The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, July 17, 2026

Trial notes: What do you call an occasion that has a murderer getting to witness how he carried out his murder again? A privilege? A punishment? A taunt? A mockery? An incongruity is too neutral a term, a paradox too academic. Jermaine Williams Sr. got to watch himself stabbing and murdering his wife this morning twice–once with the scene blown up so the jury could see better how he stabbed her maybe 20 times, how she fought, how he defeated her, how he didn’t stop until his own father pointed a gun at him and told him he’d shoot. Williams watched, then clutched his head in his hands, he wept, at one point he let out a sob. Are we supposed to feel sorry for him? I imagine even he would agree: no. The courtroom was full, Yolonda’s family, friends and colleagues filling an entire side, visitors spilling out to the other side as lawyers from the public defender and the state attorney’s office all came in to watch opening arguments and stayed for the videos. Snuff videos. In a body cam video we see how Jermaine Williams laid himself on the ground as if trained, surrendering to cops, his hands at the ready, behind his back. I would be surprised if the defense did not use that detail to make its shaky case that it was not planned. The videos will result in a five-minute guilty verdict. But guilty of what? The difference will be between premeditated first degree murder and a lesser included offense that would remove the death penalty from the options, and end the trial then and there. He would be convicted of life in prison, and most of us would forget about him. Which, I think, is the greater punishment: he would spend the next 30 or 40 years with those video images in his head, and of course he would have the choice whether to continue living with those images or be, for once, a better man than he had been and do to himself what he did to his wife and their eight children’s mother. It’s his privilege. It might also be a gift he would not know how to offer himself, not being predisposed to be a better man. But you never know. It would be a shame for the state to preempt all that with a murder of its own, in our name.

If any anxiety still grips me, it is the fear of feeling this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like beads of mercury. Let those who wish to do so withdraw from the world. I no longer complain, for I watch myself being born. I am happy in this world, because my kingdom is of this world. A passing cloud, a fading moment. A death of the self to the self. The book opens to a cherished page. How worn and pale it seems today, in the presence of the book of the world. Is it true that I have suffered? Is it not true that I am suffering? And that this suffering intoxicates me because it is that sun and those shadows, that heat and that cold felt from so far away, deep within the air? Shall I ask myself if something is dying, if men are suffering, when everything is written in this window where the sky pours out its fullness? I can say—and I shall say presently—that what matters is to be human, simple. No, what matters is to be true; then everything else is inscribed therein—humanity and simplicity alike. And when am I truer, more transparent, than when I am the world?

–From Camus’ Notebooks (Carnets, 1936).

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