Free Juice by Stephen Becker

human being. The defense would then demonstrate that the defendant was innocent by reason of temporary insanity. The defense would trace the course of this temporary insanity, reveal its origins, and attempt to prove to the jury that having manifested itself, it was now extinct.
    Davis had not raised his voice. He had not paced, only shifted his position occasionally. He had addressed the jurors each in turn and then as a whole. He had flattered them; and in flattering them he had transformed the state’s violence to an insulting attack on them.
    And the state had little else to say: the murder was confessed, and all that remained was to prove that Landauer was, and had been, sane. The defense granted that he was now. The state’s attorney rested his case; he was baffled and furious.
    Davis went to work quietly. He called no witnesses. He asked to have admitted in evidence extracts of notes he had taken in conversation with the defendant. The objection was made and, after Davis had taken the stand to swear that they were authentic, overruled. Davis made the point that his defense required knowledge not of the law, but of the man.
    He re-created for the jurors, for the judge (who was already more interested in the defendant than in justice), the world Landauer had re-created for him. He spoke fluently, intelligently, quietly. He read from the notes, interjected his own interpretations—many of which were objected to; it made no difference, the jury had heard—and even quoted bits of his own part in the long dialogue. He discussed sexual aberration, atheism; he contrasted Europe with America; he seasoned the discourse with anecdotes from his own life. He defined Willie, not in terms of origin or personality or appearance, but as he must have seemed to Landauer. He evoked pity for Landauer—“I ate spaghetti with my hands … they put up with me because I would play for them.” He evoked pity for the age, the times; he evoked pity for all men and all women.
    When he was nearly through he digressed to intellectuals, pointing out that by most definitions any juror who had followed his, Davis’, lecture thus far—and he was sure they all had—was an intellectual.
    The state’s attorney objected. This was matter for the summation. Davis agreed. “I’m prepared to recess now, if the court wishes, and to begin my summation after lunch. Unless counselor wishes to cross-examine me.”
    â€œNo thank you,” the state’s attorney muttered.
    After lunch Davis took up the thread he had left dangling: they were all intellectuals. The judge was puzzled, the state’s attorney flabbergasted. Summation? No beginning?
    â€œMy case is all of a piece, Your Honor,” Davis answered. “I have only one point to make. And I think the jurors have understood me quite clearly. I don’t believe they need a repetition of what I’ve already said; and I have no desire to insult them simply for the sake of form.”
    He proceeded, drawing instances from their own lives: bills, frustrations, political disagreements, petty rebellions, the desire for divorce, the unbidden and horrifying wish to see wife, husband, children dead. Crime often differed from these normal rebellions not in kind, but in degree. He asked them to consider again Landauer’s life: repressions, frustrations, misery, the laughingstock of his community—and yet what a contribution he had made! With whom was he compared? Prokofiev, Stravinsky. His work was played in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville. Was this man, in normal circumstances, a murderer? And could he, after a life like his, the constant search for peace and beauty, could he have been normal when he quarreled with Willie—Willie, whom he—yes, there is no need to hide the fact, and nothing horrible in it—whom he loved? The prosecution would make him out a monster by emphasizing all of his “unpopular”