The House Gun (24 page)

Like the arm on the shoulder, between Prosecutor and Defence Counsel in the corridors, passing over the scene in court where the one has been condemning a man and the other defending him. But Harald knows he should he the last one to be disillusioned by professional ethics; disillusion once begun, these days, here in this place, has ended up with his questioning his own.

—It does not require any preparation of premeditation for a conscious and rational determination to take revenge to be suddenly aroused at such a moment. The means of revenge in such circumstances is most likely to be some form of physical attack, with bare hands or whatever may serve as a weapon. It is unfortunate that a deadly weapon, a gun, was casually accepted as part of the household in that living-room and that it was lying on the table.—

How to follow the twists and turns, the swift about-face of what the man's saying as he retreats and advances, down over his text, up to take them into his confidence again; there is the desperation of half-grasping a direction his mind is taking, only to have it snatched away as if attention has been disastrously lost for precious seconds—what did that mean, what was the order of words that are the clues to be followed to a verdict forming? Each loses the way and is impatient with anxiety to know if the other has caught what is missing, and yet cannot risk to interrupt attention by whispering the question.

—But the accused could have chosen bare hands; instead he chose to pick up the gun and shoot Jespersen in the head. He has
said in evidence ‘The noise stopped.' What he didn't want to hear from Jespersen was silenced in the ultimate revenge, the taking of another's life.—

Not a liar, but a murderer.

Claudia sees that her whole life was moving towards this moment. All the ambitions she had so naively decided she was going to fulfil, when she was a girl, all the intentions of dedication to healing she has had in her adulthood—they were to come to this. The end is unimaginable; if we knew it from the start we would never set out.

—The District Surgeon's report is that the shot was accurately directed to a vital part, the forehead, consistent with deliberate action. Whether this means a certain series of actions had to be
consciously
taken to aim and fire it, as the State submits, or whether, as the Defence submits, to the hand of anyone who is familiar with a gun the necessary preparation to fire comes automatically, without conscious volition, is now the crucial matter on which the question of criminal capacity, as the State submits, or temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity, as the Defence argues, must be considered, having regard to the expert evidence and all the facts of the case, including not only the nature of the accused's actions during the period immediately relevant to the crime, but also the circumstances that preceded it in the personal history of the accused.—

The sonorous maze of clauses dazes. Even the uttermost limit of attention which is prayer lands in dead ends, turns upon premises which it seems to have just left. During passages like this the ranks of spectators rustle. All the pros and cons are no business of theirs, they wait for the narrative to recommence, a judgment is the remnant of the oral tradition round the fire; they're there to be told an exciting story.

Now it's taken up again, good, it's about the young man they've been able to study, face, gestures (what the judge called his ‘manner') on the witness stand. It's about a murderer.

—Both State and Defence psychiatrists find that the accused's
intellect is within high limits, his judgment sound. He is a young professional man of good family, apparently with a promising career ahead of him. There is no basis on which to question the Defence's submission that everything in the accused's behaviour as an adult has been contrary to the performance of any violent act. The evidence of a member of the common household, Nkululeko Dladla, states of the accused ‘It is not in his nature to kill.'—

And there he is, that Dladla, sitting with the murderer's parents, right here. People turning to look at him: it is as if he himself has spoken, a hefty black man who wears like campaign medals the insignia of the gay, his tryst rings and necklaces. Harald and Claudia are moved by the judge's quotation of Khulu and are graced to be identified in the focus of attention that has reached him; under it Khulu is rubbing his fist back and forth across his jaw-line as he often does, they've noticed, when he wants to emphasize something he has said in his calm way.

Ah but listen to this, Harald and Claudia are saying simultaneously, without words, to one another, as the judge's narrative takes another unexpected turn, listen to this!

—Indeed, demonstrably, it has been in his nature to succour. The accused met Natalie when she had made a suicide attempt, and, on her own admittance, brought her back to life. After they commenced to live together as lovers, he saved her again from suicide. Although he was passionately in love with her, that the relationship was not a happy one is confirmed not only by Natalie herself, but by Dladla. It seems she was not grateful to the accused for saving her life. Asked why the relationship she and the accused had chosen was not happy, she replied in evidence ‘He owned my life because he took me to a hospital.' Her attitude towards him as revealed under cross examination by the Defence was resentful, giving credence to Dladla's statement that although the accused ‘was patient with her … like a sick person … she gave him hell.' She taunted him before other members of the common household. The indifference, if not defiance, with which she told the court that the child she is expecting might he either the deceased's or
the accused's appears to be a particularly malicious example of taunting the man who loves her and is on trial for a
crime passionnel
of which her action is half, if not the whole cause.—

A judge knows everything. He's the vicar of the god of justice, as the priest is the vicar of God, he's privy to the confessional of the court, where witnesses and experts and the accused tell what Harald and Claudia would never have learnt. This knowledge, it's the basis of justice, isn't it? To know all is to forgive all?—no, that's fallacious. The man's dead, shot in the head. He's here under the ground of the city where this court is the seat of justice. But to know all: the judge is not going to follow, is he, any pressure for society's angry retribution, society being represented by the State; he's concerned with the fate of the individual as well. Motsamai must be thinking—what? Hope: it can't be repressed. Duncan; but it's somehow an intrusion to wonder what he's thinking, feeling. As if the sacrificial victim is anointed in his extremis, and removed from the contagion of human contact which he pursued to its awesome finality, the taking of another's life. But hope. Can it reach their son, from them.

