Incantation

My friends who can't draw well always declare to me that they are not artists. "I'm terrible," they insist. "I can't draw stick figures or even straight lines."

It's true: there is a chasm between an artist and a non-artist.

So heads up: I'm not a lawyer. There is a chasm between me and legal expertise.

All I know are a few terms, the difference between a marshal, a magistrate, and a judge. I know the degrees of murder. I know that convicted capital murderers have some right to prefer their method of execution, and I have some knowledge about the different modern practices of execution and how the executioners themselves rank the sanctioned methods, death by inhaling poisonous gas being generally regarded the slowest and most painful.

More unusual archaic forms of the death penalty include being trampled by elephants, having your lungs pulled out (a Viking invention), or being gibbeted, which means being suspended in a public cage, and hung in a public area, to waste away and suffer thirst, hunger, and humiliation.

These are the scrap-paper scribbles of my knowledge, buckled islands littering my ocean of legal inadequacies.

In other words, I'm not sure I know what I'm talking about, here.

But it seems to me that, five days from now, the first defense team representing suspected serial killer Jesse Matthew will be trying to succeed only in one way: by hoping cleverly to catch a procedural fish.

This first pre-trial opportunity for the 2005 victim to see if she can positively identify her assailant (or not) takes place in Fairfax, Virginia, where Jesse Matthew is accused of her violent sexual assault and attempted murder.

Because she fought so hard not to be strangled to death, his DNA was under her fingernail.

Because she has bright visual intelligence, she helped produce the dead-ringer police sketch, so good that Jesse's co-workers teased him about resembling the disturbing face in the wanted poster.

So how CAN the Defense defend?

I think the Defense team may try to make the victim exhibit the sin of pride.

If she were to be baited to make (what could seem to be) a strident (over)statement that she is ONE HUNDRED PER CENT SURE that there is NO possibility of ANY slight interference or influence deriving from her Internet access to Jesse Matthew's unflattering Google-able photos, or ANY memory alteration from a decade's passing between the crime and now, maybe she will be made somehow to seem distastefully certain, over-certain, and therefore a kind of credibility suspect herself, a liar, a fanatic, a hysteric, raging with pride.

And if the Defense team can't juice pridefulness from the victim, their next best hope might be to make the victim appear inconsistent.

What if they can badger the most microscopic variance between what the Fairfax victim testifies in what I presume will be her pre-trial identification of Jesse Matthew on June 4, and how she phrases her subsequent Identification of him in the trial proper.

Do these procedural minnows matter?

I don't know. But I think nuance, artfulness, tone, tact, and other bewitching ingredients do stir.

So if the Fairfax victim does identify Jesse Matthew as her assailant, I wish her a rich brew of composure, reason, and confidence.

In my home, in front of most of my windows, I have 

hung old crystal chandelier stalactites, dangling by fishing line, to catch the sun, and to spawn as many rainbows as I can stock prisms.

I have never seen anywhere else the particular quality of rainbows as the ones that are hooked by these winking rods of chandelier. They are like ketchup rainbows. They make other rainbows look skim. These rainbows swimming in my house are thick and voluptuous.

Artists are hooked by color. I want it everywhere.

So here are all five fingers, ladling these ketchupy colors, stirring up the countdown to June 4th: five more days, four, three, two, one.

Double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Stir the colors into light. Net the lies that would take flight. Add a pinch of fragrant myrrh. Send the smoke away from her. Let his eyes pick up the sting. Let the oil weigh down his wing. Gurgle, gurgle ancient brew. Now we've found our way to you.

Stir the colors into light. Net the lies that would take flight.

Net them strong, with talon hold. Now our truth will all be told.

Jane Lillian Vance