Blind Jury

Nationwide, the news media had run with the story of Martha Atkinson’s crime. It was a story they could print forever, taking new angles and new attacks up to, and even after, the day she was sentenced to life in prison.

“Did you, or did you not,” the District Attorney had said “own several firearms, many of which were posted about publicly on social media?”

The DA at that time was a lanky worm of a man called Jake J Douglas, and when the Martha Atkinson case came across his desk he was over the moon to be put at the head of the team that would send her down. When Martha heard he would be prosecuting, she had called for a conflict of interest; a few thousand people signed a petition to have her case moved to somewhere else, but it was all denied in turn. During the previous election, Douglas had tried to push his sights higher and go to The House of Representatives, running on a vehemently anti-transgender platform that only saw him overshone by rivals from within his own party who were better suited to the larger world of politics. He was narrow minded, even at a time as such where bigotry was sure ballot bait.

His blunt, well-defined face was framed by a slick of black hair and a pair of gold, thin rimmed spectacles that sat at the top of his nose at all times. He never smiled, but neither did he ever frown; his face tended to freeze somewhere between dismissive and disrespectful, and only the two thick black eyebrows at the top of his face moved any amount to be noteworthy. In his career, his eyes had always done him the trick; he knew how to give the right sympathetic look to the jury when it was needed to sway opinion even in the most open and shut cases. His eyes had sent a career thief to jail when the mass consensus said he was innocent, one look had been enough to convince the unsure half of the jury on the Letterman fraud case to sway his way, and he had been playing those looks every time he opened his mouth on every day of the eight weeks that the Martha Atkinson case was dragged out for.

“Yes, I collect firearms and made something of a career talking about gun safety on the internet.” Martha confirmed. “But as I say, Mr Douglas, all my videos were about gun safety. I was teaching people how to maintain their firearms, how to handle them safely, that kind of stuff.”

Martha was too young and too beautiful to be facing murder charges, that’s what some news sources said when the pictures of her on the stand took to the front pages. In a past life she could have been a blonde bombshell, a real Marilyn Monroe, but today she was just a punching bag for all the hatred and the rage and the anxiety that America decided she stood for.

“Gun safety?” Douglas raised his eyebrows in horror. “So, tell me, where any of the lessons about how to gut a man like a fish with a double barrel shotgun?”

Jonathan Englund, Martha’s lawyer, rose from his seat and shouted so loudly he could have deafened the jury. Throughout the whole case he had been bastardised in the media, dragged over hot coals for anything he said in his client’s favour. On one occasion, he had told a reporter that ‘in America, everyone has the right to good representation, my clients are no different’, and the headlines they took off with astounded him. Somehow, the reporters decided that statement meant he knew Martha was guilty, and that he was only representing her to make a pay check at the end of a long day, but that was far from any truth.

Jonathan Englund knew Martha Atkinson was innocent the moment the first reports came out. He was at the head of people speaking publicly about how so much of the report and the accusations failed to make any sense under any light scrutiny.

The first point he uncovered was one that he ran with for a large portion of the trial: the gun used was not hers.

William Atkinson was found dead in the evening of March 9th, 2023; his cause of death was ruled on the scene as ‘death by a shotgun blast to the abdomen’, an injury that sliced him up pretty bad and left everything from just below his nipples to just above his groin a heap of shredded flesh and dried blood.

In the autopsy report, it was ruled that William had been shot with both barrels, an assumption that most had already come to, but that each barrel had been fired off at different moments. The first shot happened when William was sat on his porch chair, some of the pellets passing through him and still having enough power to break his chair.

There would have been no witnesses to William Atkinson’s death other than his killer, until a local bar owner called Frankie Reeve arrived looking to settle a debt. He said that he had been in his car when shot number one went off. A shotgun on The Atkinson Ranch was no surprise, Reeve had been a witness to William putting down at least six animals in the time he had known the man, so he assumed that one of the cows or the horses had gone lame and needed to be put out of its misery. Reeve claimed he then climbed out of his car and started towards the farmhouse, but as he rounded the corner of the large barn just beyond the front porch of the house he had heard a voice.

“You son of a bitch, you don’t say a word, just die now.”

