After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 112

November 5, 1993. 4:49 PM.

The feeling Ralph Langley got when walking into the Chatham County Juvenile Courthouse got stranger and stranger with each passing day. Now that it was November, many of his former squadron had already taken the stand to testify in their own defense. Ralph's own turn to take the stand was set to occur later that week, and the brunette boy was sick with anxiety. Perhaps, the nearing of his own testimony was what nursed that strange feeling as he walked in the courthouse each day.

And today, Ralph was feeling extraordinarily strange.

Back in mid-October, Jeremy Reynolds concluded his defense for Larry in the case of Captain Benson's death. By the third full week in October, the defense attorney moved onto presenting the physical evidence he had for Simon's case. The most obvious thing Reynolds pointed out was the absence of Simon's body. Typically, no body meant no case. But this trial rested on another unique form of evidence: the Flag State interviews. In each of the interviews, the boys admitted to having some level of involvement in Simon's death. At the very minimum, they admitted to witnessing it. It continued to occur to Ralph that if none of them had said anything at all about Simon in the interviews, ninety percent of them wouldn't even be here right now. All Reynolds could really do now is pursue self-defense in the face of a reasonable threat. Proving that little Simon Bennett was a believable threat could've been a challenge, but luckily, the interviews produced a collective belief in the presence of something terribly frightening roaming the island, and a very dark night when Simon was killed.

The first boy to testify to his own defense in the Bennett case was Luke Armstrong as number one on the defendant's roster. All Reynolds wanted the boys to do was explain what it was like to be on that island, gain a level of sympathy, and then show the members of the court how afraid they were when they saw Simon come into view. The chaos of the moment, the darkness of the night, the youth of their ages. The defense really rested on the empathy of the jury, and so they milked it as far as it would go.

By the end of October, twelve of the twenty-two boys had spent half a day or more on the witness stand. Ralph noticed the way the members of the jury frowned sympathetically or touched their hearts as they glanced at each other when the kids spoke. Reynolds continuously reminded them that the boys were a whole three years younger then than they are now, which added a few sympathy points to the scoreboard. Most of the boys told the same story over and over with different words and from a slightly different perspective. They were young and empathetic, victims for sure, but the label of 'perpetrators' was still up for debate. Reynolds asked them about their younger, pre-island years, how they felt on the island, the trials and tribulations of surviving out there, and only after establishing that foundation did he ask them to tell the court what it was like to watch their peers die.

Roger was among the boys who testified in the second half of October, and it was an unsettling day to say the least. To say the most, Roger didn't do as well as most of the others did in gaining sympathy from the jury. Roger felt little to no shame in what he did, and Reynolds interrupted him mid-sentence to prevent him from admitting that he'd do it again if he ever found himself in a similar situation.

The looks from the jury that day were more of concern than empathy, and even after weeks of practicing and pleading, Jeremy Reynolds and the Conroy family's attorney had little success in coaching Roger to be something closer to human.

Roger admitted to killing Simon, admitted that he was under the impression that there was a monster of some kind on the island, and in that moment, Simon was it. He declared that he was merely defending himself, and that if it meant choosing between his own life and that of a wretched beast, he'd gladly choose his own life any and every time. Reynolds tried to get Roger to say that if he knew it was Simon, he wouldn't have attacked him, but Roger wasn't big on dwelling on the what-ifs.