Hayford Peirce: Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

Thirty-six years of perceptualization enhancement had not, as Dolores de la Quinta had pointed out, entirely eradicated crime. It had, however, eliminated enough of it so that the American legal system once again functioned the way it it had originally been intended to: to dispense impartial and speedy justice. The thousands of backlogged cases that had once clogged every court in the country had long since disappeared. Now it was common for cases to be disposed of in weeks instead of years. Roderick Bantry had been arrested in the middle of March; it was only because Taos’s only sitting superior court criminal judge had been in the hospital for three and a half weeks as the result of a skiing accident that Bantry’s trial started as late as the last week in May.

Roderick Bantry was, Sam knew, seven or eight years younger than Emily. He had always been darkly handsome, with a hard, muscular build and masses of curly black hair, flashing white teeth, and an unstudied arrogance that could be as appealing as it could be infuriating.

The last few years, however, had not been kind to Bantry. His once glossy hair was now a dirty salt and pepper and had receded enough to reveal a high, wrinkled forehead. His face was even more gaunt than Sam remembered in the days just before Roderick had vanished into the hands of a still unnamed department of the Federation’s security forces. Perhaps it was that exceedingly unpleasant experience, Sam reflected as he sat in the sunny Taos courtroom, and Roderick’s sudden horrible realization that even he was not, for all his godlike uniqueness, immortal after all, that had aged him. Or perhaps it was merely the fact that he had been shot three times through the chest and somehow survived that now gave his eyes a puzzled uncertainty Sam had never before seen. That, and going on trial for the murder of his wife. There were reasons Roderick might look a little ragged.

Sam squeezed his daughter’s hand. “We’ll get him off,” he whispered, “don’t you worry.”

Emily stared glumly at the back of the bench in front of her. “I guess what I’m really afraid of is that if you do manage to get the scanner introduced, we’ll… we’ll see Roderick… doing it. He easily could have, Sam, sometimes he has a terrible temper, you know he does.”

“And then really did forget killing her?”

“Yes. The trauma of being shot could easily have caused a permanent amnesia for the events leading up to it.”

“I suppose so,” said Sam dubiously. “Myself, I wonder if Martinez honestly thinks he can convince a jury that a man with three bullets in him still had the strength to grab a crystal statue and bludgeon someone to death with it—or is he just going through the motions?”

Emily shuddered. “I don’t care what his motives are. If he does prove it, then he’s going to come after me.” She buried her face in her hands. “It’s a nightmare, Sam, a nightmare! Why can’t I wake up?”

The person upon whom Roderick Bantry’s fate now depended, Superior Court Judge Harold Johansson, banged his gavel and ran a surprisingly benign blue eye across the crowded courtroom. He scratched his thicket of bristly white hair, tugged briefly at an oversized ear, and rearranged his stocky body more comfortably in his padded chair. “The court will come to order,” he said mildly. “This is the case of the People of the State of New Mexico against Roderick Bantry. Mr. Martinez, would you care to begin?”

Over the next two days the Fighting Bobcat presented his evidence deftly but methodically. Holographic pictures of Linda Rawlings lying in a pool of blood were shown. Two policemen and two ambulance interns testified to finding Roderick Bantry lying next to his wife, the bloody statuette of a stylized owl clutched in his hand. Expert witnesses conclusively proved that the figurine had been used to batter Rawlings to death. A salesclerk and the boutique’s manager testified that Linda Rawlings had indeed bought the heavy statuette earlier on the day of her murder. Holographic depositions by twelve witnesses from four states and three countries recounted vivid examples of Roderick’s openly expressed hatred for his wife.

Dolores de la Quinta sat hunched over in her ground effect chair during all this, as silent and wrinkled and motionless as a desert tortoise. Finally it was her turn to speak. A soft murmur ran through the courtroom as heads craned to see the legendary jurist. Ignoring the jury, she guided her chair directly in front of the bench and cast an unblinking gaze up at Judge Johansson.

“Your Honor,” she said in a thin but firm voice, “there is but one issue involved in this trial: the truth. Did the defendant, Roderick Bantry, kill his wife, Linda Rawlings, or didn’t he? The prosecution says he did, the defense will argue that he didn’t. There are no means to conclusively prove it one way or another. All the evidence that the prosecution has presented merely indicates that Mr. Bantry was indeed present in the room at the time that the body of Ms. Rawlings was found, nothing more. He had a bloody statuette in his hand—and three bullets in his body. The defense will not contest those facts. Nor the fact that Linda Rawlings had a gun in her hand—and no powder traces on her hand or clothes. Remarkable, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t it more likely that whoever really shot Roderick Bantry and bludgeoned Linda Rawlings to death simply placed those two objects in their hands after doing his work and then left them both for dead?”

District Attorney Martinez shook his head pityingly.

Dolores de la Quinta cleared her throat, then raised her voice. “Thirty-six years ago, Your Honor, the American people, in their collective wisdom, passed the Thirty-first Amendment, thereby permitting the use of interrogation by perceptualization enhancement. The reason they did this, to strip all the hoohah down to its bare essentials, was to enable our courtroom to establish the truth. The truth of whether an accused person is guilty or innocent. Not all of us supported the passage of that amendment, nor the subsequent use of perceptualization enhancement. But now, at this later date, none of us can honestly deny that, by and large, justice has been served. For the quest for justice, Your Honor, is a constantly evolving organism. It is hard for us to believe today, but once upon a time fingerprints were first unknown in the courtroom, and then were not admissible as evidence. The same with DNA typing. Retinal indexing. Blood classification. Not to mention the fact that women were not allowed to serve on juries. Or black men or black women. In England, the fountainhead of our own common law, even well into the end of the nineteenth century, a defendant was not permitted to testify on his own behalf. Can you believe that, Your Honor: a defendant was not permitted to testify on his own behalf! ”

The judge smiled indulgently. “I do indeed believe it if you assure me that is so, Madam Justice. But the relevance to our own—”

“You will see,” snapped Dolores de la Quinta. “The point I am trying to make, Your Honor, is that the evolution of justice has followed the evolution of both technology and of our own ever-broadening perception of what constitutes justice. And justice, let me remind you, is nothing more than—” she lowered her voice dramatically “—the search for truth.”

Dolores de la Quinta swung her chair around and directed it back to the table where Roderick Bantry sat wearing the fluorescent orange overalls of a prisoner of Taos County. Every eye in the courtroom followed her movement. She laid a gnarled hand on Bantry’s arm and cocked her head defiantly. “And now it’s time, Your Honor, for us to take the next step up in this constantly evolving quest for truth, the step that will irrefutably tell us exactly what happened in room 128 of the Casa Grande Motel on the night of January 16th. There is only one way to discover the truth, Your Honor, and that is by the use of what is commonly referred to as the time scanner. If it please the court, I therefore ask you to direct that a time scanner be brought into this room and that it be used to show us the true events of the night in question.”