The blood of monsters

Do not doubt that the justice system is shot through with logic. It is a logic that dictates that, since something happened in Sioux Lookout, my client is now housed in a Kenora jail, each week shuttled between courthouses in three different towns, but always sent back to that cell, simply because our logic finds no other appropriate place for a suspect homeless man to go. This same flow of consequences finds me boarding a small plane under the pre-dawn moon, my mind aflood with images of this man, exhausted, fumbling, mumbling for an hour in a bright interrogation room, being skillfully led by a crisp cop in a tie to talk about what may have happened in his haze, behind a dumpster in Sioux Lookout. Logic that extracts his words into a single typed sentence in the police report: "eventually the accused admitted...". But this tight, authoritative stream of consequences hits its first real eddies, for me, in a small partitioned chamber in the Dryden lock-up. It's here that I first meet my client after representing him for a month, after these weeks of zipped-up investigation papers, halting phone calls and repeated delays. Logic's narrative slowly unspools to human.

It’s hard to speak and listen in these places. A thick, scratched and smeared strip of hard plastic separates me from a worn man in old clothes, and we must frequently bob our heads down to the one low grate, in odd pantomime, to exchange stories. Mine starts out straightforward: it’s time to decide, I tell him, we’ve gotta usher this case along. I know you want… no, they won’t let you… it’s gonna be hard, because of what…no, I haven’t talked to…well, here’s the law… . An echo sounds from a recent meeting, this one held in a nice office thirty steps away: “You realise he’ll be an extremely poor witness, right?” the Crown quite logically responds when I suggest this man requires a trial, “I mean, the guy’s a street drunk!” True, this truth, obscuring truth. His tale weaves, through the plastic glass, a wandering novel told in the minutes before a guard snorts through the door, if this meeting needs to go much longer. I ask unnecessary questions.

Because it's poetry month

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

Law is the wisdom of the old
The impotent grandfathers shrilly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good-morning and Good-night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd
Very angry and very loud
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the law is
And that all know this,
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so may men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.

Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don’t know where or why
Like love we can’t compel or fly
Like love we often weep
Like love we seldom keep.

- W.H. Auden (1939)