Tired

          Chains clank as Naeem Williams is escorted by a guard into the courtroom in a beige jumpsuit with stenciled letters and numbers across his back. I am sitting with my sister, a law student, who is catching up with past co-workers from the building. She discusses her future at a law firm in Seattle after a year of clerking in San Antonio. Her co-worker smiles and congratulates her. The defense attorney whispers in Williams’s ear, presumably about the proceedings about to take place. A courtroom employee offers him some leftover Halloween candy from a large plastic bag, of which he accepts. He takes a sip of water and sits back. A small symphony of workers shuffle into place: the stenographer, attorneys, courtroom managers and security guards. A gavel pounds and all rise as the judge enters the room an up to the bench.

            “Your honor, may I have permission to unshackle my client?”
            “Again, I’m going to have to deny that request.”

            The man twenty feet away from me is the first of which I have seen, a potential offender of homicide up for capital punishment. My father is the presiding Judge on the bench. I am home from college during a vacation and thought it interesting to attend an event of this magnitude. I didn’t think it would be anything more that just interesting, anything beyond some morbid curiosity. Now I’m eating a Butterfinger from the same bag that a potential murderer was just looking through.

I have little interest in pursuing law as the rest of my direct family has, although I am in awe of the scale and importance of our country’s judicial system. You can’t help but be a little impressed by an institution that keeps justice as its aim, processing and allotting punishment to wrongdoers. I am certainly impressed and maybe a little intimidated by this windowless courtroom lit by fluorescent lights twenty feet high, wired with a dozen microphones that feed from thick wooden tables and dominated by the imposing Judge’s bench invisibly lined with Kevlar incase anything goes wrong. Then of course there is Williams himself who is dressed as the prototype of a murderer. This whole situation has turned out to be a little more than interesting, and I’m a little weirded out.

The proceeding continues and is aimed at unpacking the diagnosed disorder that Williams may or may not have. It is called Dependent Personality Disorder and its basic idea is that the sufferer is dependent on others to make decisions and cannot function properly on his own. If this is the case, Williams would have been technically “dependent” on his wife, who has already pleaded guilty to the murder of their daughter. Two top psychiatrists are the expert witnesses and they discuss the diagnosis, the disorder itself and a hundred other details of Williams’s mind. All the while, Williams sits perfectly still and passively listens to experts talk about his problems, which could eventually play a role in determining how he might die. He seldom moves but to occasionally push up his glasses. Who was the optometrist who fitted and prescribed a potential murderer’s glasses? Williams also looks very clean and put together. How did he shower today and for the past several thousand days since the incident took place in 2005? Who has been cutting his hair this whole time? I couldn’t handle the wait.

My mind starts to wander not because I can’t focus but because the whole proceeding has become in a way boring. The same way as when you move on from the lion exhibit at the zoo. How can lions ever be boring? Yet my father warned me of this this very morning. He understood my wanting to come to the hearing, but informed me of the dryness of matter that would be discussed. One can only listen to two psychiatrists talk about the ins and outs of a very specific disorder for so long, even with a person like Williams in the room.

During a recess in the hearing, my sister, father and I go out to lunch. My father smiles as he sees us waiting in his chambers after it’s all over. He asks us sarcastically how much fun we had. My sister converses with him for a minute on some law terminology that I do not understand. We go and get Subway while Williams likely sits in a holding cell eating some assigned prison food for the thousandth time, one meal closer to finding out if and when he’s going to die.

It puzzled me how I could have thoughts like these and carry on with my day. It puzzled me how I could have easily fallen asleep in the same room as someone who could have killed his own daughter. Was I in some way used to this feeling, prepared for it somehow? My sister and I say goodbye to our father, who has to dawn his robe once again and go back into that courtroom to deal with this case for many more months. My sister and I drive home, play with our dog, and take a nap.