Each morning of that trial, I roused myself at five, collected my father, and sped him in the course of seventy-five minutes to the front doors of the Skagit County Courthouse in Mount Vernon, where that cannon sat mounted between wooden carriage wheels with no plaque or placard explaining its provenance. I passed through the courthouse metal detector and sat, with others, in the courtroom gallery. Many of them were veterans of a sort. They were there because murder trials constitute a spectacle. Things that are nakedly true about humans, however ugly, were real and on the table. It was reality television without the television. Other people, though, were there for other reasons. For example, women who were, like Abeba Temesgen, Ethiopian in origin, all of them dressed in white, gauzy garb, all of them sitting shoulder to shoulder, and all of them making clear by their presence that this set of circumstances was so wrong and untenable that if justice wasn’t done in response to it, it would have to mean and could only mean that right and wrong are so upended in the United States as to have no useful or realistic meaning. This band of women, in shawls so thin that light passed through their interstices, were counterbalanced by a cadre of white evangelical Christians, who looked equally firm in a faithful conviction—namely, that Delvin and Betsy Harvey were victims of liberal progressive ideology and, in their pain and suffering, martyrs.

  On the one hand, the State, a disembodied monolith, abstract but present with intimidating gravity; on the other, two people who in their flesh and blood stood accused of terrible and unacceptable transgressions. It made for drama of an age-old cast, and we, in the gallery, whatever our sentiments, participated in it by bearing witness. The defendants, their attorneys, and the prosecutor for the State—all of them were literally turned away from us. We saw only their backs; they saw us not at all. I sometimes thought things should be reconfigured, so that somehow everyone could see everyone else—that we should look into the faces of the accused, and at their lawyers’ faces, and at the prosecutor’s, and that they, in turn, should look into ours. But that was not to be. We bore witness without it. But surely, I thought, they still felt us there, immediately at their backs, close, bearing down, like a Greek chorus or a communal tribunal.

  It was otherwise when it came to the judge and jurors. From a kind of summit, and from a far remove, the judge had no choice but to look down on us, and we had no choice but to look up at her, and to wonder who she was, what she thought, what she felt, her convictions, her doubts, her sense of the law, her moral vision and its inevitable ambiguities—inevitable because, beneath her robes, she was, like us, human. Her name was Mary Ann Rasmussen. She was only visible from the shoulders up as she presided from the bench. She looked small there, an effect I knew was magnified by the black judicial gown hanging from her shoulders. Judge Rasmussen often studied documents while people spoke. When she did raise her head, it was to say something terse. At those moments, her face came into view. It was an open face, intelligent and homespun. But, as I said, for the most part she kept her head down, maintaining a cogitator’s undistracted privacy. It seemed to me that, the more challenging a legal question, the more interested she was in it. A truly problematic legal hairsplitting elicited from her a long, suspenseful silence during which it was possible to infer that she was working through shades of meaning at speed. Judge Rasmussen was in the habit of looking at people over the rims of reading glasses. She was also in the habit of tapping her pen against the bench while dressing down attorneys. For the most part, she manifested a deep well of patience. On the other hand, she had her limits. Most judges know perfectly well that attorneys are going to waste their time with meaningless motions and niggling objections, but there’s a point at which even the most patient judge has had enough, and when an attorney hit it in Judge Rasmussen’s courtroom, she abruptly swung off her reading glasses and launched a caustic fusillade of barbs.

  But back to us, bearing witness from the gallery. Mary Ann Rasmussen had to take note of our presence. In principle, we had nothing to say; in reality, we had only to show up to speak. There was a moment when the evidence became so horrifying that, from the women of Ethiopian descent, weeping could be heard. At this, Judge Rasmussen, gavel in hand, issued the requisite reprimand: “You are not participants in these proceedings. You are observers. And if you can’t keep your opinions to yourself, you’ll have to leave.” But did she feel that way? Was the weeping in the gallery nothing to her? Did she quash weeping in the gallery with no remorse about it? Was she placating, or mollifying, the two defense attorneys? Was her motive to ensure that, in the trial transcript, she would appear to have acted with such rigorous exactitude that nothing she’d done laid the grounds for appeal? Was she doing what she had to do to avoid a mistrial? Was she, while issuing her reprimand, a sterner person than she knew herself to be, in the name of demonstrating impartiality? Did she wish, via harshness, to engender regret, specifically in Delvin Harvey’s attorney, who’d goaded her to this act of frank admonishment? Was her point in being forbidding and severe to indicate emphatically that none could accuse her of manifesting a political bent, that none could appropriately or rightly say, “Judge Rasmussen, you’re a politically correct ideologue who looks down on fundamentalists and shows favoritism to people who came here from Ethiopia”? “No,” Judge Rasmussen’s warning about weeping maybe said, “here is proof to the contrary; fair is fair and will always be fair; no one weeps in my courtroom, period; it doesn’t matter who they are or where they’re from; this is America, and we live by these ideals, and if you don’t get it, what I’m doing, then you have some learning to do.” Is that what it was?

