The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [251]
Mr. Picton, for his part, wasn’t fooled by the seemingly innocent, humble way that Mr. Darrow questioned the better-off, more educated jury candidates about the “natural state” of men and women, and whether or not human society could’ve deteriorated to the point where the most basic attachments between members of the species—“the natural law of human society,” as Mr. Darrow put it—might be broken without any cause. Mr. Darrow didn’t say outright that the bond between a mother and her children was part of said “natural law”; he didn’t have to. It was clear that most of the people in the courtroom silently believed such to be the case. But in the same way that Mr. Darrow had dismissed any potential juror who spoke openly about female violence, so did Mr. Picton give the axe to any man who voiced a belief in such “natural” or “fundamental” attachments. Mr. Darrow eventually protested that Mr. Picton seemed to be throwing out the “entire concept of natural law,” a notion what he declared was the foundation of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Picton answered that it wasn’t the business of the court to get into such philosophical discussions—they were concerned with criminal, not natural, law. It was an attitude that, while it didn’t earn him any affection from Judge Brown, was perfectly proper and within his rights, and many candidates what Mr. Darrow clearly preferred were duly sent packing.
By noon each man had used up the better portion of his peremptory challenges, and had rejected a few jurors for specific cause, to boot, so that when the midday recess was called only half the jury had been selected. It looked like the afternoon session might get a little testier than the morning had been, for when one or the other of the lawyers ran out of peremptories it meant that he’d have to start coming up with full sets of reasons for rejecting a given candidate. By three o’clock the peremptories on both sides were gone, with five jurors still to be selected; and while Mr. Picton figured that most of the men already in the box were characters that he could probably persuade to see things his way, he also suspected that Judge Brown was a lot more likely to be sympathetic to Mr. Darrow’s stated reasons for rejecting candidates than he would be to the prosecution’s. This suspicion proved justified. Mr. Darrow just kept repeating the idea that “natural law” was the mainstay of all of American government and society: if any man accepted the idea that the “bonds of nature” could be “capriciously broken,” Mr. Darrow said, he was basically saying that the United States itself was a seriously flawed concept—and if he felt that way, said man had no business serving on an American jury.
It was, as the Doctor put it, “ludicrous but singularly effective logic,” expressed by Mr. Darrow as if it were a deeply held conviction but more likely created for the particular case and town he found himself working. (This idea seemed confirmed when we found out that Judge Brown had served as an officer in the Civil War—a fact what Mr. Darrow had most likely discovered.) Mr. Picton had no similarly simple philosophical justification for rejecting jury candidates; in fact, he had no reason at all that appealed to Judge Brown’s old-school patriotism. He could only keep protesting that people’s personal feelings about politics, philosophy, or even religion shouldn’t be allowed to influence their judgment in a criminal proceeding, where guilt or innocence were determined by evidence, not beliefs. Such thinking was a little bloodless for the likes of Judge Brown, and as the shadows grew longer on the courtroom floor it began to wear on him pretty clearly, while Mr. Darrow’s deliberate attempts to appeal to the old man’s deepest