Defending Jacob (24 page)

Laurie said, “Mitigation?”

I explained, “To reduce it from first-degree homicide to second or manslaughter.”

Laurie winced. The technical terms were discouraging, a reminder of how efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing suspects into criminals.

I was discouraged too. The lawyer in me knew, instantly, the calculation Jonathan was making. Like a general preparing for battle, he was planning his fallback positions, a controlled tactical retreat.

I told my son’s mother in a gentle tone, “First-degree is life without parole. It’s a mandatory sentence. The judge has no discretion. With second-degree Jake would be parole-eligible in twenty years. He’d only be thirty-four. He’d still have a whole life ahead of him.”

“Jonathan has asked me to research the issue, to prepare for it, just in case. Laurie, I think the point, the easiest way to think of it, is this: the law punishes intentional crimes. It presumes every act is intentional, a product of free will. If you did it, it is assumed you meant to do it. The law is very unforgiving of ‘yes but’ defenses.
Yes, but I had a hard childhood. Yes, but I have a mental disease. Yes, but I was drunk. Yes, but I was carried away by anger
. If you commit a crime, the law will say you are guilty despite these things. But it
will
take them into account when it comes to the precise definition of the crime and when it comes to the sentence. At that point, anything that affects your free will—including a genetic predisposition to violence or low impulse control—at least theoretically can be taken into account.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I scoffed. “No jury would ever buy it. You’re going to tell them, ‘I killed a fourteen-year-old boy but let me go anyway’? Forget it. Not gonna happen.”

“We may not have a choice, Andy,
if
.”

“This is bullshit,” I told Dr. Vogel. “You’re gonna take a sample of
my
DNA? I’ve never hurt a fly.”

The doctor nodded. No reaction. A perfect shrink, she just sat there and let the words break over her like waves on a jetty because that was the way to keep me talking. Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.

“I’ve never hurt anyone. I don’t have a temper. That’s just not me. I never even played football. My mother never let me. She knew I wouldn’t like it. She knew. There was no violence in our house. When I was a kid, do you know what I played? I played the clarinet. While all my friends were playing football, I played the clarinet.”

Laurie slid her hand over mine to smother my growing agitation. These sorts of gestures between us were becoming more rare, and I was moved by it. It calmed me.

Dr. Vogel said, “Andy, I know you have a lot invested in this. In your identity, your reputation, in the man you’ve become, the man you’ve made yourself. We’ve talked about that, and I understand perfectly. But that’s exactly the point. We are not just a product of our genes. We are all a product of many, many things: genes and environment, nature and nurture. The fact that you are who you are is the best example I know of the power of free will, of the individual. No matter what we find encoded in your genes, it will say nothing about who you are. Human behavior is much more complex than that. The same genetic sequence in one individual may produce a completely different result in different individuals and different environments. What we’re talking about here is just a genetic predisposition. Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our
DNA
. The mistake people tend to make with a new science like this one is over-determinism. We’ve discussed this before. We are not talking about the genes that code for blue eyes here. Human behavior has many, many more causes than simple physical traits.”

“That’s a lovely speech—and yet you still want to stick a Q-tip in my mouth. What if I don’t want to know what’s in my DNA? What if I don’t like what I’m programmed for?”

“Andy, as hard as this is for you, it’s not about you. It’s about Jacob. The question is, how far will you go for Jacob? What will you do to protect your son?”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s the way it is. I didn’t put you here.”

“No. Jonathan did. He’s the one who should be telling me these things, not you.”

“Probably he doesn’t want to fight with you about it. He doesn’t even know if he’ll use it at trial. It’s just something he wants to keep in his pocket, just in case. Also, he might think you’d say no to him.”

“He’s right. That’s why he ought to be having this conversation himself.”

“He’s just doing his job. You of all people should understand that.”

“His job is to do what his client wants.”

“His job is to win, Andy, not to spare anyone’s feelings. Anyway, you’re not the client; Jacob is. The only thing that matters here is Jacob. That’s why we’re all here, to help Jacob.”

“So Jonathan wants to argue in court that Jacob
does
have the murder gene?”

“If it comes down to it, if we get desperate, yes, we may have to argue that Jacob has certain specific gene variants that make him more likely to act in aggressive or antisocial ways.”

“All those qualifications and nuances, to ordinary people it’s mumbo jumbo. The newspapers will call it a murder gene. They’ll say we’re natural-born killers. Our whole family.”

“All we can do is tell them the truth. If they want to distort it, sensationalize it, what can we do?”

“Okay, say I go for it, I let you take your
DNA
sample. Tell me exactly what it is you’re looking for.”

“Do you know anything about biology?”

“Only what I got in high school.”

“Were you any good in high school biology?”

“I was better at clarinet.”

“Okay, in a nutshell? Bearing in mind that the causes of human behavior are infinitely complex and there is no simple genetic trigger for particular human behaviors; we are always talking about a gene-environment interaction; and anyway ‘criminal’ behavior is not a scientific term, it’s a legal one, and certain behaviors that may be defined as criminal in one situation may not be criminal in another, like war—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. It’s complicated. Dumb it down for me. Just tell me: what are you looking for in my spit?”

She smiled, relenting. “Okay. There are two specific gene variants that have been linked to male antisocial behavior, which might help account for multigenerational patterns of violence in families like yours. The first is an allele of a gene called
MAOA
. The
MAOA
gene controls an enzyme that metabolizes certain neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. It’s been called ‘the warrior gene’ because of its association with aggressive behavior. The mutation is called
MAOA
Knockout
. It has been argued in court as a trigger for violence before, but the argument was too simplistic and it was rejected. Our understanding of the gene-environment interplay has improved since then—the science is getting better and very quickly—and we may have better testimony now.

