His shackles clinked across the courtroom floor as he paced anxiously in front of the jury. He spoke passionately. Desperately. Loudly.
Josh Matthews was on trial for murder.
In that opening statement he told how his mother had hit him over the head with a soup ladle when he was in 4th grade. He told of being locked in his room for weeks at a time. He told of his prolific life of crime, admitting to everything from selling crack while on probation to punching the murder victim, a 17-year-old college student, some weeks before her death. He maintained that his confession to her shooting was a lie.
In my time as a law clerk at the Dupage, Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, I have seen some criminals of questionable morals. There was the financial crimes case where the defendants were alleged to have committed $6 million in mortgage fraud. There was the man who let his pit bulls loose on the police when they showed up at his door. But Matthews was different. He seemed, somehow, like a man who never had a chance.
This was a man who couldn’t get an honest job, who was able to justify hitting a 17-year-old girl, and who had to be tazed to get him to come before the judge and restrained once he was there. Sitting in that courtroom, I remembered a conversation in the dining hall where my friends and I had debated whether or not all people had an inherent morality, a basic human compassion. If Josh Matthews was born with that morality, it had been beaten out of him by the time he confronted his childhood friend on that cold Chicago night.
In the days and weeks after Jared Loughner killed six and wounded thirteen, much has been made about his inhumanity. In his speech at the Tucson memorial, President Obama affirmed that we owe it to the victims of that tragedy to promote a more civil tone of public discourse. He said that we owe it to those victims to make sure that America lives up to their conceptions of it, and to make sure that America lives up to our own ideals and dreams. The question that was tugging at my conscience at that murder trial is this: what do we owe to the Jared Loughners and the Josh Matthewses of the world?
The answer may very well be nothing. Our first priority should be justice for the victims and their families. No one argues that. But what more can our society do? What do we owe to the children and families that are not yet victims, and to the children who are not yet killers? These are not easy questions. In our society it is taboo to discuss the morals we infuse in our children. It is more taboo still to discuss how those morals are infused.
When the victim’s mother took the stand, she could not prevent herself from breaking down while spelling her name for the court reporter. When Matthews cross-examined her, however, she didn’t flinch. She looked him dead in the face, a fire in her eyes unlike any I have ever seen. It was the fire of a mother who wanted the world for her daughter. Who instilled a work ethic that drove her daughter to work a part time job and take a full course load at community college the summer after her senior year of high school. It was the fire of a mother who would have given anything for her child. As Josh Matthews squirmed under her glare, I found it impossible not to wonder: if he had had a mother like that, would he be sitting at that defendant’s table?
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