Storytelling for Lawyers (33 page)

Hot weather was bad enough; winter posed worse dangers. “A bully,” to use Linebaugh's word, Bill forced his son to climb high into the “dense, cold, freezing fog,” on limbs that Billy says “were iced over, so I couldn't get even one cleat into it, couldn't get any purchase at all.” One very cold day, Linebaugh found Billy stuck “forty feet up in a tree without any protective equipment … not even a hard hat … his rope snagged fifteen feet below him, in what was an egregious violation of OSHA guidelines.” … Linebaugh said that the sixteen-year-old Billy “was terrified in the tree with his knees knocking in the freezing fog where his hands were blue.” He freed the rope and allowed Billy to descend. The rope was badly worn, “exhibiting signs of being cut by chainsaws.”

Linebaugh asked Billy where his father was, but Billy, he said, “was so cold that he couldn't talk because his teeth were chattering so fast.” When he warmed up enough to say something, he told Linebaugh his dad had been gone for “two or three hours.”

“Where was he?” I ask Billy.

“I dunno. Sometimes he'd of been inside, having a cup of coffee, gabbing with the client. Or if he was hungover he might of been parked somewhere, sleeping in the cab of his truck.”

“Bill seemed to resent and despise his son,” Linebaugh said. “Bill constantly put down his son as slow-witted and stupid. I remember when Bill would call to Billy and Billy didn't respond [because he hadn't heard his father over the noise of the chipper], Bill would punch his son in the head and yell, ‘Hey Stupid!' to get his attention. The force in [
sic
] which Bill hit Billy seemed hard enough to knock him unconscious, but Billy acted like it was just a normal part of his job. It appeared to me that in his father's mind it was.

“I kept expecting to hear one day that Billy got killed while working for his father,” Linebaugh concluded his affidavit. “When I heard that Billy had killed his father, it didn't surprise me at all. I remember thinking it was self-defense.”
²¹

Billy is trapped in another dangerous place. Again, the underlying theme is that Billy cannot escape the cruelty of his environment; the outcome is all but inevitable. The reader understands that in this irrational and terrifying environment, Billy's own violence is a way out. The outcome for Billy if he does not act seems as inevitable as what befalls Uncle Ambrose in
The Emigrants
after therapy or as what happens to Ernesto Miranda after he leaves Interrogation Room 2. Although Bill is clearly a villainous character, this is not a simple melodrama. Billy's enemy is an environment that consumes him, terrorizes him; we understand that he perceives that his only possibility for escape from the terror is parricide.

An environment does not come into existence on its own; it is constructed through a composition of quotations and descriptions of selected details in an overall composition of scenes pointing toward a seemingly inevitable narrative outcome. Here is an excerpt from the petitioner's brief in
Eddings v. Oklahoma.
²²
In many ways this is a legal version of the mitigation story told by Kathryn Harrison about Billy Gilley in
While They Slept
. In
Eddings
, the Oklahoma courts refused to consider Monty Eddings's childhood history in mitigation of his murder sentence for the shooting death of a police officer who had approached the car in which the sixteen-year-old Eddings and his fourteen-year-old sister were running away from home. The narrative strategy in the petitioner's brief is akin to Harrison's; Eddings commits murder while trying to escape from his abusive environment with his sister, whom he is attempting to protect. Further, the murder committed by Eddings is, in part, a product of his dark childhood history that the court has refused to consider: a history that may suggest Eddings's punishment should be mitigated, and he should avoid a death sentence. The excerpt is from the “Statement of the Case” in the petitioner's brief, presenting a portion of Monty Eddings's story about his childhood history that the court has refused to consider at sentencing:

In mitigation, Eddings produced the testimony of four expert witnesses. Stephen Dorn, petitioner's Missouri probation officer, testified that he had met Monty Eddings when Eddings was fourteen and was referred to the juvenile authorities for four break-ins and for tampering with a motor vehicle. In investigating Eddings' past, Officer Dorn
learned that, when Eddings was five years old, his natural parents were divorced. From the time he was five until he was fourteen, Eddings remained with his mother, Mary Kinney, in Jasper County, Missouri. During this period, Ms. Kinney used alcohol excessively, and, according to Jasper County authorities, may have been involved in prostitution. The report which Probation Officer Dorn “received from the Jasper County Juvenile Court was … that … Monty could pretty much—in their own language—do his own thing. He could come and go when he wanted to … starting at the age of five.” Observing that a childhood without rules or discipline often “leads [to] a chaotic adolescence,” Officer Dorn testified that when Monty Eddings turned fourteen, Ms. Kinney sent him to his natural father, Ronald Eddings, “because she couldn't control the child.”

Ronald Eddings proved a marked contrast to Ms. Kinney in his child-rearing methods. Officer Dorn described him as “quite an authoritarian,” noting that “Monty was always fearful of his father, because his father tended to overreact; or rather than discuss things with him, would take it out in more physical means … [b]eatings, slapped, that sort.” According to Officer Dorn, Eddings's step mother was unable to “cope with the problems of a fourteen … year old male child with serious emotional behavior”—indeed, her reports to juvenile authorities on Monty Eddings “indicated some sort of schism of thought.” In Officer Dorn's view,

Monty was very scared, I think, of his home situation with his father. He was very hostile. Monty didn't have anyone he could turn to and discuss his problems; and I think Monty was holding a lot of these things within him, and what happened was just a combination of Monty holding everything in and just releasing it all at one time. Towards the end, he became very hostile and bitter.

