Justice?
If I’d been sitting in the front, I would have been gripping the railing in front of me.
The defense had executed their craft very well: delays, objections, runarounds. All to save the life of a murderer.
My sister’s murderer. The jealous ex-boyfriend. The impassioned lover. The abusive psychotic. Or whatever string of adjectives the media wanted to describe him with. It hardly mattered to me. Murderer. He took my sister’s life. Because she had the audacity to end a relationship in which she was being abused.
And in the end, he’d made her final decision.
The jurors were now responsible for making his final decision.
The prosecutors, despite being thwarted by the murderer’s helpers, had done their job: established a pattern, determined a motive, illustrated the brutality of my sister’s last minutes on Earth. I was present every day of the trial; hoping the jurors would be see blind reason and make the right decision.
In the end, though, it hardly mattered. If they declared him innocent, the pain wouldn’t be any different. An all-consuming, vein-raging pain would only add to the infinite, black grief that we already were living with. Pain was pain was pain.
Even if he were declared guilty, the rest of my life would consist of the grief and a burning vengeance to be at every parole hearing for the murderer’s life. Until he had no life left. To ensure he was denied freedom; the same he denied my sister. Either verdict didn’t matter – not truly. There would still be tears, sleepless nights, and a consuming sorrow for a beautiful life lost.
Guilty.