Jodi Picoult - House Rules

I really don’t like the fact that I’m preoccupied with Emma when I ought to be focused solely on her son.

As the jury files in, I take my seat beside Jacob. He looks like he’s had sixty cups of coffee. He’s bouncing, even though he’s seated next to me at the defense table. Emma is on his right side, and I swear, I can feel the heat of her skin even with her son between us. “I don’t like this,” Jacob mutters.

You and me both, kid. I think. “What don’t you like?”

“Her hair.”

“Whose hair?”

“Hers,” Jacob says, and he points to Helen Sharp without glancing at her.

Today the prosecutor is wearing her hair loose around her face. It’s auburn and brushes her shoulders. It actually makes her look almost compassionate, although I know better. “Well,” I say. “It could be worse.”

“How?”

“It could be longer.”

This makes me think of Emma last night, with her hair free and falling down her back. I’d never seen it like that, because of Jacob.

“It’s a bad omen,” Jacob says, and his fingers flutter on his thigh.

“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” I say, and I turn to Emma. “What’s Henry doing here?”

She shakes her head. “He showed up this morning when I was out for my run, ” she stresses, and doesn’t meet my eye. Conversation closed.

“Make sure you tell the truth,” Jacob states, and Emma and I both jerk our heads toward him. Is Jacob more intuitive than either of us gave him credit for?

“All rise,” the bailiff says, and the judge strides in from his chambers.

“If the defense wishes to deliver an opening statement,” Judge Cuttings says, “you may begin.”

I would have preferred to give my opening statement back when Helen had given hers, so that the whole time the jury was watching Jacob’s reactions during the prosecution’s turn, they could have been thinking his inappropriate affect was because he has Asperger’s-not because he is a sociopathic killer. But the judge didn’t give me that opportunity, and so now, I just have to leave an impression that’s twice as deep.

“The truth,” Jacob whispers again. “You’ll tell them what happened, right?”

He is talking about the jury, I realize; he is talking about Jess’s murder. And there is so much riding on that one question that suddenly I have no idea how to answer Jacob without it becoming a lie. I hesitate, and then take a deep breath. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya,” I murmur to Jacob. “You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

I know he’s grinning as I stand up and face the jury. “During a trial, lawyers ask the jury to see in shades of gray. You’re supposed to look at both sides of an issue. To not prejudge anything. To wait until you’ve heard all the evidence to make a decision. The judge has instructed you to do this, and will instruct you to do this again at the end of the trial.”

I walk toward them. “But Jacob Hunt doesn’t know how to do that. He can’t see shades of gray. To him, the world is black or white. For example, if you ask Jacob to pitch a tent, he will toss it at you. Part of Jacob’s diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome means that he won’t understand the concept of a metaphor. To him, the world is a literal place.” I glance over my shoulder at Jacob, who’s staring down at the table. “You might have also noticed that yesterday, during this trial, Jacob didn’t look the witnesses in the eye. Or that he didn’t show much emotion when the prosecution enumerated the horrors of a murder scene. Or that he might not be able to sit through testimony for long periods of time and needs a break in that room in the back. In fact, there may be many moments during this trial where it seems to you that Jacob is acting rudely, or immaturely, or even in a manner that makes him appear guilty. But ladies and gentlemen, Jacob cannot help it. Those behaviors are all hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder on the autism spectrum with which Jacob’s been diagnosed. People with Asperger’s might have a normal or even exceptional IQ but will also show severe deficiencies in social and communication skills. They might be obsessed by routine or rules, or be fixated on a certain subject. They can’t read expressions very well, or body language. They are overly sensitive to lights, textures, smells, and sounds.

“You are going to hear from Jacob’s doctors and his mother about his limitations, and how they’ve tried hard to help Jacob overcome them. Part of what you’re going to hear is Jacob’s very concrete sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. In his world, rules are not just important, they’re infallible. And yet, he has no understanding of the underlying bases of those rules. He can’t tell you how his behavior might affect another person, because it is impossible for Jacob to put himself in someone else’s metaphorical shoes. He might be able to recite to you every line from CrimeBusters episode forty-four, but he can’t tell you why the mother is upset in scene seven of the show, or how the loss of a child impacted the parents in that show. If you ask Jacob, he can’t explain it. Not because he doesn’t want to, and not because he’s a sociopath, but because his brain simply doesn’t function that way.”

I walk behind the defense table and put my hand lightly on Jacob’s shoulder. Immediately he flinches, just like I figured, beneath the jury’s watchful eye. “If you spend some time with Jacob,” I say, “you’ll probably think there’s something… different about him. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. He may seem odd, or quirky… but you probably also won’t think of him as insane. After all, he can hold a legitimate conversation with you; he knows more about certain subjects than I’ll ever know; he isn’t running around listening to voices in his head or setting small animals on fire. But the definition of legal insanity, ladies and gentlemen, is very different than what we typically think of when we think of the word insanity. It says that, at the moment an act was committed, the defendant-as a result of a severe mental disease or defect-was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts. What that means is that a person with a neurological disorder like Asperger’s who commits a crime-a person like Jacob-can’t be held responsible in the same way you or I should be held responsible. And what you will hear from the witnesses for the defense is proof that having Asperger’s syndrome makes it impossible for Jacob to understand how his actions might cause harm to someone else. You will hear how having Asperger’s syndrome might lead a person like Jacob to have an idiosyncratic interest that becomes overwhelming and obsessive. And you will see, ladies and gentlemen, that having Asperger’s syndrome impaired Jacob’s ability to understand that what he did to Jess Ogilvy was wrong.”

Behind me, I hear whispering. From the corner of my eye, I see a dozen notes, stacked on my side of the defense table. Jacob is rocking back and forth, his mouth tight. After a minute he starts to write notes to Emma as well.

“No one is suggesting that Jess Ogilvy’s death is anything less than a tragedy, and our sympathies must lie with her family. But don’t compound that tragedy by creating a second victim.”

I nod, and sit back down at the table. The notes are brief and angry:

NO.

YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM.

WHAT I DID WAS RIGHT.

I lean toward my client. “Just trust me,” I say.

Yesterday, I was sitting alone in the back of the courtroom squished between a woman who was knitting a newborn baby cap and a man in a tweed jacket who kept texting on his phone during the testimony. No one knew who I was, and I liked it that way. After Jacob’s first sensory break, when I went to the little curtained room and the bailiff let me slip inside, my secret identity was not so much of a secret anymore. The knitting woman, I noticed, moved to a spot on the other side of the courtroom, as if I had some dread contagious disease instead of just a last name shared with the defendant. The man in the tweed coat, though, stopped texting. He kept asking me questions: Had Jacob ever been violent before? Did he have the hots for Jess Ogilvy? Did she turn him down? It didn’t take long for me to figure out he was some kind of reporter, and after that, I just stood in the back near one of the bailiffs.