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blog-brett-matthew-west-gazette · 3 years ago

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Done Deal

(Over the years, I have created some popular characters in my stories. One of them is Detective John Dutton. I have written several tales featuring him. This is one in that series. I wrote this piece on April 26, 2020 in response to a prose challenge.)

A curtain of thick tension descended over the packed courtroom. Defense Attorney Marshall Hatterfield sauntered to the witness stand. He smiled like a feral dog in the heat of manipulation and asked, "Detective Dutton, isn't it true you are well known throughout the hierarchy of the Marion County Police Department to be a, how shall I put this? A lone wolf."

An uneasy stir arose among the spectators. Many shifted in their seats. Hushed murmurs were heard as the confrontation brewed.

Hatterfiel wrung his hands together and continued, "Isn't it also true you like to bend the rules as the situation fits your needs?" Like a vulture circled overhead, with discredit an allegation away, he tightened the screws, "Most importantly, would you not agree minus your shoddy investigative tactics, this insane charge of capitol murder against my esteemed client would it have been launched?"

Detective John Dutton calmly responded, "As you know, Mr. Hatterfield, from our previous encounters, I am not a Johnny One-Time, nor is this my first rodeo." What Dutton ached to do was knock some manners into the barrister. Instead, he maintained his compunction, rose tall in the saddle, and said, "All the evidence the Marion County Police Department collected was gathered in the utmost legal way possible."

"Or so you claim, Detective. Care to enlighten us about what so-called evidence you have to offer this court?" Hatterfield pondered. He walked to his table and picked up a manila folder.

State Attorney Debra Anderson bolted to her feet and complained, "Your Honor, Mr. Hatterfield is deliberately badgering our witness."

Judge Albert Stancil glared down from the bench. He twirled the tips of his handlebar moustache and admonished the Defense Attorney, "Mr. Hatterfield, cease and desist. This court will not tolerate any such theatrics."

"Yes, Your Honor," Hatterfield replied. He raised his eyes, looked at Dutton, and rephrased the tone of his inquiry, "Detective, can you inform the court what evidence you collected during your investigation?"

Dutton spoke into the microphone, "A puddle of bleach, approximately two feet in diameter, stained the garage floor. And, a variety of aerosols and cleaning agents were boxed together on the Formica-topped island in the kitchen of the Deals' house."

"Did you locate anything else, Detective? Perhaps something of value," Hatterfield questioned.

"Yes we did," Dutton responded, "we found six towels in the washing machine with a reddish substance on them. Forensics determined this was blood that matched the deceased."

"Deceased, Detective? Really?" Hatterfield scoffed. "That is quite an interesting perspective considering there is no body. My question would be how can there possibly be a deceased without one? In addition, a blood match would hardly prove my client murdered Vanessa Deal or anyone else, for that matter."

"No it would not," Dutton agreed, "but,when Gretchen, our cadaver dog, discovered a positive indication on the driveway underneath the carport an arrest warrant was secured. That led us to bring Virgil Deal in for questioning."

"I see," Hatterfield started. He flipped open the cover of his manila folder and ran his forefinger halfway down the top paper contained inside. He approached Dutton, showed him the document, and asked, "Detective, were you not quoted as saying "We still don't have the skank's missing body, but we've got Virgil Deal by the cajones. Now's the time to ratchet up the squeeze real tight and see if we can crack a coconut?" Those comments sound like you were hell-bent to nail the innocent philanthropist Virgil Deal to the wall regardless. Detective, I strongly remind you that you are under oath."

Taking ownership, Dutton admitted, "Yes I said those words and I stand by them. You see, Mr. Hatterfield, aggression is easily aroused in lovebirds, and the Deals were in the middle of toxic divorce proceedings. But, the odd text messages Vanessa Deal's friends received were what I wanted to know about. The beginning always sounded like a stimulating environment for me."

"Clueless!" Hatterfield muttered under his breath. He asked Dutton, "Does testifying in a death penalty trial sound like a stimulating environment to you, Detective?"

"Your Honor!" Debra Anderson vehemently protested.

"I retract my question," Hatterfield smiled at the attentive jury.

Dutton explained, "Following the date Vanessa Deal was reported missing, signals from her cell phone bounced off the tower in Laramie, two-hundred-and-twenty-six miles north of Marion County." Then, he asked his own question, "Riddle me this, Mr. Hatterfield, how can a missing person text her dear, sweet, mama and tell her she is on a ventilator?"

"I'm not the one providing testimony, Detective," Hatterfield responded.

Dutton continued, "Once Maryanne Dungston received this text, we scoured all the local hospitals. Vanessa Deal did not surface. That gave us probable cause. Who else would retain access to Vanessa Deal's cell phone to send that text to her mother after she was reported missing except Virgil Deal?"

"As I recollect, the last time Vanessa Deal was seen alive was on February 14, 2019," Hatterfield began.

"Sweethearts Day," Dutton cut in. He elaborated, "Larry Courtney, her supervisor at Thurston Interiors, reported his favorite office clerk was in very good health at that time."

In an attempt to cast suspicion off his client, Hatterfield paced in front of the witness stand and stated, "It is my understanding that Larry Courtney and Vanessa Deal were having an affair."

"I will remind the court Larry Courtney has been cleared of any possible involvement in Vanessa Deal's death," Debra Anderson quickly responded.

Hatterfield stared at the news hounds clustered together in the far corner of the courtroom and warned, "Detective Dutton, while this text message you mentioned may have aroused your curiosity, it certainly did not establish a murder was committed. Unless you can produce any real substantiating evidence implicating my client in a crime, I am going to petition the court to drop all charges against Virgil Deal."

Poised, Dutton presented, "On February 21, 2019, Vanessa Deal's silver Hyundai Tucson was discovered in the North Annex of the Marion County Parking Garage. Security video showed Virgil Deal drove the vehicle into Parking Slip 618 and edited out the driver's door. Why, Mr. Hatterfield, would your client be inclined to do such a thing?" Dutton paused, look accussingly at Deal, and stated,"Unless it was a desperate act intended to cover something up."

He focused his attention on Hatterfield and continued, "Three days prior to Vanessa Deal's car being found, her next door neighbor, Marjorie Stoneman, provided a deposition stating she heard the victim plead, "No! No! No! You're hurting me! Why would Vanessa Deal make that comment if she wasn't under duress?"

Silence filled the courtroom.

"And, Mr Hatterfield, why would Vanessa Deal's neighbor from across the street, Riley Johannson, provide a sword statement in which he recalled seeing a black F150 pickup truck at her residence with a license plate that matched the one owned by Virgil Deal on the day she was reported missing?" Dutton wanted to know.

The mousey Maurice Witherspoon slipped into the courtroom seemingly unnoticed. He slid into an empty chair next to Debra Anderson and spoke softly in her ear.

"If I may approach the bench, Your Honor. My associate has informed me workers just excavated Vanessa Deal's half-naked remains from a ravine in Rock Smasher Canyon," Debra Anderson enlightened Judge Stancil.

Anguished, Virgil Dea,l a bookworm with wire-rimmed spectacles, cried out, "Stop it! I didn't mean to kill Vanessa. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I went to her house to discuss the settlement of our finances. At first, she was warm. You know, the way we used to be before all our disagreements started.

The notion brought a fond remembrance to Deal's face. He returned back to the gravity of the situation at hand and said, "Then, Vanessa told me she wanted eighty percent of all my assets. Eighty percent! I'm no fool. I couldn't do that. I tried to convince her she would ruin me and everything I've spent my life building. She didn't care."

A collective gasped emitted from the gallery as the brash Hatterfield grumbled to his client, "Shut up, Virgil! You've already confessed too much you pathetic weakling! I could have gotten you off."

Deal fiddled with the top button of his blazer and finished his confession "Do you know what she did? Do you? She laughed in my face. I lost control and slapped the taste out of her mouth. All of a sudden Vanessa wasn't so demanding. Then, I-I picked up a knife from off the tool counter and I," as if the memory was too strong to overcome, Deal hesitated, "I stabbed her again! And again! And again!" Each time the word became more venomous. Deal concluded, "There was blood all over the floor of the garage. I tried to clean it up." Collapsing into his chair, Deal moaned, "I couldn't allow Vanessa to destroy me. Don't you see? I couldn't."

Judge Stencil instructed, "Bailiff, remand the defendant. This court stands adjourned until one o'clock."

Steel bracelets flashed, then clicked.

Outside the courthouse, Dutton told his young partner, "I may not be as good as I once was, but make no mistakes about this simple fact, Mark, I'm still as good once as I ever was." He paused, collected his thoughts and stated, "I see the electric chair in Virgil Deal's future. His sand castle in the sky is gonna crash down on top of his head, and I have no sympathy for him. The greedy bastard Oh well, duty calls."

"Your timing is impeccable," Mark Ballister complimented Dutton They bounded down the courthouse stairs. Ballister stopped and asked, "But, how did you know where to send Witherspoon in search of Vanessa Deal's corpse in Rock Smasher Canyon?"

Dutton flashed a toothy grin and replied, "All in a day's labor, kiddo. Witherspoon turned that dagger just right to force Deal's confession. Helps to have snitches in low places. Let's roll."

#court #thriller #action #fiction #short story

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dfroza · 4 years ago

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Today’s reading from the ancient books of Proverbs and Psalms

for monday, September 21 of 2020 with Proverbs 21 and Psalm 21 accompanied by Psalm 94 for the 94th day of Summer and Psalm 115 for day 265 of the year

[Proverbs 21]

The king’s heart is like a channel of water directed by the Eternal:

He chooses which way He bends it.

Everyone may think his own way of living is right,

but the Eternal examines our hearts.

To do what is right and to seek justice—

these please Him more than sacrifice.

The lamp of the wicked lights his way;

a proud look, an arrogant heart—all sin.

A well-thought-out plan will work to your advantage,

but hasty actions will cost you dearly.

The fortune made by a swindler

is a fast-burning fog and a recipe for death.

Wicked people will be swept up in their own violence

because they refuse to seek justice.

Dishonest people walk along the crooked path they have made,

but the innocent travel the straight course they have laid.

It is better to dwell outside on the corner of your roof

than to live inside your house with a badgering wife.

Wicked people delight in doing bad things;

their neighbors never see even a hint of compassion.

A naive person wises up when he sees a mocker punished.

A wise person becomes even wiser just by being instructed.

The right-living understands how evildoers operate;

he subverts them and ruins their plans.

If you ignore the groans of the poor,

one day your own cries for help will go unanswered.

A gift given in secret soothes anger,

and a present offered privately calms fierce rage.

When justice is done, those who are in the right celebrate,

but those who make trouble are terrified.

People who wander from the way of wise living

will lie down in the company of corpses.

Those who live to party, who pursue pleasure, will end up penniless;

those who enjoy lots of wine and rich food will never have money.

The wicked become a ransom for those who live right,

and the faithless pay the penalty for their treachery against the upright.

You would be better off living in the middle of the desert

than with an angry and argumentative wife.

The wise have a generous supply of fine food and oil in their homes,

but fools are wasteful, consuming every last drop.

Whoever pursues justice and treats others with kindness

discovers true life marked by integrity and respect.

One wise person can rise against a city of mighty men

and cause the citadel they trust to collapse.

Guard your words, mind what you say,

and you will keep yourself out of trouble.

The name “mocker” applies to one who is proud and pompous

because he is defiantly arrogant.

What slackers crave will surely kill them

because they refuse to work.

All day, every day the greedy want more,

while those who live right give generously.

The offerings of wrongdoers are despicable to God;

it’s even worse when they bring them with evil motives.

The testimony of a false witness is eventually impeached,

but the person who truly listens will have the last word.

The wicked wears a defiant face,

but the right-living plans his path.

No one is wise enough or smart enough,

and no plan is good enough to stand up to the Eternal.

No matter how well you arm for battle,

victory is determined by Him.

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 21 (The Voice)

[Psalm 21]

A David Psalm

Your strength, God, is the king’s strength.

Helped, he’s hollering Hosannas.

You gave him exactly what he wanted;

you didn’t hold back.

You filled his arms with gifts;

you gave him a right royal welcome.

He wanted a good life; you gave it to him,

and then made it a long life as a bonus.

You lifted him high and bright as a cumulus cloud,

then dressed him in rainbow colors.

You pile blessings on him;

you make him glad when you smile.

Is it any wonder the king loves God?

that he’s sticking with the Best?

With a fistful of enemies in one hand

and a fistful of haters in the other,

You radiate with such brilliance

that they cringe as before a furnace.

Now the furnace swallows them whole,

the fire eats them alive!

You purge the earth of their progeny,

you wipe the slate clean.

All their evil schemes, the plots they cook up,

have fizzled—every one.

You sent them packing;

they couldn’t face you.

Show your strength, God, so no one can miss it.

We are out singing the good news!

The Book of Psalms, Poem 21 (The Message)

[Psalm 94]

God, put an end to evil;

avenging God, show your colors!

Judge of the earth, take your stand;

throw the book at the arrogant.

God, the wicked get away with murder—

how long will you let this go on?

They brag and boast

and crow about their crimes!

They walk all over your people, God,

exploit and abuse your precious people.

They take out anyone who gets in their way;

if they can’t use them, they kill them.

They think, “God isn’t looking,

Jacob’s God is out to lunch.”

Well, think again, you idiots,

fools—how long before you get smart?

Do you think Ear-Maker doesn’t hear,

Eye-Shaper doesn’t see?

Do you think the trainer of nations doesn’t correct,

the teacher of Adam doesn’t know?

God knows, all right—

knows your stupidity,

sees your shallowness.

How blessed the man you train, God,

the woman you instruct in your Word,

Providing a circle of quiet within the clamor of evil,

while a jail is being built for the wicked.

