Defending Jacob(80)
And two hours later we had our jury.
We gave each juror a nickname so we could remember them. They were: the Schoolteacher (forewoman), Glasses Girl, Grandpa, Fat Somerville Guy, Recording Studio Guy, Urkel, the Canal (a woman born in Panama), Waltham Mom, the Waitress, Construction Guy (properly a wood-floor installer, a surly squinty-eyed piece of work whom we worried about from the start), Concord Housewife, Truck Driver (actually a delivery guy for a commercial food-supply company), Braces Woman (alternate), and the Bartender (alternate). They had nothing in common except their glaring lack of qualifications for the job. It was almost comical how ignorant they were of the law, of how trials worked, even of this case, which had been splashed all over the newspapers and evening news. They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse. How futile the whole project is. Surely Jacob must have realized it as he looked at those fourteen blank faces. The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know “beyond a reasonable doubt” who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street. Jacob must have shivered at the thought.
26 | Someone Is Watching
That night, over dinner, in the safety of our kitchen, we chattered excitedly. Words came tumbling, grumbles, boasts, fears. We were working off nervous energy more than anything else.
Laurie did her best to keep all the talk going. She was evidently exhausted from a sleepless night and a long day, but she always believed that the more we talked, the better off we would all be. So she posed questions and confessed her own fears and kept passing dishes of food, inviting us to talk and talk. In these light moments, I glimpsed the old effervescent Laurie—or rather, I heard her, for her voice never aged. In every other way Laurie withered during Jacob’s crisis: her eyes looked sunken and haunted, her peaches-and-cream complexion became sallow and cracked. But her voice was gloriously untouched. When she opened her mouth, out came the same teenage girl’s voice I had first heard nearly thirty-five years before. It was like a phone call from 1974.
At one point Jacob said of the jury, “I don’t think they liked me, just the way they were looking at me.”
“Jacob, they’ve only been in the box one day. Give them a chance. Besides, so far all they know about you is that you’ve been accused of murder. What do you expect them to think?”
“They’re not supposed to think anything yet.”
“They’re human, Jake. Just don’t give them any reason to dislike you, that’s all you can do. Stay cool. No reactions. None of your faces.”
“What faces?”
“You have a face you make when you’re not paying attention. You scowl.”
“I don’t scowl!”
“You do.”
“Mom, do I scowl?”
“I haven’t noticed it. Sometimes your father gets carried away with the strategy.”
“You do, Jake. It’s like—” I made the scowling face.
“Dad, that’s not a scowl. You just look constipated.”
“Hey, I’m serious. That’s what you look like when you’re not paying attention. It makes you look angry. Don’t let the jury see that face.”
“That’s my face! What can I do?”
“Just be your handsome self, Jacob,” Laurie said sweetly. She gave him a broken little smile. Her sweatshirt was on backward. She seemed unaware of it, though the tag rubbed against her throat.
“Hey, speaking of my handsome self, did you guys know there’s a Twitter hashtag about me?”
Laurie: “What does that mean?”
“It’s a way for people to talk about me on Twitter. And what they’re saying? It’s all like: Jacob Barber is gorgeous. I want to have his baby. Jacob Barber is innocent.”
Me: “Yeah, what else are they saying?”
“All right, there’s some bad things, but mostly it’s positive. Like seventy percent.”
“Seventy percent positive?”
“About.”
“You’ve been following it that closely?”
“It only happened today. But yeah, of course I read it. You’ve got to check it out, Dad. Just go to Twitter and search for ‘pound sign Jacob Barber,’ no spaces.” He wrote it on his paper napkin: #jacobbarber. “I was a trending topic! Do you know what that means? Usually that’s like Kobe Bryant or Justin Timberlake or people like that.”
“That’s, um, great, Jacob.” I gave a skeptical look to the boy’s mother.
This was not the first time our son’s Internet celebrity had come up. Someone—probably a school friend—had put together a website, JacobBarber.com, to support him. The site featured a message board where people could declare Jacob’s innocence or wish him well or expound on his saintly character. Negative messages were filtered out. There was a Facebook group supporting him too. The consensus online was that Jacob was a little odd, possibly homicidal, definitely attractive, conclusions that were not unrelated. He also got occasional text messages on his cell phone from strangers. Most were vicious, but not all. Some were from girls who told him he was cute or made sexual propositions. He claimed these messages ran about two to one negative versus positive, and this seemed to be enough for him. He knew he was innocent, after all. Anyway, he did not want to change his cell phone number.