Chapter 30: The Seventh of March
The plea colloquy runs thirty-one pages. It took me two hours.
A colloquy is a script. The judge has a list and works down it. The purpose is a record that cannot be attacked later.
Are you under the influence of any substance today. Have you had time to speak with your attorney.
Are you satisfied with his representation.
Do you understand you are giving up your right to a trial by jury. To confront witnesses. To remain silent.
Has anyone threatened you or promised you anything to get you to plead guilty.
I counted my answers. I say “Yes, Your Honor” thirty-four times. I say “No, Your Honor” eleven times.
Six times I say nothing longer than two words.
Once, on page nineteen, the transcript reads: THE DEFENDANT: (Inaudible.)
I have thought about that inaudible more than is useful.
I do not know what I said. Neither does the record, which is the point of one.
On page twenty-four the judge asks me to state in my own words what I did.
What follows is four sentences. They are not my own words.
They are the four sentences off the statement, which I had read enough times to say without the paper.
Then the court accepts the plea.
The transcript ends with the reporter's certification and licence number.
I put the pages face down and sat with my hands flat on my knees.
Then I picked up the three pages.
STATEMENT OF DEFENDANT. Centred, capitals, twelve point.
The header block is preprinted: county, case number, name of defendant, name of counsel. Somebody typed the entries on a machine with a heavy R.
The body is three paragraphs and runs a hundred and ninety-one words.
The first paragraph says who I am and that I make the statement freely.
The second paragraph is the offence. It begins: “On the ninth of March, at approximately 11:40 p.m., I was operating a 2011 estate wagon eastbound on Halvard Road.”
Then the rest. Speed. The bicycle. That I did not stop in time. That I had been drinking.
The third says I have read the foregoing, that it is true, and that no promises were made to me.
Page three is the signature block.
My signature is there. It is my signature. I am exact about that, because people ask me and I always answer the same way.
Nobody held my hand. Nobody forged it. I picked up a pen and wrote my name across a line, and my name is what is on the page.
The C is too big. The rest falls away right and dies before the end of the line.
That is how I signed things at twenty-four.
Below it, a line for counsel, initialled, and a witness line with a name I never recognised.
Below that, set right, in the same typeface as the header, a printed line.
EXECUTED ON: 03/07. TIME: 1420.
I looked at it for a while.
Here is what I thought. I will put it down without improving it.
I thought: that is not the day.
I signed that statement on a Saturday.
I know because the building was empty, and a woman came through with a floor buffer and had to switch it off so we could hear.
I was arrested on the tenth. I signed twelve days later. I had counted the days in the cell.
Twelve days after the tenth is the twenty-second.
The line said the seventh.
So the line was wrong. I knew how a line gets wrong. I had spent eleven weeks watching lines get wrong for a living.
Somebody types the header block on a Monday for a file signed later.
Somebody transposes. Somebody uses the date off the template they copied from. Somebody puts a finger on the seven instead of the two, twice.
By then I had scanned twenty-two thousand pages.
In those pages I had flagged nineteen documents with a wrong date, and eleven were a finger on the wrong key.
A wrong date on a form is the most ordinary error there is. It is the least interesting thing a document can do.
So I did what I did with the nineteen at work. I wrote it down.
I took the bus transfer out of my coat pocket, the one with the crash header on the back.
In golf pencil, small, because the transfer is small: stmt p3 — exec 03/07 — sig was Sat.
Then I put it back in the inside pocket of the coat.
I clipped the three pages back in order and pushed the file under the bunk with my foot.
It was 11:24. Lights were meant to be out at eleven.
Ms. Prine's shoes came up the corridor, stopped outside our door, and went away again.
I lay down. Dorrie said, from above, “You get to the end?”
I said, “Not yet.”
She said, “You will.”
That transfer stayed in the inside pocket of that coat for twenty-two months.