Grif Stockley - Illegal Motion

Cowling had no time that day to do more than a physical examination, his nurse will read into evidence his brief entries that he observed no trauma and will be allowed to explain that the doctor was called to an emergency in Springdale before he had finished talking to her.

As I have feared, Joan Chestnut bristles with competence. She explains that in her long experience there is no typical rape victim.

“How a woman reacts after having been raped depends on many factors,” she says in a strong, careful voice that needs no amplification.

My only consolation is that today she does not look like a nurse. Apparently unable to resist the possibility she might be photographed or filmed, she has piled her blond hair on top of her head and is wearing a fancy sequined black dress that would be more appropriate for a cocktail party than a court appearance. Binlde must have died when she showed up at the courthouse not wearing her scrubs. She repeats substantially what she told me earlier, yet, here again is an absence of specifics, which Joan Chestnut shrugs off as normal. She tells Binlde that having to repeat me step-by-step actions of tee perpetrator simply forces the victim to relive the honor of he event and is beyond some women’s power to do so soon afterward.

“It’s all some women can do to say something like, “He forced me to have sex with him,”

” she says didactically.

“I might have been suspicious if she had come up with some elaborate story which took her thirty minutes to tell.”

“As a nurse giving care to a patient, you weren’t immediately concerned with investigating whether Robin Perry might have been making up this story, I presume?”

I ask on crossexamination.

Joan Chestnut crosses her long, not unattractive legs and swings her left shoe, which has a four-inch heel, Maybe she has a date after she is through testifying.

“If a person is making up symptoms, for whatever reason, and it happens occasionally,” she says, her tone now droll, “it’s just as important that we be alert to misinformation as opposed to real symptoms. As you are surely aware, these days a hospital’s resources are severely restricted.”

Though she has mentioned a subject most people don’t have much sympathy for, I beat back an urge to spar with her. She has admitted that some people who go to a hospital lie, and I’m satisfied with any little bone thrown my way. People like nurses, even if this one looks like an aspiring Junior Leaguer.

During an hour’s recess for lunch I review the “J” Board transcript. Binkie’s next witness, Mary Purvis, the student volunteer from the Rape Crisis Center, seems even younger than she did at the “J” Board hearing and readily admits her inexperience. Brushing long, unruly strands of brown hair from her eyes as she speaks, the young woman adds little, if anything, to what the nurse has already said. She admits on crossexamination that Robin had little to say to her.

Without further ado, Binkie calls Robin Perry, and the jury, which had been about to doze off, snaps to attention.

As if she were interrupting grownups to come in and say good-night, Robin shyly enters the courtroom. I realize how much window dressing other witnesses are in a case like this. You believe either the victim or the accused.

Binkie starts Robin off slowly, letting her talk about herself to give the jury a sense of who she is. Though she is trying to maintain the poise that has carried her to this moment, today she seems fragile as a glass mirror.

Doubtless Binkie is hoping she will become more comfortable the longer she talks. Gone is the confident ac tress of past performances. This is a girl, not a woman. In a trembling voice she tells the jury that her father had originally served in the Navy and that her family had moved around from base to base until she was ten. I let this go for a moment and then get to my feet.

“Your Honor, this is a rape trial. The jury can decide this case without knowing the name of the family dog. Can’t we at least start with the witness in college?”

A couple of the jurors chuckle, and Judge Franklin responds “Let’s get this going faster, Mr. Cross.”

Unruffled, Binkie asks, “What year are you in at the university, Ms. Perry?” He would have gone on for an hour if I had let him. The one advantage I have is that the jury think they already know Dade. They’ve seen him on TV, read about him. Yet, they thought they knew OJ.

Simpson, too.

Robin answers and, more quickly than Binkie appears to like, begins to talk about Dade. As she tells about the class last spring, I notice that beside me Dade has begun to hold his breath and then release it. What if he is lying and every word she utters about what happened is true?

As she talks, despite my efforts to concentrate, a memory of an event when I was a senior begins to form at the back of my brain. I was dating a Tri-Delt sophomore named Bonnie Edwards, and one Friday night when we were both drunk I took her to my room in the Sigma Nu House. Within minutes we were naked in my bed, but just as I was beginning to enter her, she told me to stop.

Drunk, I didn’t. Did I rape her? Of course I did! Then, like a freight train bearing down on me, another long-ago moment, this one an impression more than a fully remembered event, appears at the edge of my consciousness: late one night after returning from a party where we both had drunk too much, I had insisted on sex with Rosa, who was too helpless to resist, though she made her reluctance known. She had vomited a few hours later, or perhaps it was the next day. I raped my own wife. I have begun to sweat profusely. For the first time since I took this case, I cannot avoid the feeling that whoever is telling the truth, Robin was, at some point that night, completely vulnerable. Yet, whatever he has done, I am no better than the boy sitting beside me.

“Dade tried so hard,” Robin is saying.

“But sometimes in class he’d get real nervous, and it was hard to under stand him. When we’d practice, I’d get him to slow down….”

Robin has a way of making everything she does seem innocent, and the little party on Happy Hollow Road last spring becomes, in her words, purely a favor to Shannon.

There is no mention of an attempted kiss by Dade, and I realize that Binkie does not know about it, for surely he would deal with it now, instead of letting me bring it out when I cross-examine Robin.

“Why did you choose the house on Happy Hollow Road to practice the speech?” Binkie asks, a few minutes later, his voice tightening a bit and betraying the importance of this answer.

It will be the hardest question Robin has to answer.

Why, indeed, with so many other choices?

“Now it seems the stupidest thing I ever did,” Robin says.

“But I trusted Dade. He really cared about his classes. He never horsed around at all when it came to studying. He wanted to make a good grade. I didn’t really want to go over to Darby Hall because of all that’s happened there, and boys aren’t allowed upstairs in our rooms at my sorority house, and the classrooms are usually locked.”

Binkie has to decide whether to ask her to clarify what she means about Darby Hall. It won’t help him, but it can’t do Dade any good either. Binkie uncharacteristically takes his hands from his pockets and grips the side of the podium.

“Why didn’t you get a conference room in the library?”

Robin cocks her head, embarrassed by the question.

“I had forgotten you could. I didn’t even think about it.

Dade just suggested we go to his friend’s house, and I said okay.”

“Did you drive together?” Binkie asks, knowing she still has some explaining to do.

I steal a look at the jury. They are interested. If she is so pure and good, why not meet in public where she can get some Brownie points? Robin sighs audibly.