Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

"I don't think we can," Maureen said. "Remember when we were deliberating over the verdict, and we asked the judge about Elizabeth being molested? He said then that since it wasn't being charged, we couldn't use it to find him guilty. If we couldn't bring it up then, how can we bring it up now?"

"This is different," Vy said. "He's already guilty."

"The man was going to rape that little girl," Marilyn said. "That counts as cruel and heinous behavior to me."

"You know, there wasn't any evidence that that's what was happening,"

Mark said.

Marilyn raised an eyebrow. "Hello?! The girl was found without her panties. Seven-year-olds don't go running around without their panties.

Plus, Bourne had the underwear in his pocket... what else would he be doing with them?"

"Does it even matter? We already agree that Elizabeth was young when she was killed. We don't need any more from column B." Maureen frowned. "I think I'm confused."

Alison, a doctor's wife who hadn't said much during the original deliberations, glanced at her. "When I get confused, I think about that officer who testified, the one who said that he heard the little girl screaming when he was running up the stairs. Don't shoot- she was begging. She begged for her life." Alison sighed. "That sort of makes it simple again, doesn't it?"

As we all fell quiet, Ted asked for a show of hands in favor of the execution of Shay Bourne.

"No," I said. "We still have the rest of the equation to figure out." I pointed to column C. "We have to consider what the defense said."

"The only thing I want to consider right now is where is my lunch,"

Jack said.

The vote was 8-4, and I was in the minority.

I looked around the room. This time, nine people had their hands in the air. Maureen, Vy, and I were the only ones who hadn't voted for execution.

"What is it that's keeping you from making this decision?" Ted asked.

"His age," Vy said. "My son's twenty-four," she said. "And all I can think is that he doesn't always make the best decisions. He's not done growing up yet."

Jack turned toward me. "You're the same age as Bourne. What are you doing with your life?"

I felt my face flame. "I, um, probably I'll go to graduate school. I'm not really sure."

"You haven't killed anyone, have you?"

Jack got to his feet. "Let's take a bathroom break," he suggested, and we all jumped at the chance to separate. I tossed the dry-erase marker on the table and walked to the window. Outside, there were courthouse employees eating their lunch on benches. There were clouds caught in the twisted fingers of the trees. And there were television vans with satellites on their roofs, waiting to hear what we'd say.

Jim sat down beside me, reading the Bible that seemed to be an extra appendage. "You religious?"

"I went to parochial school a long time ago." I faced him. "Isn't there something in there about turning the other cheek?"

Jim pursed his lips and read aloud. "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. When one apple's gone bad, you don't let it ruin the whole bunch." He passed the Bible to me. "See for yourself."

I looked at the quote, and then closed the book. I didn't know nearly as much as Jim did about religion, but it seemed to me that no matter what Jesus said in that passage, he might have taken it back after being sentenced to death himself. In fact, it seemed to me that if

Jesus were here in this jury room, he'd be having just as hard a time doing what needed to be done as I was.

Ted had me write Yes and No on the board, and then he polled us, one by one, as I wrote our names in each of the columns.

I hesitated, then wrote my own name beneath Vy's.

"You agreed to vote for death if you had to," Mark said. "They asked each of us before we got picked for the jury if we could do that."

"I know." I had agreed to vote for the death penalty if the case merited it. I just hadn't realized it was going to be this difficult to do.

Vy buried her face in her hands. "When my son used to hit his little brother, I didn't smack him and say 'Don't hit.' It felt hypocritical then.

And it feels hypocritical now."

"Vy," Marilyn said quietly, "what if it had been your seven-year-old who was killed?" She reached onto the table, where we had piled up transcripts and evidence, and took the same picture of Elizabeth Nealon that the prosecutor had presented during his closing argument. She set it down in front of Vy, smoothed its glossy surface.

After a minute, Vy stood up heavily and took the marker out of my hand. She wiped her name off the No column and wrote it beneath

Marilyn's, with the ten other jurors who'd voted Yes.

"Michael," Ted said.

I swallowed.

"What do you need to see, to hear? We can help you find it." He reached for the box that held the bullets from ballistics, the bloody clothing, the autopsy reports. He let photos from the crime scene spill through his hands like ribbons. On some of them, there was so much blood, you could barely see the victim lying beneath its sheen. "Michael,"

Ted said, "do the math."

I faced the white board, because I couldn't stand the heat of their eyes on me. Next to the list of names, mine standing alone, was the original equation I'd set up for us when we first came into this jury room: (A + B)-C = SENTENCE.

What I liked about math was that it was safe. There was always a right answer-even if it was imaginary.

This, though, was an equation where math did not hold up. Because

A + B-the factors that had led to the deaths of Kurt and Eliza beth Nealon-would always be greater than C. You couldn't bring them back, and there was no sob story in the world big enough to erase that truth.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it's the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

I erased my name on the board. Then I took the pen and rewrote it, becoming the twelfth and final juror to sentence Shay Bourne to death.

"If Cod did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

- VOLTAIRE, FOR AND AGAINST

Lucius

I have no idea where they were keeping Shay Bourne before they brought him to us. I knew he was an inmate here at the state prison in Concord-I can still remember watching the news the day his sentence was handed down and scrutinizing an outside world that was starting to fade in my mind: the rough stone of the prison exterior; the golden dome of the statehouse; even just the general shape of a door that wasn't made of metal and wire mesh. His conviction was the subject of great discussion on the pod all those years ago-where do you keep an inmate who's been sentenced to death when your state hasn't had a death row prisoner for ages?

Rumor had it that in fact, the prison did have a pair of death row cells-not too far from my own humble abode in the Secure Housing Unit on I-tier. Crash Vitale-who had something to say about everything, although no one usually bothered to listen-told us that the old death row cells were stacked with the thin, plastic slabs that pass for mattresses here.

I wondered for a while what had happened to all those extra mattresses after Shay arrived. One thing's for sure, no one offered to give them to us.