The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, July 16, 2026

Trial notes: When the jury–or the jury pool, during selection–is out of the room a strange chumminess sets during a prolonged trial amid the lawyers, the judge, the court reporter, even the few people in attendance, the more so when the lawyers and the judge don’t mind a little humor and use the occasional break to distend what can otherwise be tense proceedings. Death penalty jurors are forced to confront questions many of them have never thought about beyond bumper-sticker slogans, or to talk about how their own past could affect their judgment. The lawyers and the judge are as if walking on on high-power tension lines most of the time, each their own Philippe Petit highwiring it between paradoxes, so stepping off is a necessary relief. They laugh a bit, they banter, they understand each other when a particularly bizarre juror has just invited being excused. All that is to be expected. But how does a defendant see all this chumminess? How is Jermaine Williams, the killer, the man whose life is on its own highwire, seeing this as anything other than a system arrayed against him down to its ritualistic ribbing? He’s always excluded of course, the way bailiffs whisk him out for any extended break, for lunch, for anything not on the record. The exclusion reminds him: you are outside of all this. You are not part of so much as the freedom to banter, to linger, to idle, even in your civilian clothes you borrowed for the trial. This is what it means to have been severed–to have severed yourself–from civilized society, which so often defines itself by the pettiest routines. We don’t give them a second thought. The freedom of a quip is as irrelevant as the freedom to go to the rest room, though for the defendant, either would be a momentous subversion. It might have been different if there were realistic doubts about his guilt. It would have added an element of tragedy, with the possibility of an innocent person getting convicted, even eventually killed. Our chummy rituals would have taken on an absurd dimension. They would have seemed inappropriate. They would have made us complicit in the flagrance of a possible injustice. But that’s not what we have here. We know he’s guilty. We know he killed. We know he killed with animus, with barbarism. What we don’t know is whether he will be sentenced to die. Whether he will spend decades thinking back, if ever, to these last days of spending time outside of a prison, or whether he’ll see his life flash before his eyes in a David Foster Wallace “Good Old Neon” way as the needle serves him the triple cocktail we still pretend is a humane way to murder in the state’s name. That’s all this comes down to: ending a life with a killing, making us all, in some ways, witnesses to an execution, or ending a life with life in prison, making us all–not just the jurors by any means–complicit, as Hugo might say, to society’s failure to keep a man like Jermaine Williams from becoming the Jermaine Williams he is. But let’s not absolve him of his own agency, and let’s not begrudge ourselves the banter that, to his eyes and ears, may be a form of torture. If so, it is, I am surprised to acknowledge, the kind of torture I am not entirely sorry to be witnessing, if not–by my presence on the other side of his fate–partially inflicting.

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was always scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again.The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, self-contained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now…

–From David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” (2001).

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