A woman’s voice, he described it as being similar to either William’s wife or daughter, said those words and then pulled the trigger for the second time. William had enough air and life left in him to scream, pushing out a mouthful of blood as a guttural belch of a cry came from somewhere in his broken chest. What happened next is the detail that secured Martha’s place as the prime suspect. Frankie peered his head round at the sound of footsteps, they were coming right for him and after just a few seconds he was face to face with the killer. Their hood was up, and they were so much shorter than him that he would have had to crouch to get any kind of a look.

That was all the detail the police needed, the killer’s height. Reeve alleged the killer could have been no taller than five foot five, maybe even five foot four, and that lined up to Martha enough to bring her in.

“Objection, argumentative.” Jonathan shouted, pointing the outstretched finger of a shaking hand at the District Attorney who was, at that moment, turning to look smugly at The Judge.

Judge Edward Wayne was a typical wiry old man, the kind of judge they cast in old movies with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks and a small pair of glasses balanced neatly at the tip of his nose. His accent pinned him as being from somewhere on the East Coast, his eyes gave away that he was just as tired of the proceedings as everyone involved save for the District Attorney. Jake J Douglas was known for his argumentative stunts, and Edward Wayne was sick of him from the first time they had ever been a part of the same case.

“Sustained.” The Judge scoffed. “Mr Douglas, that was a frankly abhorrent question. See to it that you resume your questioning with any kind of grace or decorum, or I’ll see to it that you return to your office while the grown-ups handle this.”

Something of a smirk crept across the lips of Edward Wayne, more out of self-satisfaction for finally having an excuse to belittle the DA than out of any feeling of accomplishment for protecting the accused. His eyes had lit up with a twinkle they hadn’t seen for twenty years, and he turned those eyes to the jury. Those twelve selected to pass sentence on Martha Atkinson were, in his opinion, the twelve people burdened with the hardest choice that anyone in the city, if not the state, to make. He always tried to stay impartial, but even he saw the injustice of facing a transgender woman against a prosecutor who hated any member of her tribe. While he didn’t fully understand what Martha Atkinson was, or why she was like that, he was almost sickened to have to abide letting her be persecuted by a man who would have probably killed her himself given the chance.

“Sorry, your honour.” Douglas shook his head in sardonic apology. “Mister Atkinson, did you, at any time-”

Before Douglas could continue, Jonathan was back on his feet again.

“Your honour, you really can’t stand by and let this man disrespect my client like this, can you?” He asked, passing a look of exasperation across to him. “Mr Douglas has already gone into my client’s internet footprint, in great detail, over this case. If he can drag up old talking points then I motion to re-raise my asking to bring Frankie Reeve back in.”

The idea seemed to stir something in Douglas, the until now frozen skin around his lips twitching once as if he was holding back a snarl. His eyes seemed to darken slightly, the eyebrows above furrowing and casting deep shadows down into the deep pits his eyes resided in.

“Your honour, Mr Reeve was more than helpful in his testimony, and his cross examining was pushed on for much longer than necessary by Mr Englund.”

“I simply had questions about the boot prints.”

“You dragged out a whole day off the back of those boots, and it was decided that the path leading away was not wet enough to generate prints when the killer ran from the scene of the crime.”

As if using a prop, Douglas tapped a finger against a folder that he had picked up that contained detailed notes about the boot prints found around The Atkinson Ranch. Frankie Reeve’s prints had been found where he said they would be, and he even had an alibi for how they tracked off to an area he hadn’t mentioned going to; and the conclusion had been reached that when Martha walked up to, and ran away from, the porch she wouldn’t have weighed enough to force prints into the path as she ran.

“I pushed it because it’s the clearest line of investigation that proves that my client is innocent, I wouldn’t have pushed it if I didn’t truly believe it.” Jonathan’s anger left him, replaced now only with genuine defeat.

It had taken one glance across to the jury’s seats to tell Jonathan how the case was going, they were growing bored and irritable as their petty squabbling went on; deep down he knew, without a shred of doubt, that the moment they were sent to vote it would be a unanimous guilty verdict. He could hardly blame them, the evidence prevented was damn near incontrovertible, every word of his defence painting more and more detailed a picture of a woman’s willing patricide.