God will never walk away from his people,

never desert his precious people.

Rest assured that justice is on its way

and every good heart put right.

Who stood up for me against the wicked?

Who took my side against evil workers?

If God hadn’t been there for me,

I never would have made it.

The minute I said, “I’m slipping, I’m falling,”

your love, God, took hold and held me fast.

When I was upset and beside myself,

you calmed me down and cheered me up.

Can Misrule have anything in common with you?

Can Troublemaker pretend to be on your side?

They ganged up on good people,

plotted behind the backs of the innocent.

But God became my hideout,

God was my high mountain retreat,

Then boomeranged their evil back on them:

for their evil ways he wiped them out,

our God cleaned them out for good.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 94 (The Message)

[Psalm 115]

Not for our sake, God, no, not for our sake,

but for your name’s sake, show your glory.

Do it on account of your merciful love,

do it on account of your faithful ways.

Do it so none of the nations can say,

“Where now, oh where is their God?”

Our God is in heaven

doing whatever he wants to do.

Their gods are metal and wood,

handmade in a basement shop:

Carved mouths that can’t talk,

painted eyes that can’t see,

Tin ears that can’t hear,

molded noses that can’t smell,

Hands that can’t grasp, feet that can’t walk or run,

throats that never utter a sound.

Those who make them have become just like them,

have become just like the gods they trust.

But you, Israel: put your trust in God!

—trust your Helper! trust your Ruler!

Clan of Aaron, trust in God!

—trust your Helper! trust your Ruler!

You who fear God, trust in God!

—trust your Helper! trust your Ruler!

O God, remember us and bless us,

bless the families of Israel and Aaron.

And let God bless all who fear God—

bless the small, bless the great.

Oh, let God enlarge your families—

giving growth to you, growth to your children.

May you be blessed by God,

by God, who made heaven and earth.

The heaven of heavens is for God,

but he put us in charge of the earth.

Dead people can’t praise God—

not a word to be heard from those buried in the ground.

But we bless God, oh yes—

we bless him now, we bless him always!

Hallelujah!

The Book of Psalms, Poem 115 (The Message)

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lawrencedienerthings · 4 years ago

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STEM School Highlands Ranch shooter sentenced to life in prison after emotional, day-long hearing

#inprison👩‍⚖️ 🔫 🎓 ☠ 👊 ☠ 😠

get headlines https://thecherrycreeknews.com

Betrayal. Lasting fear. Anger.

A community forever shattered.

Victims of last year’s deadly shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch, including students who barely escaped death, spoke of still-raw wounds as 17-year-old Alec McKinney, one of the two shooters responsible for the attack, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years.

The sentence is the mandatory penalty for juveniles convicted of first-degree murder. McKinney was also sentenced to serve an additional 38 years for crimes he committed during the attack, prosecutors say.

McKinney, appearing at the sentencing remotely because of the pandemic, sobbed as fellow students described their dismay at how he had turned on them. One peer called him a “bottom-of-the-barrel waste of space.”

“He made himself the judge, the jury and the executioner in room 107,” Nui Giasolli, another student, said in recounting the May 7, 2019, attack. She was referring to the classroom where the shooting unfolded.

A combined SWAT team waits outside the middle school entrance at STEM School Highlands Ranch after a shooting that killed one and wounded eight students. (John Leyba, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Giasolli said she had considered McKinney one of her best friends before the attack. She was horrified to find out that she had apparently been targeted, a gun pointed at the back of her head.

“He’s not crying because he truly regrets it,” Giasolli said. “He’s crying because he got caught.”

McKinney spoke for the first time publicly since the shooting, giving remarks for about 20 minutes. He apologized individually to victims and said he’d never forgive himself.

“I don’t deserve leniency nor forgiveness,” he said. “I don’t want a lighter sentence.”

McKinney also sent a message to anyone thinking about committing a similar act: “Get help now. The amount of pain it causes to everyone who ever cared about you and innocent people outweigh anything you are going through right now.”

18th Judicial District Judge Jeffrey K. Holmes noted McKinney’s drug use, mental health struggles and history of familial abuse in handing down his sentence.

“He has taken responsibility in this case,” the judge noted. “He has not tried to excuse his behavior today.”

Holmes could have sentenced McKinney to more than 400 additional years in prison for crimes he committed during the attack on top of first-degree murder, according to prosecutors. Instead, Holmes tacked on 38 more years in prison to the life sentence, the district attorney’s office said.

At the same time, Holmes highlighted the heinous nature of McKinney’s crimes. “The level of seriousness of the crimes here is excessive. It is an unimaginable series of violations of individuals’ physical, emotional purity,” he said.

Students from STEM School Highlands Ranch walk from their school entrance, with their hands on their heads, after a shooting that killed one student and wounded eight others on May 7, 2019, in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. (John Leyba, Special to The Colorado Sun)

McKinney’s alleged accomplice, Devon Erickson, is scheduled to stand trial in September. Erickson was 18 when the attack happened. He faces the possibility of being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

McKinney was 16 years old at the time of the shooting, but was charged in the case as an adult. He told investigators that he planned to die by suicide after the shooting but didn’t know how to release a safety mechanism on the handgun he fled the shooting with.

After McKinney’s attorneys failed in their efforts to return the case to the juvenile system, the teen pleaded guilty to 17 counts in February.

According to arrest documents, McKinney — who was born a girl and transitioned before the shooting — told investigators that he had specific targets at the school in mind, but “wanted everyone in that school to suffer from trauma like he has in his life and to realize that the world is a bad place.”

The shooting left one student, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo, dead and eight others wounded. Castillo died after rushing one of the shooters in an attempt to disarm and stop him.

Kendrick Castillo. (Colorado State Patrol handout)

Authorities say McKinney and Erickson snuck guns into STEM School Highlands Ranch and opened fire on a classroom full of students watching the movie “The Princess Bride.” It was just a few days before the end of the school year and graduation.

Some of the most wrenching testimony on Friday came from Kendrick’s parents, John and Maria.

“We never got to see Kendrick until almost a week later, when the coroner was done with the investigation,” John Castillo testified, recounting the day he learned that his son had been killed. He said he could barely recognize Kendrick when he was finally able to see his son’s body.

Castillo called McKinney “a monster” and, addressing him, said “I condemn you to hell.”

“You took something from me that can never be replaced,” he said. “As a father, my only purpose in life is to provide for my family. You took all that away. People say ‘I hope you find peace.’ I’ll never find peace.”

He added: “Your plan didn’t work. You’re pure evil and you were met by good. You weren’t counting on Kendrick Castillo. Remember that name. Remember that face. I hope it haunts you every day of your life.”

Maria Castillo, speaking through sobs, said McKinney took away her best friend.

“This evil killer took him from me five days before Mother’s Day,” she said.

18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler said a long sentence was needed to “send a clear message” to anyone thinking of following McKinney’s path.

“This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest crimes in the history of Douglas County,” Brauchler said. “And it was intended to be much, much worse.”

Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock, whose agency responded to the shooting, asked that McKinney be given the maximum possible sentence. He said that would show “that good prevails.”

MORE: A slain deputy. A political brawl. A school shooting: How Sheriff Tony Spurlock is handling years of turmoil

Morgan McKinney, Alec’s mother, asked Holmes to take into consideration her son’s age and grant him some leniency. She said she, too, lost a child the day of the shooting.

“I understand that he must pay the consequences of his crime,” Morgan McKinney said.

She addressed Alec during the hearing: “I don’t understand how we ended up where we’re at.”

This is a developing story that will be updated.

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tvtiokistwimicmptgxz-blog · 5 years ago

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Four experiments examined ironic effects of repetition, effects opposite to those desired (cf. D. M. Wegner, 1994). For an exclusion task, participants were to respond "yes" to words heard earlier but "no" to words that were read earlier. Results from young adults given adequate time to respond showed that false alarms to earlier-read words decreased with their repetition. An opposite, ironic effect of repetition was found for elderly adults–false alarms to earlier-read words increased with repetition. Younger adults forced to respond quickly or to perform a secondary task while reading words showed the same ironic effect of repetition as did elderly adults. The process-dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991, 1998) was used to show that factors that produce ironic effects do so by reducing recollection while leaving effects of repetition on familiarity unchanged.

n the early weeks of 2009, Chris Cole man began telling friends and associates in Columbia, Illinois, that he was worried about the safety of his family. He had been receiving death threats from an online stalker, and the e-mails had begun to mention his wife, Sheri, and his sons, Garret and Gavin, who were nine and eleven. Coleman asked his neighbor across the street, a police officer, to train a security camera on the front of his house.

Coleman understood surveillance better than most. He worked as the security chief for Joyce Meyer, whose cable television program, “Enjoying Everyday Life,” is at the center of an evangelical empire estimated to be worth more than a hundred million dollars a year; it includes a radio program, self-help and children’s books, CDs, podcasts, overseas missions, and motivational conventions. Initially, the threats focussed on Meyer, warning that if she didn’t quit preaching she’d pay the price, but the stalker soon turned his wrath on Coleman and his family. One note to Sheri read “Fuck you! Deny your God publicly or else!” Another read “Time is running out for you and your family.”

On May 5th, Coleman left his home early to work out at the gym. Afterward, when he called his wife and got no answer, he asked his neighbor the policeman to check on her. The officer found a horrifying scene. Red graffiti—“Fuck you” and “U have paid!”—was scrawled on the walls and on the sheets of the beds in which Sheri, Gavin, and Garret lay strangled to death. A back window was open, suggesting that someone had entered the house out of view of the camera.

The police quickly came to suspect Coleman himself. A long trail of text messages on his phone made it clear that he was having an affair with a cocktail waitress. And if Coleman had left Sheri he would have risked losing his salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year. Meyer maintained a strict no-divorce policy among her employees, in keeping with her understanding of Scripture. In February, Sheri had told a friend that she was afraid of her husband and “said that if anything happened to her, Chris did it,” the friend testified.

Still, Coleman maintained his innocence, and the evidence against him was circumstantial. His DNA was not found anywhere that would connect him directly to the crime. At the trial last spring, nearly forty witnesses and evidentiary specialists took the stand. The modern science of forensics has spawned numerous specialties and subspecialties, including forensic branches of dentistry, anthropology, sculpting, and even entomology (interpreting the presence of certain insects to fix the time of death). At the trial, experts could show that some of the threatening e-mails had been sent from Coleman’s computer, but they couldn’t prove that it hadn’t been hacked. They could tell the jury that Coleman had purchased a can of red spray paint months before, but they couldn’t link Coleman to the can used in the crime. Toward the end of the trial, prosecutors asked for the testimony of Robert Leonard, a practitioner of one of the lesser-known subspecialties: forensic linguistics.

These days, the word “forensic” conjures an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” episode who delicately retrieves a single hair or a chip of paint from a crime scene, surmises the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as incontrovertible evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and segments of audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth. In the Coleman case, Leonard, the head of the linguistics program at Hofstra University, on Long Island, was punctilious in his presentation. Relying largely on word choice and spelling, he suggested that the same person had written the threatening e-mails and sprayed the graffiti, and that those specimens bore similarities to Coleman’s prose style.

In preparing his testimony, Leonard consulted with his frequent partner, James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist. Fitzgerald brought the field to prominence in 1996 with his work in the case of the Unabomber, who had sent a series of letter bombs to professors over several years. Fitzgerald had successfully urged the F.B.I. to publish the Unabomber’s “manifesto”—a rambling thirty-five-thousand-word declaration of the perpetrator’s philosophy. Many people called the Bureau to say they recognized the writing style. By analyzing syntax, word choice, and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the range of possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. For instance, the bomber’s use of the terms “broad” and “negro,” for women and African-Americans, enabled Fitzgerald roughly to calculate his age. Both Kaczynski and the Unabomber also showed a preference for dozens of unusual words and expressions, such as “chimerical,” “anomic,” and “cool-headed logicians,” as well as the less familiar version of the cliché “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” A judge ruled that the linguistic evidence was strong enough to prompt him to issue a search warrant for Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana; what was found there put him in prison for life.

Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic linguistics, and started the Communicated Threat Assessment Database. The ctad is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing more than a million words and some four thousand “criminally oriented communications.” At the Coleman trial, Leonard noted that many of the killer’s spray-painted sentences began with the word “fuck,” as did the e-mails and letters—usage that at first might seem common. But he explained that a ctad search showed that only 0.8 per cent of threatening notes used “fuck” as the first word in a sentence. In addition, both the graffiti and the threatening notes relied on two obscenities, “fuck” and “bitch,” to the exclusion of all others. Leonard went on to compare the graffiti with two hundred and twenty-one e-mails known to have been written by Coleman. He noted that the shorthand “U” for “you” is often found in cell-phone text messages but rarely in e-mails. Both the killer and Coleman used “U” in e-mails. Coleman also consistently put the apostrophe of a contraction in the wrong place—“doesnt_’ ”_ and “cant’ ”—as did the killer. Leonard’s testimony was disputed in the courtroom, but, in a case with no physical evidence firmly linking Coleman to the crime, Leonard’s words—and Coleman’s—took on added weight. After a day of deliberations, the jury found Coleman guilty, which made him eligible for the death penalty; the judge sentenced Coleman to three life terms in prison.

Most people assume that meaning is embedded in the words they speak. But, according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous, teased into existence through vocalized puffs of air, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eyebrows, and nuanced nostril flares. The transmission of meaning still involves primate mechanics worked out during the Pliocene era. And context is crucial; when we try to record a conversation, we are capturing only part of the gestalt of that moment. What might appear to be a solid audio recording can easily morph into an acoustic Rorschach test. The plot of “The Conversation,” Francis Ford Coppola’s classic film, turns on this very point: the protagonist spends the entire movie mishearing a tiny clip of audiotape. Such errors and misunderstandings pervade our lives, in ways that modern language detectives are only beginning to make clear.

