I use a Web site called Quora, a question and answer site. I sometimes answer questions there. I did that very thing Friday night, and I thought I would post the answer here:

The question was: What happened in a courtroom that made you feel sorry for the defendant?

It happened about 45 years ago, when I was a fairly new reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle during a trial involving the torture and murder of an elderly couple in the little town of Wrens. Two men had already been convicted and sentenced to life sentences for armed robbery plus death for the murders. These two were clearly very bad men (look up Billy Sunday Birt and the Dixie Mafia). I was covering the trial of a third man charged in the murders. He was young and poor, defended by a court-appointed attorney.

The defense attorney looked lost. He didn’t seem to know where he was going, or maybe even where he was. One day I sat next to the county attorney for the county where the trial was being held. He was not involved with the trial, but was interested like almost everyone in the county. At one point he leaned over towards me and said, “It’s a shame the quality of the representation you get depends on how much money you have.” That seemed to validate my feeling that the defense attorney was not doing a very good job.

I wasn’t sure whether the defendant was guilty, even after the trial. I felt sorry for him because it seemed that another more competent attorney might have managed to get a hung jury, if not an acquittal. In his argument during the penalty phase of the trial, the defense attorney begged the jury not to return a death sentence if they had even the slightest doubt about the defendant’s guilt. The jury returned life sentences, which I took as confirmation that the jury did have doubts, and that there might have been a way that another attorney could have found to get an acquittal.

But it was fortunate that I wasn’t on that jury.

I had forgotten a lot about the trial when I thought about answering this question, so I looked up as much as I could find. I didn’t find much about the third defendant in the trial, but I found a lot about the other two defendants, and enough mention of the third defendant that it’s pretty clear to me today that he was involved. He was certainly involved in other criminal activities of the Dixie Mafia.

This murder was unthinkably horrible, and it would have been a horrible mistake for one of the perpetrators to go free. So, my feeling of sympathy for him was misplaced.

Notes: The death penalties imposed on the two other defendants were later overturned, but there was no danger of their going free. Billy Sunday Birt was already in jail for another murder, and both had those life sentences as well. Birt was suspected of more than 50 deaths. It’s almost certainly impossible to know whether he actually committed all or any of those murders at this point. He died in prison in 2017 at age 79. As far as I can tell, Bobby Gene Gaddis, the second man convicted in the murders, died in prison around 2007. I can’t find anything about Charles Reed, the man whose trial I attended, but based on a number of appeals after the trial, he is either dead or still in prison. A fourth man, an attorney, had been charged, but the state dropped the charges and he was never tried.

About 12 years ago I tore my left rotator cuff when I fell off a ladder. I was only one step off the deck where I was working, but it was enough to cause a complete tear. I had rotator cuff surgery fairly soon after the event, but long enough that I gained a feel for what a rotator cuff injury feels like.

About four years ago or so, I had another ladder incident. I knew immediately that I had suffered another rotator cuff injury, but not as bad as the first time. This time it was to my right shoulder, which connects my dominant arm to the rest of my body. It hurt quite a bit for a short time, short enough that I could continue my ladder work after sitting down for a while. It didn’t cause any severe problems, other than making it impossible to throw rocks at stray cats, which was something I just had to learn to live with. I hurt it again about year or two later using a gasoline-powered auger, but still, I could live with the fairly minor symptoms.

And then about month ago my right shoulder began to ache. It was not really bad, let’s say about a four or five on the hospital scale of one to ten. I couldn’t think of anything I had done to make it hurt. I went to the same orthopedic surgeon who I visited last summer for my knees, and who did my left shoulder. I saw his PA, who said he would order an MRI. That was on Wednesday, March 10. I didn’t hear anything about the MRI by the end of the week.

