Category: Mistakes

What if each of us had only one person we could call to the witness stand, and the strength of that one person’s testimony could free us from being behind bars for the rest of our lives? 

And yet, under the legal system, we are guilty. But that one person – the right person – might speak on our behalf, altering the conviction that, by law, we deserve.

Last week I received a subpoena from the Court of Los Angeles Attorney for the Defendant’s office. I am to appear at the sentencing hearing of one of my former parole office Literacy Classroom students. The defendant is a 45-year-old “two-striker” who, before coming into my classroom, had been imprisoned for twenty-five years. He was now on parole. One more felony would make him a “three-striker,” eligible for a mandatory life sentence.

While in my classroom, where I teach people who are on parole, the defendant never caused me any problems. He was polite. He had previously never even touched a computer, such as we taught him to use in the classroom. He had left my class suddenly; he just stopped showing up. I later learned that he had been arrested and convicted for the burglary of a 99 Cent store. That made him a three-striker, fully eligible to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Small theft. Huge consequences. He had just earned himself a life sentence.

His lawyer, the public defendant lawyer who had sent me the subpoena, asked if I would testify in court on his behalf as part of a plea bargain. I explained there was not much I could talk about except his classroom attendance record and his classroom demeanor. I couldn’t speak to anything else. She indicated that she was eager to have me in court, regardless.

I was, she explained, the only person he wanted to appear in his defense, to testify in his behalf. I was speechless. My appearance could determine whether he will spend the rest of his life in prison. My decision is made; I have no choice but to appear.

Since then, I continue wondering, and perhaps it is good to ask ourselves two questions:

Whose lives do we affect to the degree that we would be asked to show up in their defense?

And: Do we have friends in whose lives we have invested well enough, that we could ask them to show up at our own defense?

Just one railcar missing from the morning train commute can easily demonstrate how far civility has plummeted. The five-car train reduced to four cars meant standing room only. The train was packed. Still, packages clustered on seats from earlier-boarding passenger remained unmoved so that other passengers could not be seated. The passengers who stood in the aisles numbered more women than men. Not one seated male passenger offered his seat to a standing woman.

Just as an English grammarian notes the gradual demise of the subjunctive case in English grammar, something feels missing. Mostly vanishing from English usage is the classic subjunctive phrasing, “If I were you,” replaced by the colloquial but grammatically incorrect, “If I was you.”

So, likewise, courteous behavior is apparently vanishing from our societal deportment. For a seated man not to give up his seat for a standing woman was once unthinkable. Now—not so much.

What I missed on this morning’s train ride was anything resembling the notion, “If I were more civil, I would give up my seat for a woman.”

Beautiful! Civil and subjunctive!