  The jurors sat at a right angle to us, so that mainly we saw the left sides of their faces. How rapidly they embraced their roles, and became ciphers, and gathered to themselves a silent magnitude, and seemed, at least, to ignore our presence feet away, and distanced themselves by refusing to acknowledge us—so willingly did they engage the law’s purposes for them that they receded and appeared like actors. But still we were there, in the corners of their eyes at least, bearing witness.

  I didn’t miss any of the trial, not even jury selection. I watched and listened to every witness. I sat there guessing what the jurors were thinking. I tried to read the mind of the judge, who, high on her bench, appeared removed from the proceedings. She was a mystery to me. So were the jurors. The prosecutor, on the other hand, was transparent, as was Delvin Harvey’s attorney. So was my father, but differently, because I knew him. The parties to the battle were overt and explicit, whereas the judge and jury were sealed off and expressionless. It felt, to me, the way it does when two magnets, charges aligned, refuse to be joined in wavering, occult fashion. On the one hand, effusiveness, drama, assertion; on the other, the silence of an enforced neutrality. The seven days of that trial were dark and procedural, with the pace of something that refused to unfold, with the sense of something outside of living, and with a quality of interminable, idiotic sadness. A desert onto which blood had been spilled. An interregnum outside of time wherein things felt despoiled, blank.

  * * *

  —

  To begin at the beginning, 180 citizens lined up for jury selection. They filled the folding chairs in Hearing Room A, where there was a flag in the corner, twin speakers on stands, a rolling whiteboard, and a portable projector screen. Their winnowing began. By the end of the first day, the field had been cut in half. By the end of the second, fifty-eight remained. On the third day, God and religion were broached, at which point someone asserted that if selected she would be “used by God in an appropriate way.” This was followed by alternative avowals. “As an atheist, I have a negative reaction to religion.” “I believe God wants me to follow the rules.”

  One man said that photos of a dead child would make him feel vengeful. Another said he’d been beaten as a boy—head-slammed, locked in a cellar, and deprived of food by an alcoholic father. A woman, in a cloud of outrage, gathering her things, said she didn’t believe in spanking children, and that she was “pretty emotional and couldn’t presume them innocent.” By the noon recess on the third day, there were thirty people left. “They spanked me at school, so I’m used to it,” one of them revealed. Another admitted he knew perfectly well that when he denied his kids dinner they were going “to hit the fridge at night.” A woman confessed that, after losing track of her daughter in a Walmart, she’d “felt like putting a leash on her.” A man told the court about a boy he knew who’d been locked in a room regularly because otherwise he poured honey and ketchup on the floor; he was “straightened out” now, a paramedic in the navy.

  Fifteen jurors were announced at the end of the third day. Three of them, the judge said, would have no part in the verdict, though she couldn’t say which yet; before deliberating, they would draw straws to find out. One juror was retired from both the military and an oil company. Another was in construction. A third worked for Diebold, and a fourth was a program analyst for an educational service district. A fifth was a high-school math teacher, a sixth an electrician, a seventh an online bookseller, an eighth a homemaker, formerly a legal secretary, who now sold art on the side. The other seven were an employee of a poultry company, a logger, a bookkeeper at an oil refinery, a diesel mechanic, a data engineer, a lab technician, and a trucking consolidator. Eight were women and seven were men. All of them were white, as were the judge, the prosecutor, the two defense attorneys, and the two defendants.