“The second mutation is located in what’s called the serotonin transporter gene. The official name for the gene is SLC6A4. It’s located on chromosome 17. It encodes a protein that facilitates the activity of the serotonin transporter system, which is what enables the re-uptake of serotonin from the synapse back into the neuron.”

I held up my hand:
enough
.

She said, “The point is, the science is good and it’s getting better every day. Just imagine: up till now, we’ve always asked, What causes human behavior? Is it nature or nurture? And we’ve been very good at studying the nurture side of the equation. There’s lots and lots of good studies on how environment affects behavior. But now, for the first time in human history, we can look at the nature side. This is cutting-edge stuff. The structure of
DNA
was only discovered in 1953. We’re just beginning to understand. We’re just beginning to look at what we are. Not as some abstraction like the ‘soul’ or metaphor like the ‘human heart,’ but the real mechanics of human beings, the nuts and bolts. This”—she pinched the skin of her own arm and pulled up a sample of her own flesh—“the human body is a machine. It is a system, a very complex system made of molecules and driven by chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Our minds are part of that system. People have no trouble accepting that nurture affects behavior. Why not nature?”

“Doctor, will this keep my kid out of prison?”

“It might.”

“Then do it.”

“There’s more.”

“Why does this not surprise me?”

“I need a swab from your father too.”

“My father? You’re joking. I haven’t spoken to my father since I was five years old. I have no idea if he’s even alive.”

“He is alive. He’s in Northern Prison in Somers, Connecticut.”

A beat. “So go test him.”

“I tried. He won’t see me.”

I blinked at her. I was wrong-footed both by the news my father was alive and by the fact that she had already got a message from him. She had an advantage over me. Not only did she know my history, she did not consider it history at all. It was no burden to her. To Dr. Vogel, trying to contact Billy Barber was no harder than picking up the phone.

“He says you have to ask.”

“Me? He wouldn’t know me if I stood up in his soup.”

“Apparently he wants to change that.”

“He does? Why?”

“A father gets old, he wants to know his son a little.” She shrugged. “Who can understand the human heart?”

“So he knows about me?”

“Oh, he knows all about you.”

I felt myself flush like a little kid with the thrill of it: a father! Then, just as quickly, my mood plummeted, the thought of Bloody Billy Barber turned to acid.

“Tell him to fuck off.”

“I can’t tell him that. We need his help. We need a sample to argue that a genetic mutation is more than a one-off but a family trait passed down from father to son to son.”

“We could get a court order.”

“Not without giving away to the DA what we’re up to.”

I shook my head.

Laurie finally spoke. “Andy, you need to think about Jacob. How far would you go for him?”

“I’d go to hell and back.”

“Okay, then. So you will.”

I
n the last week of August—that non-week, the week of Sundays when we all move a little slower and mourn the passing of summer and get ourselves ready for fall—the temperatures climbed and the air thickened until the heat was all anyone could talk about: when it would break, how high it would go, how unbearable the humidity was. It drove people indoors, as if it was winter. The sidewalks and shops were oddly quiet. To me the heat was not an affliction, it was merely a symptom, as a fever is a symptom of the flu. It was only the most obvious reason the world was fast becoming unbearable.

We were all a little heat-crazy by then, Laurie and Jacob and I. Looking back on it, it is hard to believe how self-absorbed I had become, how this whole story seemed to be about
me
, not Jacob, not our entire family. Jacob’s guilt and mine were entangled in my mind, though no one had ever accused me of anything explicitly. I was coming apart, of course. I knew this. I distinctly remember exhorting myself to hold it together, to keep up appearances, not to crack.

But I did not share my feelings with Laurie, and I did not try to draw out hers either, because we were all coming apart. I discouraged any sort of frank emotional talk, and soon enough I stopped noticing my wife altogether. I never asked—never even asked!—what the experience was like for the mother of Jacob the murderer. I thought it was more important to be—at least to seem—a tower of strength and to encourage her to be strong as well. It was the only sensible approach: tough it out, get through the trial, do whatever it takes to keep Jacob safe, then repair the emotional damage later. After. It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these “soft” problems in the land of After. I was wrong. I think about that now, how I should have seen Laurie then, should have paid more attention. She had saved my life, once. I came to her damaged and she had loved me anyway. And when she was damaged, I did not lift a finger to help her. I only noticed that her hair was getting grayer and sloppier, and her face was becoming crazed with lines like an old ceramic vase. She had lost so much weight that her hip bones protruded, and when we were together she spoke less and less. In spite of it all, I never softened in my determination to save Jacob first and heal Laurie later. I try to rationalize that merciless intransigence now: I was by then a master of internalizing dangerous emotions; my mind was overheated with the stress of that endless summer. It is all true and it is all bullshit too. The truth is, I was a fool. Laurie, I was a fool. I know that now.

I went to the Yoos’ home around ten o’clock one morning. Derek’s parents both worked, even during this pseudo-vacation week. I knew Derek would be home alone. He and Jacob were still texting regularly. They even spoke on the phone, though only during the day, when Derek’s parents were not around to hear. I was convinced Derek would want to help his friend, he would want to talk to me, tell me the truth, but I was afraid he would not let me in anyway. He was a good kid. He would do as he had been told, as he always did, always had done. So I was prepared to talk my way into the house, even to force my way in to get to him. I remember feeling quite capable of that. I came to the house wearing baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt that stuck to my sweaty back. I had gained some weight since this all began, and I recall that the shorts shimmied down my hips over and over, weighted down by my gut. I had to hike them up constantly. I had always been fit and trim. My sloppy new body made me ashamed, but I felt no inclination to fix it. Again, there would be time
after
.