Closing statements ran as opposites, it was like Douglas had stolen the script and twisted every idea to suit his own narrative and his own end. Jonathan reminded the jury that William Atkinson was an awful man in life, arrested on several occasions for beating his wife and children and for scamming people in town; Douglas span a compelling, if almost completely false, web of a story of a reformed man murdered before retirement by a jealous child he had cut off for his own protection. William Atkinson was on no path of redemption; he was so far beyond redemption that the devil himself would spit at him.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” The Judge let out a long sigh, and turned his weary eyes to the jury.

“Yes, your honour.” The Foreman placed his hands on the rail before him. “On the charge of murder in the first degree, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty by unanimous vote.”

For the first time possibly ever, Jack J Douglas smiled; a smile that he hid from the courtroom cameras by turning his head away where he locked eyes with the small frame of Frankie Reeve in the front row. He had no idea Reeve was there, and was put off by the depressed look spread across his face. Frankie Reeve was in his late sixties, a little older than William Atkinson, and the sagging old flesh on his face was formed, undeniably, into a saddened frown. His ash grey widows peak was like a flurry of clouds overcasting a sky, dipping down into the centre of his forehead and receding up to nearly the top of his head. He was wearing the same pinstripe navy blue suit he had worn during his cross-examination, the same white handkerchief sat in the breast pocket and the same top two buttons were still unbuttoned.

“No…” The thought had now hit Douglas’ mind, and that word had passed through his lips as nothing more than a movement backed by no breath. The Lawyer was right to fight every detail how he did, that look said it all. He cemented his lips together and furrowed his eyebrows at Reeve, who looked at him shamefully, his lip quivering.

“Martha Atkinson, throughout these eight weeks you have spun a compelling story, but it seems that the jury has seen it for what it is: a story. You played a convincing victim, but the only victim here is your father, and for the crime of patricide you have been found guilty; thus, I hereby convict you to life in prison.”

“Don’t.” Douglas mouthed.

Frankie Reeve began to shake all over, there was an earthquake forming in the base of his soul and it wouldn’t take a lot to set it off. He knew he was guilty, but he’d sold his story as only a true, seasoned liar could.

Englund, in defeat, placed his head in his hands and began to shake it from side to side; he could barely look the way of Jack J Douglas, he knew what would be plastered all over his face. Eventually, he looked across and saw concern. Concern, an emotion that Jack J Douglas had never, not once in his life, demonstrated an ability to even understand. If he wasn’t mistaken, he almost thought he saw regret somewhere in the vacant distances behind his eyes. Then, he saw what Douglas had seen, and he rose from his seat, startling everyone present.

“Reeve…” He took a few, unsteady breaths in and out. “Confess.” He demanded.

It was a gambit, a last gamble. If his theory was correct, he would be a hero; if he was wrong, he’d be a fool. He’d been the fool for too long.

“Your Honour, he’s-” Jack J Douglas began.

Without another beat passing, and just as The Judge was moving in to stop the harassment of the old man, Frankie Reeve rose up and thrust both his hands in the air. He wailed, like a ghost, he wailed long and loud for everyone.

“I did it.” He cried. “God forgive me, I killed him.”

The Judge’s small, thin-lipped mouth peeled back in horror. His eyes beat between the three men who were now all on their feet, and the woman looking as though she had just been missed by a speeding truck. Her face was washed with something between terror and relief, the same things currently washing over the emotions of Edward Wayne.

“Order.” The Judge eventually stammered out; he rose a shaking hand in protest to the noise in his courtroom. “Mr Reeve, if what you say is true then-”

“It’s true, it’s all true…” he trailed off into hysterical sobs, his hands still raised and beckoning to God.

Jack J Douglas stormed out of the room, the two officers who had been down by the door moved in and took Frankie Reeve by the arms. Stunned, hushed calls of ‘wow’ and ‘what’ passed from person to person from the public gallery to the jury bench.

Jonathan Englund, by this point lost for breath, glanced to the jury as the doors to the side of the stand slammed closed. “Would you, members of the jury…” He took a second, letting the prior moments settle in. “Would you care to rescind the verdict in light of new information.”

Unanimously, all twelve men and women of that jury slowly began to nod. Englund’s lips curled into a smile, one that he passed down to his client. She had been dragged by the neck through eight weeks of trial for this; she was beaten, worn, and almost destroyed, but she was still here. That’s all that mattered, she was still here.