Day 854: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: eye witness
“It's amazing how many of these cases turn on what a a single eye witness did or did not see, after more than 20 years, Captain Lee.”
“That is a grave but natural misconception, Lieutenant. Because we are human, it is natural for us to want to think another human's eye saw what we picture in our mind may have happened. However, it is a deadly form of self-worship.”
Lieutenant Anderson, who had started the conversation, and Lieutenant Jackson, who had worked the Linden Creek case with Captain Lee, almost fell over. On this day the members of the cold case division of Big Loft, VA's police were debriefing the closure of the Linden Creek case with the arrest of Judge Milford Lofton – and was it ever a debriefing!
“That is why every rational legal system requires at least two witnesses to a matter,” Captain Lee said. “To take one person's word and build a whole case around that is essentially to concede that this one person saw all that needed to be seen – thus according this person the status of God. And we do that evil because we wish to be accorded the same privilege in our perception of the matter. The official name for this is confirmation bias, but it is the same garden-variety desire to suppress truth in order to pretend at divinity that animates sinful man and also Satan!
“Compound that by the fact that this is Virginia, where my direct ancestors misappropriated the rights of gods in the lives of men anyhow, but even they knew they had to have some protection from each other.”
“Yikes, sir,” Lieutenant Longstreet said. “I didn't know it was that deep, but, when you look at the Soames case, one White woman's word was valued over all available evidence, including that showing she couldn't have seen what she saw!”
“And two families went without justice for 25 years, while others, knowing what had been done, enjoyed the power to steal, kill, and destroy the lives of others since they could not actually create a life worth living for themselves,” Captain Lee said. “We are only 400 years deep in such wickedness.”
Captain Lee's dark eyes were flaming … at such moments he looked like someone had brought his great-great-great-uncle, General R.E. Lee, back to life in an unusually ferocious moment of his early middle years. How much he detested the legacy of his ancestral uncle and also his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Colonel Henry Lee III, as it pertained to slavery, Jim Crow, and further abuses of Black people was terrifyingly obvious.
“In fairness,” the captain continued, “even Mr. Amos Pointer's testimony in a state prepared to take a Black man's word as worth the same as a White man's would not have been enough alone, even though he certainly told the truth consistently over 60 years of time. As remarkable as that is, any good prosecutor would have picked it apart – stressed out by nearly being killed and then witnessing a multiple murder when young, mildly senile when old. But with the other witness of the solid evidence we worked to obtain in the Linden Creek case, then, Mr. Pointer's witness shines beyond the disparagement put on him because he is very old, very Black, and dared to tell.”
“Right,” Lieutenant Lightfoot said.
“Makes good sense to me,” Lieutenant Carter said.
“We shall see,” Captain Lee said as he pulled out the next file folder. “The Battler case, right here.”
Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash