figure carried a large, lengthy object, also wrapped in dark material. Like the figures who stood in that semi-circle, this last lonely figure hid his face, while the rest of his demeanor alluded to a task that would be more somber and dark than his clothing.

The judge’s anxiety mounted, yet his gaze was focused on the tableau in the courtyard. It held him, terrified and transfixed. As something macabre and hideous holds our attention, this held Judge Payne’s. There was nowhere to turn. Flight was impossible. His eyes and mind were drawn to what was before him and he was rooted by a body that had betrayed him.

Wanting to scream, to shout to the men outside, the judge remained mute, hoping and expecting that questions about his fear and apprehension would soon be answered. As these thoughts dansed macabre in his brain, the figures in the courtyard ever so slightly turned their heads in unison toward the last of them to arrive, seemingly paying homage and attention to him.  When they stopped moving, the other raised his head and turned toward the judge’s window.  His right arm and hand rose with index finger extended, pointing directly at the judge; and the other figures’ eyes followed the line of that finger, to the judge’s presence in the window.  

With the stares of all in the courtyard now fixed upon the judge, the robed figure with the wrapped package lowered his outstretched arm to his hood, pushing it back from his face, allowing the judge to finally glimpse what manner of apparition he might be. 

Judge Payne had thought his horror couldn’t progress; but he was wrong. Horror gave way to hideous fascination at the face he saw, and inklings of recognition crept into his fear-frozen mind. The eyes, the forehead, the nose, the thin lips, turned up in a mocking sneer; they all came together in a rush of recognition. Dear God, it was Jerome Denton, the man he’d sent to the executioner.

The judge’s knees buckled further, and he slumped against the window, all the courtyard figures staring up at him.  He recognized the figure as the man who most certainly had been executed just hours earlier and was now staring into his eyes and pointing at him. Gasping, Judge Payne gaped with revulsion at the countenance below, and that figure lowered his arm farther in order to grasp his covered package with both hands. Slowly, deliberately, he unfolded and unwrapped an implement with a handle that was long, thick, and sturdy. As the final wraps of dark material were pulled away, the shiny surface of a woodsman’s double-bladed axe was visible. The judge now understood the courtyard, the bench, the notch, the axe, and the hooded executioners. As this realization blended with his fear, he noted that the other four figures were no longer in the courtyard. The judge was so totally transfixed with the realization of who he was staring at, trying to reconcile the thoughts of an executed man staring at him from an impossible scene outside his window, that he lost sight of the other four.

Judge Payne began to sob uncontrollably, mumbling, “It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help it. The law is the law. I had to follow the law. It wasn’t my fault.” Sliding to the floor, weeping and wailing as he felt his senses and his mind slipping, there was a loud, insistent pounding on his door.