DEAR DIARY,
Okay, so imagine this: I'm in the hospital, under a portable drainer lamp. Not that they need one, because, of course, there's a guy from Justice Force on standby, in full power armor just in case I try to do any of the things I'm thinking about doing. Like having that orderly wheel me out to her car and drive me somewhere else, so I can just disappear and not have to go to trial.
Which means the part of the system that keeps criminals from escaping before they stand trial works, I guess. Anyway, between the drainer and the head wound and the shock, I wasn't able to come up with a better idea for getting myself out of that situation. So mostly I just lay there in bed, vegging out and staring at the wall.
When they figured I was as healed as I was going to get, they bundled me into one of those big grey JF armored vans and trucked me over to the LA County Jail. The new building, where I had a wing practically to myself; I think it's still the one they use for holding metahumans, ever since Supremas went after the Federal one up in Sacramento. Anyway, after they stuck me there, things went really fast. Like, less than three weeks from jail to sentencing to prison. It was like they were trying to set some kind of judicial land speed record or something.
I had a court-appointed attorney, of course, since I never really carried much cash at that point and anyway, it was all stolen and would have gone into evidence anyway. Her name is Marjorie Mancuso, if you can believe it, and I think she did her best considering how little time she had to work on a defense and how little of a defense was even possible, what with all the evidence against me. And on top of that, there were all these weird jurisdictional things going on behind the scenes, because they're trying to avoid shipping mutant criminals all over the country just to stand trial, so states are making deals with other states about what charges will be prosecuted and who'll pay and all of that kind of thing. It's really complicated.
I have no way to tell whether my trial was typical or not. I don't think my lawyer had ever seen anything like it. She came by the jail a few times and tried talking to me about the case, but the drainers gave her a headache so that never went very well. She asked a few times if we could meet with them off, but they've got rules about telepaths and drainers, so that wasn't going to happen. Most of our talks were by phone or by letter, at least until the trial itself started.
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"Trial days were always kind of blurry..." |
And it still doesn't really seem fair to me that they could run a trial that way. I had a lawyer, but she didn't have much time to prepare a case and any time she asked for an extension it was denied. We couldn't actually talk face-to-face because they weren't going to let me out from under a drainer and she couldn't get any work done with me under one. (Though I guess I should be honest, if they'd ever turned them off, I would have done anything I could to escape.)
Though the judge did ban cameras from the courtroom, which I guess helped a lot. At least, Marjorie said it was good for me, because she felt that any publicity would have been pretty firmly against me. California's not even that nice to pretty people accused of crimes, I suppose.
Most of the trial itself was me sitting in the tank, watching the closed-circuit connection on a scratched-up monitor, while the prosecutors laid out piles and piles of evidence against me and called witnesses and experts one right after the other. The court could kind of see me, too; the camera in the tank was all scratched-up, too. The guy they'd had in there before my trial was kind of feral, but didn't have nails strong enough to do more than make shallow gouges in bulletproof plexiglas when the drainers were on. The jury could still see me well enough to know what I was.
Meanwhile, Marjorie would do what she could to discredit their evidence and witnesses, but she never really got anywhere with it. There was just too much, and it was all too solid. I guess I just sucked at being a criminal, because there wasn't even any reasonable doubt.
And that was most of the trial; I'd sit in the tank and try to see something on the monitor, the jury would hear about what I stole and where and who I stole it from and what I did with it in perfect detail, Marjorie would try to get a word in edgewise and then slump back in her chair, totally depressed by it all, then the judge would stop it for the day and I'd be tranquilized and driven back to my cell. And then at 4 in the morning we'd start it all over again, up until the day the jury went into deliberations and came back five hours later with enough guilty verdicts to keep me in prison without parole until I turn 50.
Well, except for the day they brought my dad in. I didn't even know they were going to charge me with attempted murder and arson until that morning, and Marjorie had to tell me three times before I realized that she was saying that Dad was going to be in the courtroom to testify against me. And when I realized that, I still had to spend four more hours in that tank before he actually came into the courtroom, all of it just sitting there feeling queasy and terrified. I kept trying to push past the drainers to see if I could find him out there, but I couldn't.
That's probably for the best, because when they wheeled him in and he looked at the monitor and saw his horrible criminal daughter, I really didn't want to know what he was thinking. He spent the entire time on the stand just glaring at me, letting me know silently that he wished he had killed me when he had the chance, letting me know that he would always, always hate me.
He told them that I'd been manipulating him and Mom for years, until I killed her. And then that I'd held him captive for three months, eventually trying to kill him, too, but he defended himself as best he could, so I only left him partially paralyzed before setting our house on fire to cover it up. The prosecutors asked a lot of questions, and he had an answer for each one. Meanwhile, Marjorie was sending me notes asking me for anything I could say that would help, but there wasn't much I could do except write back that he was lying. She tried really hard to make the jury see that, but I guess they didn't, because those charges stuck.
They cut that day short; after Dad finished his testimony, they wrapped things up quickly. We had a few more days of other evidence, but that was the worst of it.
On the day that they sent the jury out to deliberate, Marjorie kept trying to tell me not to worry, that you never really know what they're going to believe, and there was still a chance that they might find me not guilty. But I didn't need the drainers turned off to know that she didn't really mean that, or to know that the jury didn't really want to acquit me, not even for the two things they charged me with that I didn't actually do. She also told me that she'd been talking with one of the prosecutors, and that Dad was scheduled for some surgery in a few weeks that would supposedly help him walk better. With crutches, but no more wheelchair.
I asked her how I was supposed to feel about that, but she didn't have an answer.
It really wasn't a fair question, since I don't have an answer for it either.
Like I said, the jury took five hours to come back and say I was guilty, and I think it would have taken them less time except that they wanted to make sure they didn't miss any of the counts. Sentencing took one more day, and then they sent me to the Castle.
And that's enough for you tonight.