Frank Riley

“ Yes, down through the ages, law has become a living, meaningful instrument of human dignity because—at each crossroad of decision—men and women were not afraid to depart from precedent!"
Oldtimers in the court had never before heard Jake Emspak summarize a case in such dispassionate, objective tones. Usually, his voice and argument ranged the gamut of emotional and semantic appeals, plucking at each member of the jury like the strings of a harp. ”

“ All this thinking, all this culture—all of everything brought into a courtroom to defend a bush-league hoodlum. Reporters ceased to ask who was paying for this display; they simply marveled at the pyrotechnics. Through it all, Jake Emspak moved deftly, surely, extracting from each witness the pure essence of relevant thought:
Man is a creature destined to live in two worlds. He is surrounded first by the realities of this world—and he is called to live with eternal realities that transcend this world.... ”

“ The D.A. and his deputies sat up half the night studying an air-check of the Murrow broadcast.
By the close of the fourth day, selection of the jury had been completed and the trial was ready to begin. That evening, Jake worked on his notes until ten o'clock, and then went out for his customary walk through the memories and quiet of Central Park. As he paused at a crosswalk to watch a satellite platform sweep like a new planet across the sky, a long, black car drifted silently to a stop beside him. ”

“ What is your feeling about capital punishment? Would you credit the testimony of an eye witness? Do you believe that a criminal must be punished as decreed by law?
Jake's questions were fewer, and less orthodox. Sometimes he asked: "What is your attitude toward science?" Or, again: "Are you a religious man?" But most frequently he came without preamble to what seemed to be the key to his case:
"What is a man?"
And while this went on in the courtroom, Jake continued his tireless preparations. Research, subpoenas, talking to witnesses, taking depositions, then more research and more subpoenas. ”

“ Jake continued quietly. "Science destroyed that man—completely and with absolute finality! In his place is a man with a new body, new thoughts, new blood and new reproductive capacity. The fact that this new man can be brought to trial violates justice in its deepest and truest meaning! ”

“ Naturally, his fingerprints would be different! The Defense Counsel knows that!"
Jake smiled, and replied mildly:
"Of course the Defense Counsel knows that, and will certainly make the full extent of the defendant's injuries a part of the trial record. However, I have called this particular witness to show that Tony Corfino cannot be identified as Tony Corfino by what is still regarded as the most infallible method of criminal identification."
"Your Honor," retorted the D.A., "This so-called testimony is totally irrelevant and immaterial. I request that it be stricken from the record!" ”

“ If the fabricating of replacement parts for the human body has already become a billion dollar industry, if psychiatry continues to achieve new miracles, how many people in this world could now—or in the near future—seek to escape their responsibilities by taking refuge in the argument that they were no longer themselves? ”

“ If Tony Corfino was not Tony Corfino, was he then not more of the real personality, the human entity, than the original Tony had ever been.
"In restoring the damaged areas of the brain," a surgeon testified under Jake's skillful prodding, "we thought it wise to perform a lobotomy at the same time, thereby relieving anti-social tensions and pressures."
(The body is at once a means of expression for the soul, and a veil; it reveals and it hides....) ”

“ At what point would we draw the line? If fifty-percent of a man's body has been replaced is he neither himself nor a new person? If fifty-one has been replaced, is he no longer the husband of his wife or the father of his children? Can he then walk blithely away from his responsibilities, proclaiming 'I am a new man'?"
A titter went through the courtroom. Judge Hayward gavelled immediately for silence, but the D.A. winked at the TV cameras. His point had been well made.
When Jake Emspak stepped up to the jury box to deliver his own final plea, he promptly picked up the challenge. ”

“ The next five million years of evolution will be in the human brain, where Man must ultimately be defined. Until Man appeared, evolution strove only to produce an organ, the brain, in a body capable of protecting it, and carrying out its will. ”

“ The human person is a body, and therefore subject to the laws of matter, to spatiality, temporality and opacity. As such, he is a meeting place for passing forces, a crossroads of contacts and reactions. But the human person is also a spirit, that is to say a reality that transcends apparent reality. ”

“ Around the Earth, and above it, too, from South Africa and Franz Joseph Land to the satellite stations adrift through the black morning, two hundred million pairs of eyes focussed on the gaunt figure that moved so deliberately across the television screen.
In the glass-fronted TV booth, where the 80-year-old Edward R. Murrow had created something of a stir by his unexpected appearance a few moments earlier, newsmen stopped talking to let the viewers see and hear for themselves what was happening. ”