The pioneer of forensic linguistics is widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a retired Georgetown University professor and the author of such fundamental textbooks as “Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom.” Shuy is now eighty-one years old and lives in Montana. When I asked him to describe the origins of forensic linguistics, he referred me to an Old Testament story. After a confusing battle with the Ephraimites, the Gileadites were able to identify the enemy by asking them each to pronounce the Hebrew word “shibboleth.” If they pronounced the first syllable in the Ephraimic dialect, “sib,” instead of in the Gilead dialect, “shib,” they were killed. According to Judges 12:6, some forty-two thousand Ephraimites failed that first linguistic test.

The field’s more recent origins might be traced to an airplane flight in 1979, when Shuy found himself sitting next to a lawyer. By the end of the flight, Shuy had a recommendation as an expert witness in his first murder case. Since then, he’s been involved in numerous cases in which forensic analysis revealed how meaning had been distorted by the process of writing or recording. In a bribery trial in the nineteen-eighties, two Nevada brothel commissioners were caught on tape in a crucial exchange. When they were offered a bribe, one turned to the other and, according to the police transcript, said, “I would take a bribe, wouldn’t you?” Shuy analyzed the tape and, on the stand, testified that the defendant had actually said the opposite: “I wouldn’t take a bribe, would you?” The tape was scratchy. Moreover, in conversational speech, the “n’t” of a contraction is barely vocalized. It was hard to hear—or, rather, easy to hear what the listener was primed to hear. But two facts were indisputable, Shuy noted: both versions of the sentence had exactly eight syllables, and the pause fell just before the last two syllables. Thus, Shuy testified, only one reading of the sentence made sense: “I wouldn’t take a bribe, would you?” The trial resulted in a hung jury.

Shuy has become famous in his discipline for some of the field’s finest Holmesian aperçus. Early in his career, the police in Illinois approached him regarding a notorious kidnapping case; they had several suspects, and they hoped his reading of the ransom notes might help narrow down the list of suspects. In each note, the kidnapper demanded money in a semiliterate rant: “No kops! Come alone!!,” followed by a terse instruction—“Put it in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner 18th and Carlson.” Shuy studied the letters and then asked, “Is one of your suspects an educated man born in Akron, Ohio?” The cops were stunned. There was one who matched that description perfectly, and when confronted he confessed. As Shuy subsequently explained, “kop” and “kan” most likely were intentional misspellings by someone posing as illiterate. And he knew from his research that the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street—sometimes known as the “tree belt,” “tree lawn,” or “sidewalk buffer”—is called the “devil’s strip” only in Akron, Ohio.

In recent years, following Shuy’s lead, a growing number of linguists have applied their techniques in criminal cases, such as Chris Coleman’s, and even in major commercial lawsuits. An upcoming suit between Apple and Microsoft, slated to go before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, features two stars of the field, Rob Leonard and Ronald Butters, a retired Duke University linguist. At issue is: What part of speech is the phrase “app store”? Leonard, siding with Apple, contends that it is a proper noun, which is to say a trademarked expression that should be capitalized. Butters’s work upholds Microsoft’s view: the term consists of two common nouns and is not proprietary at all.

Butters is a past president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, which has some two hundred and fifty members. Most of them, he said, are in the United States, England, and Spain, but interest has spread to Australia, Japan, and China. Today, one can study forensic linguistics at several schools, and last year Leonard inaugurated the first graduate program in forensic linguistics, at Hofstra. For those earning a master’s degree, the field offers job prospects outside the courtroom. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hires language detectives to assist agents in evaluating asylum seekers. In such cases, forensic linguists interview applicants to verify that their accents and their use of idiom and slang match those of the country they claim to have fled.

Increasingly in the courtroom, however, forensic linguists have been asked to weigh in on matters of “author identification”—not to determine the grammatical significance of certain words but to identify who said or wrote them. This trend has widened an old schism in the field. Given the stakes in, say, the Coleman case—a felony murder potentially involving the death sentence—some linguists hold the view that Leonard is taking forensic linguists into groundbreaking territory. Others, including Butters, wonder if he isn’t leading them over a cliff.

When I visited Leonard one afternoon at Hofstra, he was reviewing a range of cases: another murder involving the killer’s letters; a libel suit that turned on a single, ambiguous sound; an attempt to identify a potential assassin of a prominent politician; and a Whirlpool Corporation lawsuit involving the meaning of the word “steam.” In a modest office walled with books, I found Leonard working at a laptop. He was noticeably kempt, in pressed slacks and a crisp blue button-down shirt—a Sam Spade of semantics. His hair was surprisingly dark for a man in his sixties; his eyes were playful and his smile fetching, a little bit show biz.

Long before he emerged as one of the foremost language detectives in the country, Leonard had achieved a different kind of celebrity. As an undergraduate at Columbia in the nineteen-sixties, he and his brother George revolutionized the school’s a-cappella group by having everyone dress as faux Brooklyn thugs (white T-shirts, greased-back hair) and sing up-tempo arrangements of such nineteen-fifties doo-wop classics as “Duke of Earl” and “At the Hop.” They named the group Sha Na Na and became wildly popular. One of their hits was “Teen Angel,” which Leonard sang at Woodstock just before Jimi Hendrix, who had invited Sha Na Na, débuted his version of ��The Star-Spangled Banner.”

By 1970, Leonard the heartthrob had to choose between academia and show business. “All of our good friends were dying of drug overdoses,” he said. “I just decided to move on.” Leonard finished his undergraduate studies at Columbia; William Labov, a prominent linguist who had introduced him to the field, helped him earn a fellowship. Leonard pursued a scholarly career until 2000, when he heard Shuy give a lecture urging linguists to apply their training in the real world—especially in the courtroom, as language detectives. Leonard struck up a professional friendship with Shuy and has been consulting on cases ever since.

As we sat in his office, Leonard described his recent involvement in the tabloid saga of Natalee Holloway. In 2005, after graduating from high school in Alabama, Holloway went with her friends on a chaperoned trip to Aruba and disappeared. The case remains unsolved. The chief suspect is a young Dutchman named Joran van der Sloot, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to charges of murdering a twenty-one-year-old woman in Peru. In Aruba, two young brothers, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, were initially arrested (they and van der Sloot had partied with Holloway the night before she disappeared), but were released in the first weeks of the investigation. After being the subjects of a television exposé, the brothers are suing Dr. Phil McGraw and CBS for defamation. The Kalpoe legal team has hired Leonard as their expert witness in a lawsuit that could turn on the pronunciation of a single syllable.

The “Dr. Phil” show promoted the exposé by claiming, “You are going to find out what he”—Deepak—“says he did with Natalee the night she disappeared.” An announcer adds, “What he said brought Natalee’s mother to tears.” On the show, viewers listen to the audio of Deepak being secretly videotaped by a private investigator named Jamie Skeeters and making an astonishing confession:

Skeeters: I’m sure she had sex with all of you.

