Rebecca Rice: Juror No. 3 Reflects on the Case Against Leo E. Fugler, III: Published in "The Hampshire Gazette" June 13, 2015

The excused were giddy as schoolchildren on a snow day as they hurried out of the Hampshire County Superior Court, released from jury duty in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III trial, grateful that they won’t have to spend days imprisoned in the jury box, hours listening to testimony about whether Fugler forced children to perform oral sex with one another some twenty years ago, relieved of ruling on whether the defendant is innocent or guilty of the 11 indictments of forcible child rape and sexual assault and battery, the details of which, read out in rapid fire by a granite-faced Judge John Agostini, elicited uneasy murmurs.   

     By mid-afternoon that day, after two impanelments in which lawyers for both sides questioned jurors, there were only seven of us left, seven out of 80 who hadn’t been disqualified—because we knew the lawyers or the witnesses or worked in the courts or didn’t believe children could be trusted in recounting sexual abuse or admitted we would suspect a defendant of hiding something if he chose not to testify.     
     When we returned to the bare-walled jury room on the third floor of Hampshire County Superior Court a day later, we discovered that subsequent impanelments from a second pool of 80 had yielded only six more jurors, bringing our numbers to 13 instead of 14. “What does that say about this case they couldn’t get 14 people out of 160?” one juror wondered. Then the court clerk was telling us to leave our belongings behind and line up by number to prepare to enter the courtroom.      
     “Juries are the better angels of our nature,” intoned a solemn voice from the film we watched on our first day in the jury pool, extolling the system that our Founding Fathers created which gives every man, innocent until proven guilty, the right to be seen, heard, and judged by his peers, a privilege that only three other countries in the world afford their citizens.
     During my six days spent as juror number 3 in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III case, I tried to channel this better angel. As the judge instructed us at the end of each day, I did not read about the case in the local newspapers, did not Google the defendant or the lawyers, did not talk about the testimony to my son in college in Indiana or my boyfriend visiting from Maine or even to my fellow jurors. This last proscription was particularly hard as we twelve (our alternate was excused on Day Two) instantly became a little family, trading stories about work and local politics, sharing grapes, mints, donuts, and even clothes (the air conditioning was punishing and I lent my fleece jacket to juror number 4 on Day 2 and an extra pair of socks to juror number 10 on Day 3).         
     But what I could not do, which the judge urged before releasing us for the Memorial day weekend, was not think about the case. He might as well have asked me not to dream. I thought about it while shopping for organic blueberries at Whole Foods (one of the jurors worked in the florist’s department and I prayed I wouldn’t run into her). I thought about it while checking e-mail (a friend had forwarded a joke entitled Murphy’s 17 other laws, number 16 of which read: “When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.”) I thought about it while grading a student’s extra-credit paper on plagiarism (he had copied an entire assignment from the Internet, and instead of failing him for the course, I was giving him another chance).  
     At night, I shunned my boyfriend’s advances—engaging in sexual relations was as ugly as watching slasher porn—and wrapped myself in blankets and comforter, despite the summer heat. Closing my eyes, I met Leo E. Fugler, III: his massive body barely contained in its funereal suit, his huge, close-shaved head with his toothbrush mustache, his impassive face registering no more emotion than a parked front-end loader as his accusers testified against him. How did this man, sitting stoically between his lawyers--the soft-voiced, red-haired counselor to his right who did all the objecting and cross-examining and her grey-haired, yellow-tied partner to his left, mute except in sidebars with the judge—how did this fifty-five-year-old man match his twenty-years-younger doppelganger who had done all the evil deeds attributed to him? 
     Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep and failed to lose myself in a Dickens novel, I thought about the victims. The prosecution had projected school photos of them on two TV screens in opposite corners of the courtroom. The eldest girl broke my heart: an exuberant, soccer-playing teenager, her face was heart-shaped and dimpled and pretty and her smile open and unaffected and trusting, as if life would forever offer up its gifts like a succession of happy Christmas mornings. How had this girl turned into the thirty-three-year-old obese woman who suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Type II Diabetes and alcoholism and drug addiction? Whose swollen hands and feet were shaking from the side effects of all the medications she was taking? 
     Courtrooms, despite how they are portrayed on TV, are not dramatic places. After the prosecution rested its case in the second week, the defense called several witnesses, none of who offered new or germane information. There was the repeated trotting out of an architectural drawing of the floor plan for the house in South Hadley where the abuses allegedly took place—pretty useless, as one juror pointed out in our deliberations later as the drawing did not include doors. Fugler’s attorney made much of the discrepancy between testimony about where the abuses first took place—on the third floor or the first floor.  
     To my surprise, the defendant did take the stand. Speaking in a preternaturally calm voice, he fixed his gaze upon his attorneys—not once looking at the jurors—and denied the accusations, claiming that the three children had gotten together as adults five years ago and cooked up the charges because one had not been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner and another had not been given Christmas money and another had not been given a car.    
     “Someone is lying,” said one juror at the beginning of our deliberations, “and we have to figure out who.”  
     “I believe the kids,” another said when we first went around the table to see where each of us stood.  
     “It’s hard to imagine that someone would make up a story about being forced to have sex and stand up in a courtroom and admit to this humiliation without it’s being true,” another juror said.  
     “But there’s no evidence.”  