Officer Dorn summarized that Monty Eddings's actions derived from “a mother who didn't have time for him in Jasper County … a stormy history of divorce; a … step-mother up in Camdenton who he finally goes to live with who has no idea how to raise a child, and who, herself, had problems with children; a father who didn't have time for anything but doing his job.” …

… Eddings's final witness in mitigation was Dr. Anthony C. Gagliano, a licensed psychiatrist in private practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Dr. Gagliano interviewed Eddings in the Sapula County Jail. He indicated that Eddings “was very upset about [his parents'] divorce” when he was five, “[a]nd he had always maintained the fantasy that they would remarry.” His natural mother instead remarried a policeman from Joplin, Missouri, when Eddings was seven, and Eddings responded with “anger, hatred, rebellion, rejection, loss.” Dr. Gagliano told of one incident when Eddings

… wanted to impress his mother or father. I don't know why he did it, but he washed down the walls, and he thought it would be nice if the walls were clean. And his [step-]father walked in, and I think removed his shoe and hit him quite severely with his shoe for dirtying the walls.

Dr. Gagliano stated that the incident engendered “Anger. Hatred.”

Dr. Gagliano diagnosed Eddings as suffering from “an antisocial or a dissocial disorder,” characterized by an “arrested emotional development at age seven” and an inability to display his emotions. He stated that at the time Officer Crabtree was shot, Eddings “acted as a seven year old seeking revenge … [against] the original cause of his anger … the Policeman who married his mother, and who stole his mother away.” Eddings' disorder could be treated, Dr. Gagliano thought, though the treatment might take “many years—fifteen or twenty years of real intensive therapy.”
²³

When we compare this mitigation story and the environments depicted within it with the two excerpts from
While They Slept
we find they both employ quotations, witness testimony, and affidavits. Both provide generalizations about the impact of the environment on the defendant to crystallize these abstractions. Both shift perspectives strategically, enabling the reader to understand various aspects of the story.

In Eddings's brief, however, the detailing is not nearly as vivid and there is none of the movement characteristic of Billy Gilley's dark journey. Stylistically, the simple declarative sentences depict slices from Monty Eddings's past spliced together with the testimony of various expert witnesses. There are some assertions about how Eddings's childhood history affects his conduct, but the incidents supporting these assertions (whether the precise circumstances of Monty Eddings's childhood or incidents such as when the stepfather hits Eddings with his shoe) are not as compelling or as dramatic as the accounts of abuse in Harrison's storytelling.

The differences in Eddings's brief and Harrison's Billy Gilley story can be accounted for in various ways: they may arise from the material available in the record, the abilities of the storyteller, different aesthetic conventions of drafting a “Statement of the Case” in a brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, or the creation of an environment that is appropriate to the purposes of the argument, rather than constructing the most powerful and compelling mitigation story possible.

In
Eddings
, the narrative is left undercooked or undeveloped. The particular quality of the environment depicted in
Eddings
is both intentional and purposeful. The straightforward presentational style of Eddings's brief, likewise, chooses not to overdramatize the facts. Eddings's environment is appropriate to this brief and fits the legal purposes of the argument. Unlike Harrison's narrative, the story is not designed to depict evil or terror. Instead, it takes slices of Eddings's past from the perspective of two of these witnesses (a policeman and a psychiatrist). The story is simply designed to meet a lower threshold and to demonstrate that the evidence of Eddings's past and social history were legitimate mitigating factors that should have been taken into account in determining Eddings's punishment. The legal argument in this brief is left to do the heavy lifting and the narrative is made subservient to it, whereas Harrison's depiction of Billy Gilley's past was designed to persuade the reader that parricide was all but inevitable and that Billy Gilley took the only possible escape route that he believed was available to him.

All stories require a place for the events of the story to unfold. The skillful writer can determine the way in which the reader or listener interprets and understands the events of the story through strategic choices about how the setting is developed and described. Some stories will require the setting to be described in poetically presented sensate fragments, pulling the reader into the setting. Others will require that the place be only minimally described or not described at all, purposefully requiring the reader to supplement the setting with his own imagination or leaving the place a mystery. As we have seen from the legal and nonlegal examples, setting, place, detail, and environment can be implemented in countless ways. What is clear is that the legal writer who thinks strategically about how to describe the setting, how to set the stage, can evoke the power of environments to strongly affect the reader and possibly determine the story's ending.

A BRIEF EXPLORATION

Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time
.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened
on his wedding day. He has walked through that door in
1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back
through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his
birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits
to all the events in between.
He says.
Billy is spastic in time, he has no control over where he is
going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in
a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never
knows what part of his life he is going to have to act next
.

—
KURT VONNEGUT JR
., S
LAUGHTERHOUSE
F
IVE
OR
T
HE
C
HILDREN'S
C
RUSADE
: A D
UTY
-D
ANCE
WITH
D
EATH

In legal writing and clinical skills courses, young lawyers and law students are typically instructed to organize their presentation of facts simply and “chronologically.” They are told to keep the presentation straightforward and candid, and to be wary of overly shaping the facts of the story. But this instruction is, at best, naïve, and, more accurately, deceptive and self-deluding. First, chronology is not an all-encompassing or a preferential strategy for organizing
events in narrative time but merely one modality (perhaps the default mode) for ordering events into story. In chronology, story time appears to mimic how time unfolds in “real life” and seems to order events onto a shared “one-size-fits-all” narrative spine. Many stories are unlike the events that occur in our daily lives, which are measured against the clock. In complex stories there is seldom a strict or pure linear chronology available. Language, almost by its nature, does not allow it; we seemingly move back and forth effortlessly in story time, and do so in extremely subtle and complex ways. Intuitively, we make selective choices from events as we shape them into stories, and we bend malleable story time to fit the demands of narrative. The depiction of time in all but the simplest of stories is, on close inspection, extremely complex, far more complex than a strict and literal chronology contemplates or allows.