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.