Kalpoe: She did. You’d be surprised how simple it was.

Leonard examined the uncut version of the exchange. In it, Kalpoe denies having sex with Holloway. “Simple” refers to the fact that, from his point of view, the evening was uneventful:

Skeeters: I’m sure she had sex with all of you, and . . . good . . .

Kalpoe: No, she didn’t.

Skeeters: O.K., well, I mean, good. If she did, fine.

Kalpoe: You’d be surprised how simple it was that night. [cartoon id="a16677"]

Watching an unedited piece of footage doesn’t require a linguistics expert, but Leonard realized that there were other issues at play. During the covert interview, the microphone generated a great deal of confusing ambient sound. Moreover, the hidden camera captured only the top of Kalpoe’s head, so his face and lips weren’t visible. Amid the muffled noises, and before Kalpoe speaks, there is an odd sound—sha!—which Kalpoe appears to make just before “No.” When I met with Leonard, he had been concentrating on this sound. An expert hired by the opposing counsel was taking the position that the sha! might not be a throat-clearing or some other stray sound, as Leonard contends, but a “voiceless vowel with ‘r’ coloration.”

Leonard explained: “Vowels are the most open of sounds, and when you come off a vowel and cease saying it you switch the vocal apparatus to pronounce the next sound.” In some words, like “forth,” the “r” gets full phonetic treatment, but in many words, like “bird” and “sure,” the “r” isn’t fully voiced and instead becomes a shadow of the vowel, just because it’s easier to say that way. If the lawyers for “Dr. Phil” can show that the first word Kalpoe spoke in that sentence was “sure,” and that there is no audible “n’t” at the end of “did,” then the transcript of Kalpoe’s first utterance changes from “No, she didn’t” to its opposite, “Sure, no, she did.”

Like all linguists, Leonard starts from the position that meaning is delicately contingent, and that the most common way we compensate for this frailty is “redundancy.” We say the same thing more than once, or in more than one way. In his written report to the court on this case, Leonard notes that the original video of the meeting between Deepak Kalpoe and Skeeters shows Deepak “shaking his head ‘no’ from side to side,” as if to deny the accusations. The program, though, aired only a still photo of Deepak. The case has yet to go to trial, but when it does, Leonard says, he will argue that there is enough redundancy in the semiotic detritus of these sounds to conclude that Kalpoe’s meaning is clear: he is stating that he did not have sex with Holloway that night.

It may be that the changes made to the edited interview were deliberately damaging, but forensic linguists offer another possibility: that a subtle presumption of guilt unconsciously overwhelmed the editing process and inverted the meaning of the exchange. Such inversions, linguists say, happen far more often than we might like to believe.

According to Leonard, words serve as catalysts, setting off sparks of potential meaning that the listener organizes into more specific meaning by observing facial expressions, body language, and other redundant cues. We then employ another powerful tool: prior experience and the storehouse of narratives that each of us carries—what linguists call “schema.” To every exchange we bring unconscious scripts; as any given sentence unspools, we readjust the schema to make better sense of what we are hearing.

One afternoon at Hofstra, Leonard explained to the twenty students in his introductory course how this works. He wrote a sentence on the board: “John was on his way to school last Friday and was really worried about the math lesson.” He quizzed the students on what they might presume about this story. John is a student, one called out; he is either on a bus or walking.

“So we can just close our eyes and imagine John the schoolboy on the bus,” Leonard said. “But are we all imagining John with the same height, the same hair color?” Nothing in the sentence signals any of that information, yet each of us supplies our own variant, which awaits further verbal data for confirmation.

Leonard wrote another sentence beneath the first: “Last week, he had been unable to control the class.” Who is John now? “A teacher!” someone shouted. And how is John getting to school? “A car!”

Leonard wrote a third sentence: “It was not fair for the math teacher to leave him in charge.” Instantly, the students revelled in John’s new identity as a janitor or a substitute teacher.

Meaning, Leonard noted, is constantly bent by expectation, and can be grossly distorted. Indeed, one of Shuy’s first studies, of the Abscam trials of the nineteen-eighties, reveals just how easily the meaning of linguistic evidence can be twisted by a background assumption of guilt. Abscam was an F.B.I. sting operation in which nine United States congressmen were lured to meetings with a government agent posing as an Arab oil sheikh with “Abdul Enterprises.” The initial meeting was described as a legitimate business deal. At one point, though, the agent playing the sheikh would offer the congressmen an outright bribe. Their conversations were videotaped, and some of the evidence was breathtakingly unambiguous. Representative John Jenrette, of South Carolina, accepted the money cheerfully and chirped on tape, “I’ve got larceny in my blood!”

The sting resulted in seven indictments. Toward the end came the trial of Senator Harrison (Pete) Williams, of New Jersey. Shuy listened to those tapes and became convinced that the Senator was innocent. Whenever the sheikh raised the issue of bribery or illegality, Williams steered the conversation to legal ground. At one point, the sheikh put the bribe directly to Williams: “I would like to give you . . . some money for, for permanent residence.” The first four words of Williams’s reply were “No, no, no, no.”

A prosecution memo at the time stated that there was no case against Williams, but the judge, who, in his ruling, decried “the cynicism and hypocrisy of corrupt public officials,” set it aside; Williams was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison. Shuy later noted that, with such attitudes prevalent, the schema of the “corrupt congressman” overwhelmed even the plainest facts pointing to Williams’s innocence. After the trial, the lead juror confessed that had he known all the facts he would not have found Williams guilty. The Senator was forced to resign his seat, though he declared his innocence at every opportunity. He was the first senator in eighty years to go to prison; President Bill Clinton refused to pardon him.

Shortly after the Unabomber case was cracked, in 1996, forensic linguistics gained another public boost. Donald Foster, an English professor at Vassar, employed the most basic forensic technique—tallying word frequency—to unmask the anonymous author of “Primary Colors,” the best-selling novel about Clinton’s first Presidential campaign: Joe Klein. Foster analyzed dozens of pages of writing from several suspects, including Time’s Walter Shapiro and the former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. He compiled a concordance that showed how frequently each writer used certain words, compared this information with a database of word frequency in the novel, and was able to identify the author.

For a short time, the potential of forensic linguistics seemed limitless. With enough raw data and computing power, a trail of words might betray its author as reliably as a set of fingerprints identifies an individual. Foster, though, was a professor of literature, not a linguist; he was not trained to use the forensic methods that Shuy had mastered, such as listening for unconscious semantic patterns and looking for distinctive phrases or unusual colloquialisms. Overconfident, Foster went on to identify a suspect in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, only to learn that he had already been cleared by the police. In the days after September 11, 2001, Foster falsely implicated the bioweapons expert Steven Hatfill as the person who had sent several anthrax-laden letters around the country; the accusation wrecked Hatfill’s career and resulted in a settled lawsuit. Foster then recanted a previous claim linking a 1612 poem of dubious provenance to Shakespeare; another academic had shown that the analysis was fatally flawed. Foster has since retreated to his campus in Poughkeepsie.

