Mirrors by Autumn Burton

Author:Autumn Burton [Burton, Autumn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

January 1971

The door to the Baltimore Criminal Courtroom thudded as the last juror trickled in. Yet, Donna had barely heard it in the silence that followed Marshall’s raising voice.

“Mr. Conway,” Judge Charles D. Harris stiffened in his high seat. “I’m going to warn you right now on the record that unless you behave yourself…”

“Behave myself?” Donna remembered jumping in her seat, startled by the man in the orange jumpsuit rising to his feet. “You said I could have an attorney of my choice. I gave you a name and you’re going to tell me behave myself while you give me somebody who’ll just join in the railroad job.”

The gable banged and the judge’s face reddened. “I’m formally warning you that if you persist in this conduct, the trial will go forward without you. You will remain outside of the courtroom.”

“The trial will go forward without me if you don’t let me have an attorney of my choice.” Donna shook her head. All this for some Black Panther Party attorney? Donna knew he never met the court-appointed lawyer, but it had to be better than nothing. It had to be.

But Marshall didn’t think so. “If you’re going to give me an attorney that I don’t want on a homicide charge, then the trial will have to go on without me. It’s your trial.”

The judge raised his eyes like pigs had just flown into the courtroom. Quickly, he lowered them and slightly shrugged his shoulders. He’d get this insane man out of his sight before any pigs would fly. “All right. Now, would you care to be seated, or do you wish to leave the courtroom?”

Donna remembered mouthing sit down from the juror’s corner. She vigorously tapped her pointy high heels, waiting for him to give the right answer. “Right.” Wrong answer. “I wish to leave the courtroom.” He held up his hands to be cuffed. “I’m not going to take part in this madness.”

Donna remembered how her leg shook as she watched him get practically shoved through those courtroom doors. She remembered looking to the ten other jurors at her sides, wondering if goosebumps rushed to their skin, too, as they imagined Marshall locked below in the courthouse bull-pen as they sat in on the trial.

But as she stood before the court, her leg trembling just as much on the seventh and final day, while the judge spoke. “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case of Conway vs. the State of Maryland?”

Donna’s head ached from long hours of sitting in that small jury room, hearing ten other voices bounce off those walls that seemed to close in on her. At first, she stood tall with a few others in her corner, asserting that besides the tip from that obviously coerced jailhouse informer, there was nothing to indicate Conway’s involvement in the shooting. But as the hours ticked on, her corner became shrank until she was the only one who didn’t see how that officer’s stacked deck identification was enough for a life sentence.

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