A Book of American Martyrs(88)

We will help you, Jenna. Please let us help you—but she was not hearing these words.

In her hotel room she was feeling very tired as if she’d climbed many flights of stairs though (in fact) she’d taken the slow crankily-moving elevator as she usually did. Her brain seemed to hurt. She was seeming to recall that yes, she had actually seen stains in the asphalt, beneath the powdery snow. Yes, she’d been warned beforehand that the Women’s Center was closed. (Always the careful qualifier—“Temporarily closed.”) In the musty-smelling room on the fourth, top floor of the Muskegee Falls Inn she would sit on the edge of the oddly high bed facing the window (that overlooked at a distance of a quarter mile the snowy Muskegee River) but seeing nothing for she was awaiting the call from the prosecutor that would come near noon of that day December 18, 2000, to summon her to the Broome County, Ohio, Courthouse to hear the jury’s decision.



I’m sorry. I don’t care to defend my ballot.

I voted not guilty for reasons of “justifiable homicide.”

I don’t care to defend my ballot or my religious views. I follow my conscience.

We were in the jury room deliberating for three and a half days, and we wore one another down like teeth grating and grinding but nobody wore me down.

On the third day my voice was trembling but I said to the foreman and the others at that end of the table, what the abortion doctors do to babies you are trying to do to me. And they looked at me like I was crazy or sick or had screamed at them in some language they pretended they did not know.

I was excited then. I was not afraid. I said, I am not a defenseless baby in some woman’s womb. You can’t silence me that easy. You can’t abort me.

After that, we didn’t communicate much. I was Juror Number 8. I had an ally Juror Number 2 who began to vote with me. Edith came to sit beside me. She said she’d been praying to make a correct decision. We had both brought our Bibles into the jury room, which was allowed. No newspapers—of course. No reading material except the Bible we were allowed to read if we read silently and not aloud. So I would read my Bible, my favorite books which are St. Luke and St. John and some parts of the Psalms and Revelation while there were these long discussions by just five jurors that took up so many hours. They were always asking the bailiff to run to the judge with some question to show how smart they were, the female especially who was a high school principal she allowed you to know every chance she could. But I’d made up my mind at the vou-yar deer on the first day.

You are supposed to say if you are “prejudiced” or had read about the case in the newspapers or heard of it on TV but I did not say this when I was being questioned for they would not have chosen me to be a juror, and it is my right as a citizen to be a juror. In my life I have been a juror in three trials but not ever a trial for “two counts of homicide.” Right away I looked at Luther Dunphy and saw that man was a true Christian, in his heart he had only concern for the unborn to be slaughtered. There was no other motive for him to act. This was a “selfless” act as his lawyer would say. That was the instant, I believe that God had summoned me to that courthouse that day to vote as He would wish.

I knew that I would vote not guilty and nobody could change my mind. And that was how it was.

The prosecutor would try to malign that man, who had done his duty as a Christian as he saw it. They would not let him testify like the others did—“witnesses.” He was made to sit silent at the little table at the front of the courtroom. He would shut his eyes and you could see that he was praying, his mouth would move in silence. In his way of setting his shoulders and the worried cast of his eyes I was reminded of my uncle who was my father’s oldest brother who had died when I was in eighth grade. My uncle had been a good man and you could see that Luther Dunphy was a good man. The more the prosecutor tried to portray him as a “murderer,” the more clear it was that he was not. For Jesus was in the courtroom with us, you could feel His presence. Once, on a morning in the last week of the trial, which was the fifth week, a bird of the size of a pigeon flew against a courtroom window—you could not see the actual bird but only its shadow, and you could hear the noise it made hitting the glass—and I turned toward Edith, and a wild look passed between us—The spirit of the Lord was in our presence.

We could not discuss the case during the trial, in the jury room. We could not say a word outside the courthouse or inside the courthouse until the trial was ended! We were brought to the courthouse by a shuttle bus to a special door at the rear of the building that was guarded by Broome County sheriff’s men, and we exited by that door, and boarded the shuttle bus to avoid the picketers and protesters at the front of the courthouse who would shout and scream at us, if they saw us. For half of them wanted Luther Dunphy freed. And the other half wanted Luther Dunphy found guilty. And they hated one another, and had to be kept apart from one another. And there were TV camera crews there also, tying up traffic in the streets.

Inside the courtroom we just had to listen to all that talk, talk, talk of the lawyers. Every damn thing the prosecutor would say if he would say it once, he would say it a dozen times. There was too much about shotgun shells or casings—whatever they call it. Identifying Luther Dunphy. So many witnesses speaking for the abortion doctor and the other one—the driver of the van—hearing what a good man Dr. Voorhees was, how “selfless” and “dedicated” to helping women and girls—and the other one who’d gotten in the way of the gunfire (so it seemed to me)—what a “good husband and father”—you just stopped hearing it after a while. I did listen to the priest from Nebraska. He spoke from the heart and knew of what he spoke, the defense of the defenseless. And the pastor of Luther Dunphy’s church—there was a true man of God, you could see. The prosecutor was sarcastic hoping to make them say incriminating things against Luther Dunphy but they would not.