Foster’s disgrace left most forensic linguists feeling cautious. Now that Leonard’s work is bringing the field back into the realm of author identification, some are worried. Ronald Butters, the Duke linguist, provided expert testimony for the defense at the Coleman trial and challenged every aspect of Leonard’s testimony as “linguistically meaningless.” Butters argued that even though certain linguistic oddities, such as using “U” for “you” or consistently misplacing the apostrophe in contractions, seemed distinctive, there weren’t enough examples to be statistically significant. Moreover, Butters told me, it can be tricky to compare different genres of even a single person’s writing. Reading, say, a routine office e-mail alongside rants spray-painted on a wall makes about as much sense as comparing the prose in one of Wallace Stevens’s insurance riders with the cadences of his poem “Sunday Morning.”

“Really bad linguistic testimony is when you go to court and say you’re pretty sure that this person wrote that, and yet you’re comparing apples and oranges,” Butters said. Leonard argues that he never claims to name a specific author but simply presents comparative evidence for the jury. Butters, Leonard said, “is a specialist in trademark cases, so I’m not sure what his experience was in authorship cases, and they are two quite different applications of linguistics.” On the stand, Butters admitted that he hadn’t read all Leonard’s research on the evidence; his challenge was focussed on Leonard’s methodology and its purported usefulness in the identification of individual authors. Butters said, “Forensic linguistics has not come to a place where we are mature enough to answer a lot of these questions.”

Carole Chaski, the executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and the president of Alias Technology, in Georgetown, Delaware, which markets linguistic software, agrees. Chaski has been working to perfect a computer algorithm that identifies patterns hidden in syntax. With enough linguistic material to work with, she says, she can run the program and draw accurate linguistic conclusions. Her goal is to develop a standard “validated tool” that police, civil investigators, and linguists can turn to when testifying in crucial cases, such as a capital murder trial. “If this is real, these tools should be so reliable that I can automate them and somebody can use them,” she says. Chaski foresees a time when forensic-linguistic “technicians” will do what DNA technicians in crime labs do: “They learn how to run a piece of software or run a Southern blot”—a standard DNA test—“through electrophoresis and then go, ‘Here are my results.’ ”

In Chaski’s view, a trail of words can be parsed to reveal its author, but that work is best done quantitatively, through brute computational force, not qualitatively, by subjective scholars. Forensic linguistics, she believes, should not be limited to a few highly credentialled experts who have been approved by the courts to testify. She warned me of the recklessness of an “academic” and an “ex-cop” hanging out a shingle, and said their methodology was “fraught with error.” In the small world of forensic linguistics, it was obvious that she meant Leonard and Fitzgerald.

Leonard said that Chaski’s computerized approach made him “want to take a nap.” His methods and findings are all transparent, he noted, whereas her algorithm is a proprietary “black box.” He does not believe that computer software can eliminate the need for human interpretation. “Even those algorithms have to be coded by humans,” he said; any good linguist will depend on both quantitative and qualitative analysis. “One thing we have learned about language is that it is a very human form of communication. You have to have human intelligence, human powers of inference, and human encyclopedic knowledge of the world” to make sense of it. At the end of the day, the scientific findings depend on human interpretation, Leonard said. Computers can crunch reams of words, but only people can decide what the words mean.

Shuy told me that he, too, initially had doubts about author identification. “That is how I felt until Rob Leonard started working,” he said. “Rob has come up with this competing-hypothesis approach.” In the same way that DNA technicians will report only the statistical likelihood that the killer’s DNA and the DNA found on the murder weapon are the same, Leonard creates a number of opposing hypotheses and presents the evidence in light of them. In the Coleman trial, Leonard did not declare that Coleman was the author of the red graffiti and the threatening e-mails; rather, he testified that the language in them “is consistent with” the language in Coleman’s writings.

“I don’t know any forensic linguists who will claim that they can find the answer for you,” Shuy said. “Our role is to analyze the data and give it to the triers of the facts, who have to evaluate it or issue the ultimate decision of innocence or guilt. We don’t go that far, and shouldn’t.”

Shuy also noted that it was Leonard who popularized a safeguard against comparing unrelated documents, called a Community of Practice filter. For instance, Coleman’s use of “U” for “you” would be of no use in a pool of text messages, but as an unusual abbreviation in an e-mail it becomes another point of data.

Recently, Leonard used this technique to question a charge, levelled at a jailed gang member, of murdering a prison guard. Prosecutors had linked the prisoner, Jarvis Masters, to a note that ultimately led to the guard’s murder, based on misspellings such as “has’nt” and “is’nt” and the use of “no” for “know.” But in his research Leonard learned that the way Masters’s gang, the Black Guerrilla Family, disciplined its members was to make them copy propaganda by hand. All the gang members had picked up the oddities pinned on Masters, Leonard determined. “Thus, when we examine the corpus of non-murder documents written by other B.G.F. members,” Leonard said, “we discover the features that may at first seem to educated writers like the prosecution to be randomly incorrect, highly idiosyncratic features were not random at all but systemic features of the B.G.F. community.”

On some level, extracting meaning from linguistic evidence is what we all do intuitively every day. Forensic professionals go about the same work, with better tools and a heightened sense of how easily meaning can be misconstrued. As one forensic-linguistics firm, Testipro, puts it in its online promotional pitch, the field is “the basis of the entire legal system. Both Judges and Juries are using informal or unconscious FL”—forensic linguistics—“every time they weigh a witness statement or testimony document.” The field is bound to thrive on the ever-growing piles of what Shuy calls “data.” Our embrace of personal media—e-mails, text messages, voice mail, tweets—has created an avalanche of tossed-off language, an evidentiary trail that linguists are getting better and better at following.

Shuy believes that forensic linguistics can do for language crimes, such as bribery, blackmail, and extortion, what DNA has done for violent crimes. It could offer a counterweight to the many old-school methods, like lineups and unrecorded police interrogations, that are heavily relied upon despite serious flaws. “I won’t claim that we have anything remotely like DNA in this work,” Shuy said, “but we are a whole lot better than a lot of the crazy schemes that cops are being taught.”

Leonard offered a sobering statistic: eighty per cent of people who were later exonerated by DNA evidence had falsely confessed to their alleged crimes. “When I got into this business, I figured if there was an eyewitness or a confession, then case closed, the guy absolutely, one hundred per cent did it. But those are the two shakiest types of evidence, really.” He recalled many cases where a confession on paper turned out to be no confession at all. “The way humans perceive language is according to schemas, which lead to misperceptions as much as perceptions.” In a sense, investigators who try to extract evidence from confessions are acting as linguists, too, albeit poorly trained ones.