  * * *

  —

  Day four. The prosecutor rose. He was a Democrat with a long jaw named Lincoln Stevens. No doubt he’d been asked a thousand times about his name, since it sounded so illustrious and historically pregnant. You couldn’t blame someone for believing they’d heard it before, maybe in the context of the American Civil War—wasn’t there somebody named Lincoln Stevens who’d done something or other in that bleak era? The answer was no. I was present once for a conversation my father had with Lincoln Stevens, during which the latter drily hypothesized that a majority of Skagit County voters had marked the box beside his name because they thought they were familiar with it. He also said that he’d gone to high school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, with a Roosevelt Washington, and that he and Roosevelt Washington had played football together, with Stevens at quarterback and Washington at wide receiver, and that they’d been “in synch” a lot. Stevens had gone on to Lehigh, where he’d also played football, though not at quarterback. “Actually,” he said, “they kept me around as a backup punter.” From there, he’d gone on to Fordham’s law school.

  Lincoln Stevens was, you might say, aware of fashion. He wore custom dress shirts and, sometimes, a denim blazer. He had appeal in a way that might make other men resentful. If you were with Lincoln Stevens, say, at a party, you would note that gazes turned toward him, not you. His brand of attractiveness could be a disadvantage in court, which he clearly knew, and which he sought to address by conducting himself politely. The word for all of that is “charisma.”

  Lincoln Stevens now said, “I am the prosecutor in this county, elected by the People—the People with a capital ‘P’—to represent us when we have cause to suspect that individuals among us have committed crimes. Well, let me tell you, we have cause in this case, not just for suspicion but for guilty verdicts, as the facts will show. They will show that the defendants adopted a girl from Ethiopia and proceeded to brutally beat her, not only with their hands but with a variety of cruel and vicious instruments, and to strike her on the head, the feet, the arms, the legs, and the torso, and to do all of that not in a manner in accord with what most of us would think of as a relatively benign spanking or a within-the-bounds-of-normal form of corporal punishment—which they would have you believe—but, no, much, much worse than that. But guess what? This beating of a child was just the beginning. Just the tip of the iceberg, the start. You’re going to hear that the defendants also locked their adopted daughter up for long hours, at first in a little shower room, where she was made to sleep alone in a bathtub; later in a closet literally shorter than a coffin, if you can believe that, and with the light switch on the outside, meaning there was no way out of a terrible darkness and a claustrophobia and a suffocation. She was not allowed to use the bathrooms in the house and had instead for her use an outdoor toilet behind a barn, located next to a chicken coop, the sort of thing you might see on a construction site, a port-a-potty that wasn’t regularly cleaned. But this was not the end or the extent of her mistreatment. Far from it. You’re going to hear that this poor girl was not allowed to take an indoor shower, and that the defendants instead made her wash under a garden hose out of doors, and you’re going to hear that they cut off almost all of her hair on more than one occasion as a form of punishment, and that they took her clothing away and made her walk around with a bath towel knotted at her waist, and that she was regularly banned from the dinner table and made to eat cold food out of doors—scraps, leftovers, even food taken directly from the freezer and dropped like ice cubes onto her plate—and denied food until she lost a lot of weight, and that the defendants didn’t celebrate her birthday, and gave her nothing for Christmas or on other holidays. The punishments, the punishments she endured, were just plain evil. She stood three inches to the left of the spot one of these defendants wanted her to stand on, whap, she got hit; she spelled a word incorrectly on one of her homeschooling assignments, whap, she got hit; she didn’t respond in a timely way to some command or order they gave, whap, she got hit; she mowed the lawn grass an inch too short, whap, she got hit. There were times she had to march in a rectangular pattern, for hours on end, around a concrete pad in the defendants’ yard, and there were times when she had to move rocks from point A to point B and then back to point A, and there were times when she was struck not just by her parents but by the older male children in the home, victims themselves, who were authorized and commanded by their parents to be their henchmen. You’re going to hear how these defendants concocted, together, a scheme of child-rearing that constituted nothing less than torture, and how they both participated in it, and you are going to hear about the tragic night on which Abigail Harvey died, just outside the back door of the defendants’ house, with her face in the mud and no clothes on, while members of the family looked on through a window.”