On Sunday, I hurt my arm again, and it was bad. I couldn’t, and still can’t lift my arm above my shoulder, and sudden movements cause a sharp pain. It hurts some when I try to sleep, and it hurts if I absent-mindedly try to do some trivial task with my right hand. I called the surgeon’s office Monday to tell them I was hurting pretty bad and had limited function with my arm. They responded in about an hour. So now I will have my MRI on the day this posts, Thursday, and see the surgeon on Monday.

Based on my left-armed experience, I expect the MRI to show a tear that warrants surgical repair. This comes at an inconvenient time because Leah is still experiencing a lot of pain in her leg after her failed surgery on December, and is not going to feel like carrying me around in her arms for two months while I recuperate.

I know that after the surgery I will have a few days of pain that will almost certainly require drugs, but that after that I will actually be able to move around and do everything that’s possible to do with only one hand, like tying my shoelaces. No, wait, I won’t be able to do that. I might be able to put on a shirt without help. I might be able to walk the dogs, if I can convince Zoe not to pull too hard. I’ll be able to work the TV remote with either hand. It’s going to be a hassle, but I will be glad to have it repaired, assuming that’s what the doctor says I need. We have a stray cat around the house that has been needing some attention.

You might be wondering how I sustained the most recent injury. Sunday night I was scooping out some ice cream. The ice cream was really hard. The spoon I was using slipped and I jerked my hand. No big deal, but I think it finished the rotator cuff tear. I made a noise that got even the dogs’ attention.

I had to eat all the remaining ice cream. It was too dangerous to leave in the house.

It seems that every time I turn around, something else has gone wrong.

The gone-wrong thing with the most seniority is the latch mechanism for the storm door on our front porch. Something inside failed, probably a spring. I ordered a new mechanism last summer. The company charged our credit card, but so far I have not seen a new latch mechanism. A few months ago I checked, and they blamed the pandemic. I checked again a few weeks ago, but apparently the pandemic has hindered their ability even to respond to customers.

More recently our dryer started making a loud and terrible screech when we asked it to dry some clothes. I did a little searching online and found some suggestions. I pulled it out, which is a major job since it’s the top of a stacked unit, and it’s pushed back into a small closet off our kitchen. I opened the back and lubricated a tensioner, then I put it back together. When I turned it on, there was no screech. I wasn’t confident that a little oil would solve the problem, so I didn’t push the washer and dryer all the way back into their lair. I also ordered a complete replacement set for all its rollers. That was a good thing, since after a few loads, the front rollers began to make a new and more concerning noise. It runs, but it complains constantly and loudly. I think I hear a little screeching, too. My replacement parts have not come yet.

And, then there was the failed control board in our dishwasher. I repaired that a while ago, and it still works. Then the microwave failed, and I had to replace it. These two appliances were about four years old, not old enough to fail. But they did.

I can’t really call Leah’s back problem a failure, but I suppose in some ways it was. She had a laminectomy on December 21 to try to alleviate the nerve pain that was shooting down her left leg. She is still having pain, two months later. I don’t know how much of that is the result of her not following the post-op instructions (Don’t bend, lean, or twist!). Not all back surgeries are successful. So far, hers has not been.

The most recent problem may or may not be related to her back condition. A few days ago we were talking in the kitchen, standing on either side of the island table in the middle of the kitchen, when she took a half step backwards, and then fell like a cut tree. She sat down in the floor really hard, and ended up leaning against the kitchen cabinet under the sink. We got her back onto her feet, and she seemed OK.

Then I noticed that one of the cabinet doors was crooked. She had fallen back and hit her head on the door. It tore one hinge out of the frame, bent the other hinge, and broke part of the door frame itself. A day or so later I noticed a big, dark bruise on her bottom. The scariest part was the possibility of having done some serious harm to her back, but so far that seems not to have happened.

As it turns out, breaking the door was lucky for her. The door took most of the force of the impact, all of which would have been absorbed by her head had she hit something harder. If she had been standing one pace further back, her head might well have hit the edge of the counter top, and that could have been very serious, indeed.

