Free The Confession by Domenic Stansberry

cheeks of his, those over-sized brows, and he didn’t seem in the least conscious of the dilemma in which he had placed me. He took me through the usual preliminaries. Slowly, we made our way into the heart of things. I described the conversations I’d had with Dillard, and also the tests I’d administered to him: the Minnesota Multiphasic, the Rodgers Profile, the Kleinsdt Double-Blind.
    Wagoner hitched a thumb into his waistband.
    “Could you summarize your findings, please, as to the defendant’s state of mind at the time the crime was committed?”
    With Madison Paulie out of the picture, I had been put in an awkward position. My choices were not great. I could bend the evidence the way Wagoner wanted, or I could leave him to twist in the wind. Neither one would do a lot to enhance my professional reputation.
    “Mr. Dillard is a borderline personality,” I said.
    This was a catch-all phrase, used differently by different people in the profession, to describe behavior that skirted the edges without falling into a clear category. Wagoner hitched himself up. Underneath it all, he was a slow-witted man. He regarded me with a kind of amiable wariness, still expecting I meant to help him.
    And all this time Minor watched from the prosecutors table, a man who missed nothing, sitting there with his legs all askew, his pencil between his fingers, waiting his chance at me.
    “What do you mean borderline?” asked Haney.
    “I mean the test results were mixed, and he was not easily defined. He displayed some aspects of normalcy—but there were also asocial tendencies. Whether these have their roots in a native impulsivity, or a full blown psychopathy, or some kind of childhood trauma . . .”
    At this point, the judge halted my testimony. He asked me to start over: to elaborate my meaning in a way that would not confuse the jury with psychoanalytic jargon.
    “Could you define the phrase psychopath?” asked the judge.
    “I would be pleased to. Going to the Greek. Psyche has to do with mind or soul. While pathology has to do with sickness. So a psychopath is one who suffers from an illness in the soul, a sickness of the mind or spirit. In truth, in real life, psychopaths can often be quite charming.” I smiled at the jury then. And several of the jurors smiled back. “They are in touch with the basic manner of interacting with other people. They emote quite well. They make good eye contact.” I paused, my eyes skittering over the jurors, drawing in first one, then another. I was flirting with them, I suppose, the way a speaker flirts with a crowd, bestowing a glance here, there. “But their social dexterity is a mask. Underneath, psychopaths lack compassion, as well as conscience. That’s the simplest way of putting it. Sooner or later they take off their masks,” I made a gesture, like a man unpeeling a rubber face, “and they indulge their asocial impulses. Which in some cases, can be quite violent.”
    Wagoner looked distressed. I was engaging the jury, true, but the content of my remarks was not what he wanted. In the parlance of the law, psychopaths were not subject to much mercy. They possessed cognizance of their actions, that was the key. So in theory, if you wanted mercy from the court, you did better to show your client suffered from uncontrollable delusions.
    Perhaps that was the intent of the next question. To address the matter directly, so that I could dismiss it—and remove the subject from the table.
    “In your professional opinion, the tests you conducted, the interviews—did any of this suggest that Mr. Dillard was a psychopath in the sense of the word you have just described?”
    I pondered a moment, feeling the jury watching, curious, desirous of guidance and insight. Wanting a show. (And I remembered then how Elizabeth, before we married, had come to see me testify, sitting in the spectator pew in her worsted suit, and how later when we’d kissed in the elevator it had been like there was