     “There rarely is in childhood sexual abuse.”

      Back and forth we went like this for almost two days, writing the names on a blackboard of all the witnesses in the order in which they had testified, going over our penciled notes on the legal pads we had been given, asking the judge to explain “beyond reasonable doubt” to us again. In a much slower voice than the judge had used seven days ago, our jury foreman, a dignified retired newspaperman, read aloud each of the eleven indictments, so many times that I no longer winced with the multiple referencing of sex organs. And because we were eager for unanimity, we haggled with one another on which charges we could rule not guilty because there was only one person’s testimony and which we could rule guilty because there was more than one person’s testimony.  
     We lined up for the last time to file into the courtroom to deliver our verdict on a thunderstorm-threatening Friday afternoon. The seats behind the prosecution and the defense were full. Most of the witnesses who had testified were present. When the bailiff delivered a guilty verdict for eight indictments out of eleven, the three grown children cried. Throughout the trial, I had kept my eyes pinned to the floor when proceeding in and out of the courtroom, but when I walked out, I nodded to the district attorney and then to the eldest girl witness who had so affected me.   
     Some of the jurors talked about going out for a drink afterward, but none of us felt like celebrating. Instead, we said goodbye and hugged one another in the hot sun on Gothic Street and headed home to mow our lawns and hug our kids and call our friends and try to process this experience which had affirmed the better angels of our natures while, at the same time, weighing our souls down with acts which the judge, a week later in his sentencing, called “beastly.” 

Published in The Hampshire Gazette, June 13, 2015. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

How to Live to 90: In Memory of John Hamilton Rice

Published in “The Hampshire Gazette”

Father’s Day--June 20, 2009 

Read at Memorial Service at Onota Lake Camp 

Berkshire Natural Resources Council 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts June 7, 2014

My father, who turned 90 recently at his assisted living facility in Maine, would just as soon have let the day go by without blowing out one birthday candle, but we three children, who are getting on in years ourselves, needed some fanfare.

After much e-mailing, Dad and Janet, his companion of many decades, agreed to attend a dinner party at my sister's in New Hampshire. There were 16, including in-laws, grandchildren and various significant others. A Civil War-era cannon was fired; meat was roasted on a grill; tributes were read. This is my tribute - I am his younger daughter from his second marriage - which I wrote as a half-mocking, half-serious self-help treatise about how to become a nonagenarian based on what I learned from him.

