,
14 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
we’re on a bit of a delay this morning with the snow, but victim impact statements should be starting at 11am. the jury will hear from several victims, then the defense’s mitigation witnesses, before deliberating again on sentencing recommendations.
the jurors were starting to worry about the melting snow refreezing as it drops below freezing this evening, so they’ve asked to return tomorrow morning at 10am to continue sentencing deliberations. no decision tonight.
we heard four victim impact statements this morning and one mitigation witness for the defense after lunch. the victim impact statements were heart breaking. i have some complicated feelings about the psychologist’s testimony about fields’ case.
this is less germane but really bothering me: fields’ hair had grown out a bit while he was in jail. he showed up this morning, though, with very freshly shaved sides & the fashiest damn haircut you ever did see. why would his lawyers allow that?!
because all we'll get tomorrow is the jury's sentencing recommendation, which is very important but won't take long to discuss, i'm going to save discussion of today's witnesses & just record once tomorrow.
as someone who lives with mental illness & who has also never murdered anyone, it was difficult to hear the defense's mitigation witness this afternoon. he testified for over an hour about fields' psychiatric history, presumably in the hopes of eliciting some sympathy from jurors
it's also incredibly clear now why they waited until the sentencing phase of the trial to put on this witness -- the cross examination was brutal & would have been very damaging to their case (assuming they'd bothered putting one on) if the jury heard it before the verdict
i know i'll read a lot of irresponsible reporting about today's testimony. people don't know how to write about mental illness. they don't know how to write about hate. they don't seem to understand racism isn't a mental illness but that racists can happen to be mentally ill.
part of why i'm waiting to record the recap of today's testimony until the jury returns with the sentencing recommendations tomorrow is that i need to sit with that we heard today. this attempt at humanization & contextualization of an inexplicable act isn't sitting right with me
i have conflicting feelings about this whole process. as a prison abolitionist, spending the last year in court hoping to see nazis sent to jail has necessarily involved a lot of cognitive dissonance. we won't abolish prisons anytime soon, so it's the the solution we have now.
but to hear people who should know better make the case that past bad behavior is somehow a mitigating factor at sentencing? that a lifetime of mental illness somehow reduces a murder's culpability for his actions, despite having been found sane to stand trial?
to hear the mother of a murdered daughter cry on the stand followed by a doctor's testimony that the murderer has experienced trauma of his own was an ugly juxtaposition.
bipolar disorder is an illness. hate isn't. maybe there's a reason treatment hasn't been successful.
bipolar disorder is an illness. hate isn't. maybe there's a reason treatment hasn't been successful.
you're going to read in the news that fields was a very sick young man. that everyone could tell from infancy that there was something off about him. that he was psychiatrically medicated from the age of 6. that he was hospitalized three times by the time he was 14.
these things are, by all accounts, true. but mental illness doesn't make you incapable of making choices. he was determined to have been sane at the time of the offense - that doesn't mean he wasn't mentally ill. it's a legal determination. it means he knew what he did was wrong.
