Thursday, October 28, 1999

by the Wunderland Toast Society

For those of you eagerly checking the mailbox for your pre-ordered Icehouse set, you'd better go rent a movie or something, because they haven't gone out yet. The pieces themselves arrived late last week, but there was a fairly serious car wreck that shook up the staff at TJ's Print Shop, which in turn held up delivery of the books. And that wasn't even our only delay... Kristin is still finishing up Orderama (her new Panorama-based order-tracking system), which she wants to have operational for the credit card processing element of filling the pre-orders, plus we'd like to include our newly re-designed catalog flyer in with the shipments, and we've only just now gotten that finished up. So, we're back to November 1st as our probable ship date (although there's still an outside chance we'll put them in the mail on Saturday morning...)

But while I must ask you to be patient a little while longer, the good news is, it'll be worth the wait. As everyone who's held samples in their hands will attest, the pieces are fabulously beautiful... we've been sorting and counting pieces all week, and the cartons filled with pieces are like crates brimming with gemstones. It's just an unbelievable joy, sifting our hands through mountains of game pieces that are (to us, at least) as beautiful and valuable as emeralds, rubies, and diamonds.

The defendant was just a kid, a 14 year old who ordered a pizza at a friend's house and then held up the delivery man. He confessed to the whole thing the next day, during a marathon "interview" at the police station, during the course of which, in other interview rooms, all of his friends told basically the same story: The kid showed up, organized the ordering of a pizza, paid off the delivery man, then followed him outside, held him up, and then inadvertently shot him. (One of the numerous details the witnesses agreed on was that his first words after the shooting were "It was an accident.") He then fled the scene, taking one of the pizzas with him, spending the night at a friend's house. The evidence trail was easily followed by the police, who rounded everyone involved up the following morning. Not too surprisingly, once on the witness stand, the defendant's friends gave muddled and poorly remembered testimony, but the evidence was nonetheless overwhelming, including the murder weapon (the hammer of which was sheared off and might well have been difficult to uncock, particularly when nervous on a cold night) and the pizza box, covered with the murderer's fingerprints and still bearing the little yellow tag showing the address of the crime scene, recovered at the location where the defendant was picked up.

Given the volume of evidence against this kid, there wasn't much the defense attorney could do to inspire reasonable doubt, but he sure gave it his best shot. Although the only charges the kid faced in this trial were related to the robbery/murder, the defense immediately told us that his client was a drug dealer, and that because of all the money he made selling crack cocaine, he had no motive to rob the delivery man. Of course, by the same token, he also had to admit that his client owned a gun. (Just as the gangsters of the Prohibition era all carried guns, so too must the bootleggers of today, in order to protect their lucrative trade.) The defense also objected to everything imaginable, tried to make us think that the police had coerced the signed confession by being slow in fetching him a lunch, and even tried to suggest that the fingerprint experts might have made some sort of mistake somewhere along the line.

But the cornerstone of the defense was a completely unsubstantiated theory that this kid was totally innocent and that it was instead his 19-year-old friend who had committed the murder. According to this theory, his client had confessed to the crime as part of a vast conspiracy to keep the real killer from going away for life. This 19 year-old dude, already out on probation, would face life in prison for these charges, whereas if the kid took the fall, he'd be free and clear when he turned 21. The real irony here is that, the way things turned out, the defendant was tried as an adult, and now faces life in prison himself. Of course, we weren't allowed to know about this until after we'd given our verdict.

Another thing we didn't find out until after the trial had ended was that the defendant would be back in the same courtroom on the following Monday, with the same lawyer, prosecutor, and judge... facing an entirely different set of murder charges, this time for the first degree killing of a classmate. It's probably a good thing we didn't know about that... we might have been more inclined to convict him on that sixth charge, the one that included the words "depraved heart". Given the evidence we heard, we weren't convinced he'd shown "extreme disregard for human life", but now, I'm not so sure. What else would you say after angrily shooting the pizza man besides "it was an accident?"