  Delvin Harvey’s attorney, Pam Burris, went next. Burris had only recently passed the bar, but confidence still exuded from her gestures and diction. She didn’t rise to speak. Nor did she become animated. Her chin was set, her shoulders square. With her elbows on her table, fingers laced at chin level, she spoke in a voice that never rose but was evenly insistent in its toneless rhythm. She was patiently propelled, and propped up by fortitude. It was as though she were conducting a congressional hearing. Unlike Stevens, she had no interest in fashion. “Now you’ve heard from the prosecutor,” she said. “He’s pretty convincing. He sounds pretty good. But let’s look at the facts here. Let’s live in the real world. My client, Delvin Harvey, is charged with homicide by abuse. Before he was arrested, he was a millwright at Boeing. He worked the swing shift there, at the Everett plant, which meant a very long commute. Five days a week, he left home at noon and didn’t return until approximately midnight. That’s twelve hours, Monday through Friday, when he wasn’t present in his home and didn’t participate in child-rearing. That’s not to say that he didn’t participate when he had time and opportunity. Delvin liked to make breakfast for his family. He took his children on weekend outings. He was a family man first and foremost. When Delvin was a child, his parents were, for a time, missionaries in Jamaica. There he’d been the only white student in his class, and there he’d learned to appreciate other cultures. So, for those of you who think racism plays a role in this case, that Delvin mistreated his adopted daughter because of the color of her skin—that just isn’t true of Delvin Harvey, because he doesn’t have that bone in his body. He never has and he never will, because Delvin is a good and decent person. You should know that Delvin served in the air force. He served his country and was honorably discharged. He met Betsy at church, and they married and settled down. They lived in Kent at first, and then they lived in Arlington, and then they built their dream house near Sedro Woolley. Throughout it all, Delvin was the breadwinner. He had children to feed and clothe, so he worked overtime whenever he could. It was a hard life but a good one, and he had no complaints. He and Betsy got along well—that is, until they adopted Abigail. Betsy stayed home and did the housekeeping and the homeschooling. Betsy raised the children while Delvin was at work. And, as it turned out, they loved having children. Eventually, they had seven, but were eager to have more. Then something happened they hadn’t expected. Betsy experienced a difficult pregnancy that didn’t end well, and was counseled by a doctor to stop bearing children. So it was that they were inquisitive and drawn when they came across another family that had adopted a child from Ethiopia. From there it was only a hop, skip, and jump for Delvin and Betsy to move toward an adoption of their own. And what joy they felt. How eager they were to share their love with a girl who needed them so. But then it emerged that this girl was troubled and had come to them from a traumatic background. Delvin could see that she wasn’t bonding with Betsy, and that Betsy, in turn, wasn’t bonding with her. Betsy had always been particular about hygiene and dedicated to cleanliness in her home, so it was hard for her to bear the lice and fungus Abigail had brought with her, and, even worse, the hepatitis B. Betsy just scolded Abigail at first when she broke family rules, but then Betsy began to punish Abigail sternly, and then her punishments turned brutal. What could Delvin do about it? Betsy grew angry when he spoke against it and refused to listen to his point of view. She reminded him that he was gone all day, and that the business of running the home was hers—that she was the one who had to deal with day-to-day realities. Delvin, she said, was always working and didn’t know what went on at home. And you know what? That was true. She was right about that. Delvin didn’t know that his wife was deceiving him about the depth, cruelty, and extent of her punishments. He didn’t know about the things she’d been doing. Only after his arrest did he learn that Abigail had been locked in a closet for long hours. Only after his arrest did he learn how Abigail had been treated while he was gone. And consider this. On the day Abigail died, Delvin left, as usual, for work at noon. He’d seen her that morning at the breakfast table, eating what everybody else was eating, and dressed in warm, dry clothes, as usual. He’d gone to work, and when he returned, Abigail wasn’t breathing. At a loss, stricken, he tried to revive her—he did all he could to save Abigail’s life—and when he couldn’t, he fell into a grief so deep you can see it in his face to this day. Think about that. This man next to me is charged with homicide. But this is the same man I just described to you who wasn’t even home when Abigail died and did everything he could to save her. I don’t even know what this case is about when it comes to the behavior and actions of my client. I don’t know why he’s sitting here, charged, when nothing points to his guilt or complicity, and everything points, instead, to his innocence. The state is just arguing that Delvin is guilty by virtue of being married to Betsy, and that’s it, that’s all they’ve got.”