Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [59]
I should have explained all that to the bus driver. I really think I scared him.
Karma Takes a Hand
Sincerity is a strange beast. Most people would like to believe, I think, that they are honest. They value their reputations, their good names, and their ability to be trusted. And yet, we lie. Possibly we are not creatures of integrity but creatures of opportunity. It is said that there is no profit in lying. But what if there were? What if our jobs, our careers, our fortunes, or our lifestyles were at stake? What if our “profit” were the absence of losing something critical to us? Would we be likely to be truthful? Perhaps the best test of someone’s integrity is when the jar holds the most cookies.
I got a chance to both see someone be tested and be tested myself in the week of Sincerity, thanks to the trial of an (alleged) impaired driver and a grandmother.
The trial was a run-of-the-mill impaired-driving trial, and notwithstanding an inevitable constitutional challenge, some scanty evidence on essential points, and a consistently well-prepared defense lawyer on the other side, I went into the trial with some (largely unwarranted) confidence. What I didn’t know was that my main witness and the principal investigator differed, though neither of them knew it, on a central point of the evidence.
Here was Ben calling me out. In my pretrial interview of the main witness, an impossibly honest, hardworking man, it became apparent that though his testimony was going to provide most of the evidence against the accused, it was clearly going to strengthen the constitutional argument I was sure the defense was going to raise.
One of the obligations of a prosecutor is to reveal all of the relevant information in the hands of the prosecution to the accused. What the witness had told me was not really new. The rules of disclosure, looked at in a certain way, would not have required me to reveal what I had learned in the pretrial interview. Legal ambiguity aside, there was no way that I was going to hide the information from the defense. Even if my own personal moral code did not compel me to reveal it (which it did), my own sense of long-term career survival assured its revelation.
As I suspected, the lawyer used what I passed on from the witness. It strengthened the defense’s case, and as a result of that and an error in some documents prepared by another witness, the charges were dismissed. Sincerity had taken a sizable bite out of my metaphorical derriere. Still, I knew I had done the right thing.
I’d like to give Ben Franklin all the credit for this little lesson in virtue. Unfortunately for the premise of this book, the real lesson had come from a grandmother and her troubled grandson.
Earlier in the day, before the unsuccessful prosecution of the impaired driver, I received a call from a woman who had been victimized by her grandson. She wanted me to know that over the weekend, her grandson had tried to take his own life with the assistance of his biological mother (yes, you read that right), who had provided him with a handful of pills. The grandmother, in the face of this colossal human tragedy, was depressed, frightened, and lost. She was watching her grandson, whom she had raised as her own, spiraling into a life of despair. She wasn’t really seeking information or asking me to do anything. She was just letting me know that she had nowhere else to turn.
Later that day, during the sentencing of the young man, that same grandmother read her victim impact statement—a process that allows a victim to describe how a particular offender has affected his or her life. It was the epitome of Sincerity. The grandmother, often turning her attention directly to her grandson, told the court how much the financial burden of the theft was going to hurt her. What was worse, she explained, was the emotional burden of being betrayed. When it was the grandson’s turn to speak—he had refused to be represented by legal aid—I saw another view of Sincerity. Cynical though I have become, it was difficult