John Nance - 16 Souls

A short recess separated Richardson’s rhetoric and Judith’s by fifteen minutes, but as they reassembled in the courtroom, she leaned toward Marty and gave a reassuring pat on his hand.

“He didn’t surprise me at all. I expected everything he said.”

Marty nodded, his face a study in stoic apprehension. He took his seat again and listened as Judith moved for dismissal on the grounds that the state had failed to prove even a basic case, but as she had told him, the motion was just for the record and would be rejected, as it was.

The embarrassment he felt for coming apart in the middle of the night had been all but replaced by a quieter level of dread. But even that was diminished by the feeling that he was not alone. The yawning chasm of loneliness that had been his life for the last few years, long before January, had been breached, and that gap had admitted a vulnerability he had long denied. He was still scared to death, but there was something different about the way that felt.

Judith was on her feet now, the jury following her as she moved out from behind the table, wearing a carefully chosen, classy dress in a soothing shade of blue, set off with a simple strand of pearls. She smiled and greeted the jury and began to walk them through the facts from Marty’s point of view rather than the cynicism of Richardson’s re-telling. She painted a crystal-clear picture of a dilemma into which no human should be placed, laced with the unhelpful pressure from the airline and the shifting facts regarding runways and snowfall that all had to be dealt with by two pilots who also had to struggle to keep a crippled airplane aloft while balancing a precariously attached fuselage of another aircraft on its wing.”

“Yes, I ask you to empathize and sympathize. We are, after all, human, and it would be completely inhuman not to put yourself in this man’s position, in that cockpit, where we are now told that having the courage NOT to condemn those sixteen souls to certain death was a crime. Mr. Richardson would have you believe that because no one technically knew precisely what combination of angle of attack or airspeed would condemn those sixteen people to fall off the wing, Captain Mitchell’s best estimate should be discounted. An airline captain fighting for survival in a dire emergency seldom has the luxury of dealing with certainties. By the way, that is precisely why we have humans and not computers flying our jetliners and making the tough calls in emergencies, as rare as they are, because machines can’t deal with uncertainty the way we can. You heard the testimony about the near-disaster in Singapore a few years ago with a fully loaded Airbus A-380, Qantas Flight Thirty-Two, using the largest passenger airliner on the planet. It took five qualified pilots nearly three hours to figure out how to land safely. If the computers alone had made the decisions, the aircraft would have crashed with the loss of all aboard, over three hundred people. We need captains like Marty Mitchell who can quickly take in all the evidence, and working with the captain of a Mountaineer 2612, determine that slowing down would be fatal. You heard Michelle Whittier’s testimony! She and her copilot had to fly… literally fly… their fuselage in order to stay on the wing of the 757 even at two hundred thirty knots. Can you really ignore all that testimony? Can you really say that Captain Mitchell should have just assumed they’d stay attached, suppressed his own training and experience and instincts and experimentation, thrown all that away and just trusted that his airline’s spokesman had better information, and then slowed to normal approach speed? You see, far from smoke and mirrors, that’s the key to this and to your deliberation. Mr. Richardson wants you to conclude that slowing down was a certain win for the occupants of the 757, and that since there was no certainty about when the Beech would fall away, deciding to slow down would not have constituted knowingly causing the deaths of those sixteen. But that’s nonsense! In fact, if Captain Mitchell had slowed down, and if everyone aboard the 757 had lived, but the sixteen people on the wing had died, by his definition of the criminal statute we would still be right here with Mr. Richardson charging Captain Mitchell with second degree murder because he had knowingly slowed the aircraft… knowing that it would case the deaths of the Mountaineer passengers. Are we really ready to imprison someone who had an impossible choice? Are we that crass and hateful as a people to use the literal meaning of law to inflict an outrageous result?

“Again, that’s the key. No matter what he did, by Mr. Richardson’s definition of the law, we would be here trying the same case for a different set of deaths.”

“The law against second degree murder is for punishing someone who knows that doing something completely voluntary, such a pulling the trigger on a gun they’ve cocked and aimed, would likely result in a death, and they did it anyway. This law was never intended to cover a dire emergency by reference only to its outcome. Captain Marty Mitchell, as he said himself, never did anything volitionally or knowingly to hurt another human. That has one conclusion and only one when you get into the jury room. You must acquit.”

“Please keep this in mind: If you do not acquit, you will be sending a major message to every airline pilot who flies into or through Colorado that should an emergency ever happen with life threatening potential, their only hope of avoiding criminal prosecution will be blindly following whatever their company tells them to do. Imagine being on such an airplane and the pilots are not allowed to use their own training and intelligence. Imagine your life hanging on the opinion of someone in a distant command center who isn’t even there and who cannot have all the facts. If that’s what you want to fly with, then convict Captain Mitchell. If you want thinking, caring humans doing their best, you must acquit.”

Richardson was not about to let Judith have the last word, and since the prosecution gets the chance to make the final comment, he rose again to address the jury with as much simplicity as he could muster.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Winston certainly didn’t disappoint in providing a great opportunity to distract you. But let me bring you back to reality. Captain Mitchell made the conscious decision to maintain a dangerous airspeed knowing that the potential for loss of human life was very great, and thus regardless of any other information about runways or headlights or any other distraction, the fact is unavoidable: Because of his refusal to slow down to a safe speed, he knowingly caused five deaths, and in accordance with Colorado law, you have no choice but to convict.”

Two hours of intense wrangling between Judith and Grant Richardson in front of the judge finally distilled the court’s final instructions to the jury, as she explained to Marty later, the best compromise they could engineer. With that, the case went to the jury, and the waiting began.

Sitting quietly at the defense table, Marty was aware of Judith and the team beginning to repack all the notebooks and legal pads and other supporting materials, but he remained without comment until she snapped her briefcase shut and turned to him.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never wanted to snap anyone’s neck before, but with Richardson… I…”

They were interrupted by someone handing a folded note to Judith

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A gentleman in the back would like a word with you, if you have a moment.”

She unfolded the note.

It is urgent I have a moment to speak with you. I believe a great injustice is about to be done, and there is a very material element to all this that you — and the court — should be aware of. Carl Moscone