—Unfortunately, it is not within the competence of this court to refer a witness for psychiatric examination.—And now the judge has allowed himself the indulgence of sarcasm, again an aside for those who may appreciate it.

Somebody stifles a rough laugh. It is out of order but probably what the judge expected he might get from the public.

—Therefore it is difficult to assess what the Defence submits, that the
extent
of stress this young woman was capable of imposing on her patient and devoted lover was great enough to culminate in his committing a crime in a state of criminal incapacity. There is evidence that Natalie had had other passing sexual adventures during the period in which she lived with the accused as his lover, and he had forgiven or at least tolerated these. Why then if he were not to have been reduced by her, finally, to a state where he was not responsible for his actions, would he not have forgiven, tolerated her betrayal once again?

We must turn now to the special circumstances of this particular sexual adventure. The court has learned from the accused himself that what he came upon that night after the party not only was his lover, Natalie, engaged in sexual intercourse with another man, that man was Carl Jespersen, a homosexual who had himself taken the accused as a lover and then discarded him, and who had repeatedly declared himself revulsed by women's sexuality. The accused has not confided to the court what his emotions are towards his present and former lovers, what interpretation he puts on a role in the spectacle apparently inconceivable for him to believe Jespersen would ever force himself to perform. It is the Defence psychiatrist's opinion that ‘When he (the accused) saw her in the sexual act with his former male lover, he felt himself emasculated by them both.'—

Silence is a great hand spread over the court.

All at once the people on the public benches are no longer strangers, their prurience is stifled as the laugh was, their presence is protective around the parents of this man.

—The court can accept that it was ‘not in his nature to kill'.

But what the accused saw in that act, and what he encountered in the deceased's attitude next evening were surely not in the nature of human relationships in even the freest of sexual mores. Given these exceptional circumstances of what might otherwise have been nothing more than another regrettable incident in a relationship fraught with problems, the State psychiatrist submits that if the accused were to have acted in a state of diminished capacity, unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behaviour, he would have attacked the deceased then and there, on the night when he discovered the couple. The psychiatrist's opinion is that the accused went to the house next evening with the conscious intention of vengeful jealousy built up during a day of solitary premeditation in the cottage. Asked whether she meant the accused intended to kill Jespersen, the psychiatrist's reply was that she was not able to say to what extreme the accused's intention might carry him.

This brings to the court's attention the question of the gun kept at hand in the house: did the accused have in mind, in conscious intention, the availability of the gun, which he admits having seen being produced in the living-room the previous night?—

The judge looks up conversationally, but his audience is transfixed.

—The psychiatrist called by the Defence found the accused to have been precipitated into a state of dissociation from what he was doing when he was confronted with the sight of Jespersen on the evening of 19th January. He submits that when the deceased said ‘Why don't you pour yourself a drink' this attitude constituted a second blow like the one received the previous night. His professional opinion was that ‘A tremendous emotional blow is as forceful as any external blow to the head.' Further, he states: ‘With the impact of these last words he (the accused) recalls Jespersen saying, he would have entered a state of automatism in which inhibitions disintegrated … cumulative provocation reaching its climax in the subject's total loss of control.'

This raised again the question of the nature and extent of cumulative provocation acceptable as the extreme stress submitted by the Defence as justification for a temporary non-pathological criminal incapacity. The psychiatrist testified that—I quote—the accused ‘is a man with a bisexual nature. That in itself is a source of personality conflict. He had suffered emotional distress when he . followed his homoerotic instincts and had a love affair which his partner, Jespersen, did not take seriously and broke off at whim. He overcame the unhappiness of the rejection and turned to the other and probably dominant side of his nature, a heterosexual alliance for which, again, he took on serious responsibility. Even more so, since the alliance was with an obviously neurotic personality with complex self-destructive tendencies for which, when crossed in what she saw as her right to pursue them, she punished him with denigration and mental aggression.' The conclusion of this assessment, which I have already quoted earlier, was that when
the accused saw her in the sexual act with his former lover, he felt himself emasculated by both.—

Claudia feels Khulu lift and let fall his arms. At her other side, Harald's profile is Duncan's, the order of resemblance reversed; confusion engulfs her. She is confronted with the face of a patient whom she referred for surgery to take place today; it's a fragment of the medical record that is her life, blown across her mind.
My assessors and I
, what is the voice saying—

—My assessors and I, of course, have to examine the evidence of psychiatrists carefully and give it due weight. However, as the highest court of the land has said, their science is not an absolute but an empirical one. Psychiatrists rely on what they have been told by the accused, often without critically analyzing these statements to determine whether they may not be proffered as self-serving. My assessors and I are equally capable of interpreting the evidence as a whole, led before us, as to whether or not there was criminal responsibility. Albeit that the Defence psychiatrist is of the opinion that there was no criminal responsibility, and even though the State psychiatrist, if somewhat reluctantly, has made some concessions in terms of our law, we are entitled to come to our own conclusions. We find as a fact that the accused's personal history of prolonged emotional stress is genuine; but is this enough?—

So confidently in control of their life, Claudia's and his own. First they were ceded into the hands of Motsamai; now in the power of this man who asks, but is this enough? The power's omnipotent. Only Duncan could answer.

—We have identified the decisive aspects of the case.

One: did premeditation of revenge occupy the accused during the day he spent alone in the cottage, and as a consequence did he go to the house intending to seek out Jespersen and cause him bodily harm?