I hadn’t the right to show any friendly feeling or possess good intentions.
And I tried to follow what came next, as the Prosecutor was now considering what he called my “soul.”
He said he’d studied it closely—and had found a blank, “literally nothing, gentlemen of the jury.”
Really, he said, I had no soul, there was nothing human about me, not one of those moral qualities which normal men possess had any place in my mentality.
“No doubt,” he added, “we should not reproach him with this.
We cannot blame a man for lacking what it was never in his power to acquire.
But in a criminal court the wholly passive ideal of tolerance must give place to a sterner, loftier ideal, that of justice.
Especially when this lack of every decent instinct is such as that of the man before you, a menace to society.”
He proceeded to discuss my conduct toward my mother, repeating what he had said in the course of the hearing.
But he spoke at much greater length of my crime—at such length, indeed, that I lost the thread and was conscious only of the steadily increasing heat.
A moment came when the Prosecutor paused and, after a short silence, said in a low, vibrant voice:
“This same court, gentlemen, will be called on to try tomorrow that most odious of crimes, the murder of a father by his son.”
To his mind, such a crime was almost unimaginable.
But, he ventured to hope, justice would be meted out without paltering.
And yet, he made bold to say, the horror that even the crime of parricide inspired in him paled beside the loathing inspired by my callousness.
“This man, who is morally guilty of his mother’s death, is no less unfit to have a place in the community than that other man who did to death the father that begat him.
And, indeed, the one crime led on to the other; the first of these two criminals, the man in the dock, set a precedent, if I may put it so, and authorized the second crime.
Yes, gentlemen, I am convinced”—here he raised his voice a tone—“that you will not find I am exaggerating the case against the prisoner when I say that he is also guilty of the murder to be tried tomorrow in this court.
And I look to you for a verdict accordingly.”
The Prosecutor paused again, to wipe the sweat off his face.
He then explained that his duty was a painful one, but he would do it without flinching.
“This man has, I repeat, no place in a community whose basic principles he flouts without compunction. Nor, heartless as he is, has he any claim to mercy.
I ask you to impose the extreme penalty of the law; and I ask it without a qualm.
In the course of a long career, in which it has often been my duty to ask for a capital sentence, never have I felt that painful duty weigh so little on my mind as in the present case. In demanding a verdict of murder without extenuating circumstances, I am following not only the dictates of my conscience and a sacred obligation, but also those of the natural and righteous indignation I feel at the sight of a criminal devoid of the least spark of human feeling.”
When the Prosecutor sat down there was a longish silence.
Personally I was quite overcome by the heat and my amazement at what I had been hearing.
The presiding judge gave a short cough, and asked me in a very low tone if I had anything to say.
I rose, and as I felt in the mood to speak, I said the first thing that crossed my mind: that I’d had no intention of killing the Arab.
The Judge replied that this statement would be taken into consideration by the court.
Meanwhile he would be glad to hear, before my counsel addressed the court, what were the motives of my crime. So far, he must admit, he hadn’t fully understood the grounds of my defense.
I tried to explain that it was because of the sun, but I spoke too quickly and ran my words into each other. I was only too conscious that it sounded nonsensical, and, in fact, I heard people tittering.
My lawyer shrugged his shoulders.
Then he was directed to address the court, in his turn.
But all he did was to point out the lateness of the hour and to ask for an adjournment till the following afternoon.
To this the judge agreed.
When I was brought back next day, the electric fans were still churning up the heavy air and the jurymen plying their gaudy little fans in a sort of steady rhythm.
The speech for the defense seemed to me interminable.
At one moment, however, I pricked up my ears; it was when I heard him saying:
“It is true I killed a man.”
He went on in the same strain, saying
“I” when he referred to me.
It seemed so queer that I bent toward the policeman on my right and asked him to explain.
He told me to shut up; then, after a moment, whispered:
“They all do that.”
It seemed to me that the idea behind it was still further to exclude me from the case, to put me off the map. so to speak, by substituting the lawyer for myself. Anyway, it hardly mattered; I already felt worlds away from this courtroom and its tedious “proceedings.”
My lawyer, in any case, struck me as feeble to the point of being ridiculous.
He hurried through his plea of provocation, and then he, too, started in about my soul.
But I had an impression that he had much less talent than the Prosecutor.
“I, too,” he said, “have closely studied this man’s soul; but, unlike my learned friend for the prosecution, I have found something there. Indeed, I may say that I have read the prisoner’s mind like an open book.”
What he had read there was that I was an excellent young fellow, a steady, conscientious worker who did his best by his employer; that I was popular with everyone and sympathetic in others’ troubles.