*

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Author’s Note

This story forms part of a narrative triptych alongside In Tenebris [2021] and In Darkness [2022], three pieces that explore the same murder trial through a different angle.

In Tenebris addresses the deliberation from within; In Darkness proposes an open-ended reimagining; Between Law and Conscience returns to the experience from a reflective distance—to examine what the justice system leaves out.

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*

The trial took place seven years after the murder.

It was difficult to grasp how something so grave could have waited so long.    No weapon had been recovered.    The witnesses gave halting, conflicted testimony.    The victim had been fourteen when he was shot.    The defendant—who looked barely older than twenty at the time of trial—must have been about the same age back then. Both boys, really.    What had unfolded in those missing years—before and after—was never addressed.

We were told the crime stemmed from a turf dispute between youth gangs.    Not a premeditated act, but a flare of violence born in a world where survival, for some, is its own daily labor.    Children—some no older than primary school age—trapped in loops of retaliation, where fear and poverty set the rhythm.    None of that—none of what might explain how violence germinates where options vanish—was part of what we were allowed to consider.

There may have been earlier proceedings.    Maybe the case began in juvenile court. Maybe there were appeals, delays, witnesses who refused to testify.    Or maybe the file just sank, for a time, under the sheer weight of the judicial backlog.    By the time we—the jury—entered, none of that background was available to us.    Our task was to begin where the case file did: with the event.    As if time had left no mark.    As if the intervening seven years had not eroded memory or reshaped the young man who now sat before us.

The purpose, formally, was to determine guilt or innocence.    But from the outset it felt like we were being asked to apply a blunt question to a situation that resisted such clean edges.    This was not just about what had happened—but about what could not be said.

We were instructed to confine ourselves to the evidence. And we tried. But the questions kept tugging—quietly, steadily.    How could we not see that this was a killing between teenagers?    That it unfolded in a context already stacked against them? How could we not feel that something vital had been left out of the frame?

No one spoke of the defendant’s time in custody—how long he’d waited for trial, whether he’d been offered a plea, or had access to counsel early on.    And that expression on his face—unreadable to some, unsettling to others—may have carried traces of confinement, of growing up inside a system that offers little room for grace. I couldn’t know. But I kept wondering.

Despite our best efforts to remain disciplined, the questions kept returning.    What chances had that boy really had to escape the fate that claimed him?    What might his life have looked like if different choices—his or others’—had been possible earlier?    Was it fair, even legal, to weigh his guilt without considering the conditions that had shaped him?

But those thoughts were not admissible.    They weren’t in the record.    The judge’s instructions were clear: such context, however compelling, was irrelevant to the task before us.    Justice, we were told, required a kind of tunnel vision—stripped of background, stripped of time.

So the proceedings followed their course: objections, testimony, forensic accounts, cross-examinations.    The weapon was never found.    Both the prosecution and the defense had their lapses—moments where arguments frayed or confidence gave way to fatigue.    But what lingered wasn’t the strength or weakness of the case.    It was the feeling that something essential remained unspoken, unreachable.    That the full truth—if such a thing existed—had been sealed off long before we arrived.

Some jurors were ready to decide quickly.    For them, the evidence presented was enough to convict.    Others, myself included, were less sure—not out of sympathy, but because the case felt incomplete.    I kept returning to a quiet unease: were we being asked to judge a person, or only the narrow outline the system permitted us to see?

During deliberations, the tension thickened.    One juror said that the defendant’s withdrawn posture looked like guilt.    Another saw in it exhaustion.    I couldn’t say.    But I kept asking myself—what does innocence look like after seven years in pretrial detention?    What shape does presence take in someone who has lived under constant suspicion?

On one afternoon, before we adjourned for the day, the youngest among us—barely twenty—spoke up.    His voice was low but certain:

“I grew up in a neighborhood too, where you were more likely to be stopped for how you looked than to be seen as someone worth protecting.    I don’t know if he did it.    But I do know what it feels like to be judged before you understand who you are.”

No one responded.    But something in the room changed.    The atmosphere softened.    Our conversations grew less defensive, more reflective.

It took us nearly three weeks to reach a verdict.    Not because the case was complex in a technical sense, but because we all—each of us—had to confront not only the facts but our own expectations of justice.    Doubts lingered.    The discussions were civil, even quiet, but weighted.    It was as if the jury room had become something else—a kind of confessional, where what we revealed was not just about the case, but about ourselves.

I thought of my father, who used to say that justice must be blind, but never deaf.    That one must listen for what’s withheld, not just what’s claimed.    That memory stayed with me as we signed the verdict:    not guilty.

There were quiet cheers from the defendant’s side.    The victim’s mother wept.    We, the jury, didn’t feel resolution—only the tremor of uncertainty.    The judge thanked us for our service.    We exited through a narrow corridor, shielded from the public, down a service elevator, then out.

I don’t know what became of him after that.    Maybe he disappeared again into the margins of a city that had already marked him.    Maybe he tried to begin again. I can’t know.    But I do know this:    that trial was not only about one act of violence.    It was about the quiet violence of exclusion—of what the law, in its procedures, often refuses to see.

And it is that omission—silent, sanctioned, systematic—that places justice itself on the stand.

*

Ricardo F. Morin

Bala Cynwyd, PA — July 10, 2025

Editor: Billy Bussell Thompson

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