“ By means of projection on a large screen, Jake demonstrated to the jurors and Judge Hayward that Tony Corfino, defendant, had an entirely different electrocardiagram from the Tony Corfino whose crushed body had been pulled, more dead than alive, from the wreckage of a burning automobile.
Late that afternoon, Ed Murrow commented to his news audience in the cadence that had been his trademark for more than forty years:
"We know not yet where this trial is taking us, though Jake Emspak is beginning to show the direction. Perhaps, we, too, could ask ourselves the question: What is a man?" ”

“ He proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Tony had never been out of custody from the moment of his apprehension.
"Even the defendant admits to his responsibility for the crime," the D.A. continued coldly.
Only in his concluding remarks did the District Attorney make reference to the defense presented by Jake Emspak.
"I wonder," he asked, smiling for the first time, "if any of you tried—as I did—to carry through to its ultimate conclusion the line of reasoning presented with such detail and admitted virtuosity by the defendant's counsel? ”

“ The human self is an object, of a sort—and, as such, can be described as the empiricists have described us. But the human self is also, and more essentially, a subject, which never appears to the view of others or even to the most determined introspection. ”

“ Jake was glad to have Judge Hayward on this case. At forty-seven, he was the youngest Superior Court judge and least wedded to precedent. He was impatient with legal sleight-of-hand, painstakingly insistent on a structure of evidence. "Any mule can kick a barn down; it takes a good carpenter to build one," he had once told Jake.
Selection of the jury proceeded at a creeping pace, which court reporters had come to expect with both the D.A. and Jake Emspak in the same courtroom. In their last clash, they had meticulously examined one hundred and fifty jurors before accepting twelve. ”

“ Man is a blending of the rational and intuitive processes. Ethical conclusions reached by logical thinking were attained several thousand years ago by the religions, which proves that man's rational processes are strangely slower than his intuitive processes....
Jurors shifted impatiently in their seats, yet their attention would inexorably be drawn back to the witness stand. Courtroom spectators, who had come to be titillated by the sensational, stayed to grope with concepts they could not understand. ”

“ His eyes were strained from staring at the viewer screen, and his big hand was stiff from spinning the reel crank. He opened his fingers, and the knuckles cracked. Jake stared disgustedly at them. You could take a boy out of the coal mines, but not the coal mines out of the boy. His hand was too big for such a small crank. Someday, he'd have to buy an automatic viewer, or even one of those electronic brains they demonstrated at the last Bar Association meeting. ”

“ Murrow began, his 80-year-old voice more vibrantly alive than ever. "Tomorrow we may—and very likely will—have a verdict.
"But whatever the verdict, this case has served an epochal purpose—to our time as well as to the law. We have paused for an instant in our frantic drive for technological advancement to ponder the essential meaning of man—and the worth of the human entity.
"It may take years to evaluate and appreciate all of the complex testimony Jake Emspak put into the trial record, for each of us will see in it only what we want to see or are capable of seeing.... ”

“ Jake Emspak raised his cane to the chart once again, then apparently changed his mind and lowered it.
"Dr. Clendenning," he asked quietly, "am I correct in believing that the construction of parts for the human body is now an important industry?"
"That's right," the doctor said grudgingly. "It's grown tremendously in the past twenty years—from a $160-million-a-year business in 1957 to nearly a billion today...."
"One further question, if you please, Doctor," said Jake. "What is your definition of a man?" ”

“ Part of the answer to this question was on display the next morning when the jury filed into Judge Hayward's courtroom. Before them, and angled toward the TV cameras, was a chart nearly eight feet tall. It showed, in outline, the figure of a man. The figure was covered with small black dots, each bearing a white number. In all, there was seventy-two dots.
As soon as court was in session, Jake called a short, squarely-built man of about fifty to the stand. There was a bulldog set to his jaw and mouth. He identified himself as Dr. Theodore Clendenning, Chief of Staff at City Hospital. ”

“ From Malthus and Darwin, Spencer and Feuerbach, Vogt, Buchner, Czolbe and Haeckel evolved a reductive naturalism in which the spiritual quality of man is ruled out and he becomes a unique emergent of a blind natural process—a creature who must make of nature what he can.... ”

“ For all its advances, the 20th century is still a child of the 19th, when the impact of the developing sciences of physics and biology produced a change in the concept of nature and Man's place in it. ”

“ I deserve the chair!"
(Thus Man escapes himself in freedom, and is therefore never a fully predictable or manipulatable object—only a window through which we peer with blind eyes into the reaches of the universe....)
The District Attorney's summary to the jury was a model of legal craftsmanship. Boldly disregarding the broader issues raised by Jake, he hewed firmly to the line of criminal responsibility and punishment.
Point by point he reviewed the facts of the crime. Witness by witness he retraced the eye-witness testimony. ”