0013 The Witness Box Poem by Michael Shepherd

It was a minor court case –
a matter of a market trader
selling maybe stolen goods,
the police attempting, probably not for the first time,
to get clear evidence to nail him…

but for those serving on a jury
for the first time, an occasion
full of all the solemn majesty of law;
the difficulties of following court proceedings;
weighing the evidence; and most of all,
the fear of convicting an innocent man –
even, as visibly here, a slippery man to deal with.
The court was small; almost intimate.

After the grubby, vague, sometimes seemingly irrelevant
prosecution claims (points being made that
a jury would not appreciate, involving finer points of law) -
and, months after the event,
policemen reading from notes they took of the case
which were as evidence, more like a crime half seen, and
half assumed, the accused took the witness stand

and as he took the last two steps towards the stand
I witnessed an extraordinary moment, even with
his back to me – for two seconds at the most, you could see
the burden of a lifetime's criminality fall from his shoulders;
in this moment of pure, beautiful grace:
something within him knew that this was the given moment
to ‘come clean’ once and forever…

before me stood, for a single glimpse,
the human being in primal innocence.
So when he took the witness stand
and declared himself not guilty
at was, at one level, manifestly true..

He took the stand; swore on the holy book
to tell the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth;
and lied and lied and lied – so obviously,
that to my astonishment, the judge intervened,
leaned over to him and said in almost motherly tones,
‘Mr Smith – why is it that whenever you are asked
a question.. you tell..a lie? ’…

In the courtroom, a breathless pause;
(the defence lawyers can’t have been too pleased
to hear this condemnation by implication) :

‘It’s me nature, ma’am’ was the sincere and miserable reply..

The police failed to convince us of his guilt – although
we quessed they’d been after him for some time;
we let him off; but in that moment which was unforgettable,
I’d seen innocence and guilt within one man.