Run. Get up every morning and run two miles before breakfast, when others in the household are still sleeping; run in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in summer heat that ripples the blacktop, run so hard so that your face drips with sweat, soaks your faded tee-shirt, darkens your gray athletic socks, makes your daughters hold their noses and cry "Pee-you" when they hug you. Run every day for 30 years, Sundays and holidays, on business trips and vacations, until your hips will no longer carry you, and then walk.

Read. The New York Times, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Savage God. The Lives of a Cell. A Brief History of Time. Read everywhere -riding the chairlift at Bousquet's with The Brothers Karamozov in your parka pocket; it's only a 10 minute ride, but after you've pulled down the safety bar, settled your skis on the painted rung, slipped your poles along your wrist, you can telemark into another world larger than all the blue hills of the Berkshires, the world of the Grand Inquisitor that poses the only questions worth asking: Is there a God? And why does He permit some to be happy and others to suffer?

Play. Play the piano because you always wanted to and were never allowed to as a child because your parents said it was for sissies, for girls. Play Chopin the Prelude in C, the Nocturne in E Flat Major --late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. Play even though it's hard to stretch your arthritic fingers across those octaves, hard to capture all the subtle crescendos and diminuendos, play even though you ll never sound like your concert-pianist teacher with her nimble, fairy fingers, play because it moves you, because it holds you in the moment, because it makes you forget about everything you have lost.

Laugh. Don t take anything, especially yourself, too seriously, because it's all passing, the tragic and the comic, and nothing endures, even the wittiest remarks, the family dinner years ago when you said to your 38-year-old younger daughter, when she couldn t seem to settle on an occupation or a boyfriend, much less a husband, "You know, Becky, life isn't for everyone." You laughed. She laughed, even though the joke was on her. The fool, you often pointed out, is the wisest man in Shakespeare, and he who laughs lasts, as your favorite bumper sticker says.

Eat. Fill your plate. Take seconds. Take thirds. Steak, scalloped potatoes, Cole slaw, Stickie buns, anything chocolate brownies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate turtles nestled in gold paper and tucked in gold boxes from the candy store that the smiling salesperson saves just for you, that you squirrel away in the top right hand drawer of your desk and munch on to sweeten all those nasty chores like staying up late to finish your taxes.

Drink. Raise your glass. Make a toast. Chardonnay. Sauvignon Blanc. Pinot Grigio. You're no oenophile, you don t really get terms like nose and palette. You'd be just as happy with a $10 bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay as with a $200 dollar bottle of Chateau Margeaux. But you drink because you love the taste of the sweet-sharp, oak-like bouquet swilling down your throat, love the altered state that makes death and taxes fly away, the buzz that fills the world with oxytocin, makes everything worthy of your attention.

Change. Stop drinking. Eat less. Travel to the North Pole. Take a dip in the frigid, 40-degree waters. Leave the western Massachusetts city you were born and raised in, the county where you have lived nearly all your 85 years and move to an assisted living facility, Piper Shores, on the coast of Maine. Join a weekly men's doubles group, even though you hate doubles. Walk four miles a day. Walk the flat hard sand of Higgins beach at low tide, in summer and in winter, in rain and in snow.

Break your hip a week before Christmas, recover in Holbrook, the acute care wing which you wouldn't enter when first touring Piper Shores. Stay there for three weeks, even though the food is terrible and the demented old folks give you the willies. Learn to use a walker, learn to get around with a cane. Return to your condo. Take up all the scatter rugs so you don t break the other hip. Walk the paved lanes near Higgins Beach, enjoy the spectacle of dogs off their leashes chasing seagulls, even though you ve always hated dogs. Vote for Barack Obama, even though you ve voted the Republican ticket for most of your life.

End every telephone conversation with your partner, your children and grandchildren with the words, I love you, even though you come from a generation that isn t comfortable expressing sentiment. Hug your friends and family at the beginning and end of every visit. Say, Thank you for coming, say I love you, say I love you.

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