A few weeks ago, Leonard finished testifying in the retrial of Brian Hummert, a Pennsylvania man charged with strangling his wife. After initial suspicions pointed to Hummert, the police received handwritten letters claiming that a serial killer, not Hummert, had committed the murder. Once again, the linguistic evidence was important to the case. The notes bore a resemblance to a series of stalker letters that preceded the killing and to the defendant’s writing. As an expert witness, Leonard testified about Hummert’s prose style, noting the rare use of what he calls “ironic repetition” in constructions such as “She tried to break it off, so I broke her neck.” And all the letters contained a linguistic habit that, Leonard testified, he had found nowhere else: a tendency to use contractions in negative statements (“I can’t”) but not in positive ones (“I am”). The jury was out for forty-five minutes and returned a verdict of guilty.

Posted by // on 2018-05-25 10:19:30

Tagged: , lights , indoor , room , box , ironic , repetition , drawing , denial

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years ago

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Sundance 2019: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Clemency

Joe Talbot’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is the tale of two friends, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), and a Victorian home in the middle of a highly gentrified neighborhood. Jimmie claims that his grandfather built every part of the home back in the 1940s, and he just wants it back in the family. The house, which he goes so far as to paint when its current owner is not home, is more than just a building to him. It’s a heartbreaking symbol for how the whole city he grew up in has changed, and has devalued the lives of men and women like him. But this emotional set-up for the script, co-written by Fails and Talbot, is only just the foundation for what proves to be a singular, luminous American story.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” proclaims a next-level brilliance from it opening sequence in which Jimmie and Montgomery speed around San Francisco (Jimmie on his skateboard, Montgomrey sometimes dashing behind him), displaying Talbot's major league precision in color, editing, motion, and music. It gets a true adrenaline from this filmmaking in its first half, going from one visually stunning scene from the next, introducing a wildly new color palette compared to the last. This is the kind of movie that sucks you in with its vision, that begs to be rewatched in order to savor every shot or strange little item in its production design for various living spaces (like the cluttered home of Danny Glover’s supporting character and grandfather to Montgomery). Talbot quickly announces himself as a filmmaker who actively considers everything going on in a frame, and how to define his characters by their surroundings, and the music that accompanies them (a whimsical Joni Mitchell song over the aggressive Greek chorus of men that talk shit outside Grandpa Allen's house is probably the best example). All the while, different tones of storytelling are blended—some beats are extremely funny in their dry manner, others are completely heartbreaking—and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” remains consistently gorgeous and unpredictable.

Talbot doesn’t lean on this energy the entire time: the second half is more subdued, spending more time in the house, while getting to know the men internally. It’s a crucial choice, as the film would've been exhausting if it went the same speed from start to finish, and it helps the movie go inward, detailing the lives of supporting people like Kofi, a member of that Greek chorus who talks shit about Montgomery and Jimmie being "soft." In more tender moments, Talbot's film observes how these men have a friendship that itself is like a peaceful family, a contrast to the lost relationships they have with their own parents.

A pivotal aspect to this story are Jimmie and Montgomery. They’re two gentle friends who are clearly removed from the aggression that's observed in other black men within this film. They reminded me most of Charlie Brown and Linus from Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” comics: Along with both of them wearing the same clothes in every day, Majors clings his red drawing book like Linus does with his blanket, while being the introspective, philosophical one. They both have a boyish innocence that is striking, a very specific artistic choice in their acting and in storytelling that works as an honest expression on the film’s contrasting portrayals of masculinity.

Talbot displays perhaps his most confidence with his script (co-written by Talbot and Fails), which is simplified to the two men trying to get the house, fill it with themselves, and hold onto it. He wants you to appreciate the magic of the house, the way that light cuts through in different rooms, its ornate detail from start to finish. Even more, he wants you to recognize and love these characters, too. The film's incredible tension comes from watching Jimmie and Montgomery in this gorgeous city--alongside other larger-than-life individuals--and seeing just how much these men do not have a place in it.

“Clemency” is one of the toughest films playing in the Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition this year, but with its tactful and rich world-building for its story about the death penalty, it’s also one of the best. Writer/director Chinonye Chukwu uses calibrated artistry across the board to tell a sensitive story about a prison warden’s very challenging position of power, its performances providing unforgettable faces for those whose lives circle around capital punishment.

In a stunning opening scene, we see a lethal injection go wrong, requiring different needle placements and horror for those who have been selected to watch. It is not a peaceful route to the required result. All the while, Alfre Woodard’s Warden Bernadine Williams remains impossibly stoic as she stands over the man. It’s just one moment in which you see the control that she has over this place, a woman caught between a clear pride she has for her work that has elements that continue to wear down on her. Throughout the film, Woodard is brilliant in how she shows a woman who does not easily let her guard down in a job that demands so much of her strong spirit, something that affects her relationship with her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) and can be challenged whenever she interacts with the prisoners that she knows more like a caring teacher than someone just working a job. When Bernadine does reach her breaking point, after later seeing the tragedy of her work, it’s a masterful display of a face failing to beat its repressed emotions, and Chukwu holds on her face for a stunning minute-long close-up.

But more than just about Warden Williams and the prison she watches over, the story is about a life we see in the headlines: Aldis Hodge’s Anthony Woods, a man sentenced to death for the killing of a cop, which he insists he didn’t do. Hodge carries on the film’s exhilarating ambition to express feelings that are unconscionable outside of a prison cell, like when he silently processes that he is finally about to die after a visit from Woodard’s character and then aims to smash his head against a concrete wall. Later, he helps “Clemency” show the tragedy of men like Anthony, as he gets a glimmer of hope that he might belong to a family, and clings to that fantasy while waiting on a message of clemency from the governor. One of the best supporting turns at Sundance this year, it's an incredible physical and emotional feat.

Within Chukwu’s impressive work with this material, she populates the story with concrete themes as explored by side characters who revolve around Warden Williams, and fill in the world of “Clemency.” Wendell helps paint a sense of the sometimes silly, but conflicted home that Warden Williams can return to, and has a striking moment in which he quotes Invisible Man to his high school students, while Chukwu shows us glimpses of listening faces. Anthony’s lawyer Marty (Richard Schiff), brings a tenderness to the job as another person who cares about Anthony, providing a friendship to him as much as hope of saving his life. And Michael O’Neill, as Chaplain Kendricks, offers a sense of the spiritual peace that comes with such a job, as if a lifeline for Warden Williams as someone who has also seen the same horrific things that she does on a daily basis. Chukwu unites these characters, vivid and excellent roles for each of these actors, under the theme of finality—all of them proclaim to Warden Williams that they want to retire, as if they have reached their own end with being in the same world as capital punishment.

“Clemency” is that little miracle of filmmaking, a story that answers to unthinkable tonal and narrative challenges it sets for itself by providing a clear vision. The cinematography by Eric Branco becomes its own life source, finding expressive lighting and framing within the drab setting of a prison, making corridors of cells seem all the more endless. Chukwu's film is further proof that great moviemaking is the key to bringing audiences into profound, somber head spaces and places of employment.

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