I ordered two new hinges for the cabinet door last week. They came Saturday. On Monday I put the new hinges on and rehung the door. Here it is, halfway done.

I needed everything you see on the table, including the paper towel with a few blood stains. Sticking a sharp new chisel into your palm might not seem to be a likely way to injure yourself, but I managed.

I had to drill out the screw that held the bottom hinge to the cabinet frame because it broke off from the impact. Then I had to fill that hole with epoxy so I could put a new screw in.

So far the cabinet repair seems to be successful. I just wish Leah’s recovery could be that successful.

When I was just a boy, back in 1961, my parents took me and my brother out of public schools and enrolled us in Darlington School, a private boys’ prep school in Rome. Thinking back, I realize it was because Rome schools were just starting to be integrated. I think they were afraid there would be violence, as there had been in other Southern towns. That didn’t happen, fortunately, but we still went to Darlington.

Darlington was not a segregation academy like so many that appeared in the South in those days. However, in addition to being all boys, it was also all white.

It was founded in 1905, and had a pretty decent reputation for academics. The public schools did not, so Darlington insisted that every student that started the fall had to go to summer school to make sure they were ready for sixth grade.

In those days, Darlington affected a sort of English-inspired terminology. Grades six through eight were the Lower Forms, and nine through twelve were the Upper Forms. I was in the first class to go through all three years of the Lower Forms in the brand-new Junior School. My brother Henry started in ninth grade in the Upper Forms.

I was not a great student. OK, but not great. I was not a happy student, either. I was a little uncooperative in some ways, and oblivious to most of what was going on around me. I made my way through the Junior School, then on to High School, just middling along. And then, somehow, I started doing better. I was surprised a few years ago when Henry was recording his memories after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, when he mentioned that he noticed when I started doing better in school. He also mentioned that I had been, as I mentioned before, uncooperative in some ways. I had no idea that anyone could possibly have noticed.

I ended up pretty close to the top of my class, below a couple of guys who thoroughly deserved to be ranked higher than me.

Those years were probably formative for me, although I persisted in being oblivious to a lot of that. It was easy to be submerged in a culture where academics were valued as a matter of course, and everyone was expected to go to college. I never studied as hard in three different colleges as I did at Darlington. There was no academic shock when I started college. It was only in graduate school that courses became harder than at Darlington.

After I left Darlington, I didn’t maintain any kind of contact with the school or my classmates, other than my friend Dan, Leah’s brother. I ran a race on the cross country course at my 15^th class reunion, and a few years later I took some books that a friend was disposing of to the new school library. But for the most part, Darlington has been a part of my past that I didn’t think about or miss.

I have seldom seen anyone I knew from Darlington. I saw one of my favorite teachers, Gordon Neville, at a cross country meet that my nephew ran in sometime in the ’90’s. I saw another teacher at the barber shop about 20 years ago.

And then on Wednesday I saw one of my old teachers in the parking lot at Lowes. I walked up to his car and he rolled down the window. It was history teacher Jack Summerbell. His hair was thinning and gray, and his eyebrows were wild and white, but it was still him. We spoke for a few minutes. Neither of us had been back to Darlington for years. He said the school was unrecognizable. For some reason a few days earlier I had GoogleEarthed Darlington, and I knew what he meant. The old buildings from my day looked small and lost among all the new buildings. What had been open, grassy fields were home to dormitories. My brand-new Junior School had been demolished and replaced with new buildings. Nothing looked the same.

And Gordon Neville died last year from Alzheimers.

In fact, almost all the teachers I knew at Darlington are dead now.

It has been nearly 53 years since I graduated from Darlington. I do not want to see it now. I prefer to remember it as it was; all the teachers are young, and so am I.

Postscript

Unfortunately, in the last few years Darlington has been most widely known because of sexual abuse accusations against at least one teacher. The accusations that ended up in various news reports were about a teacher who came after I graduated. One of the worst things I learned is that a few students reported to school officials that they had been molested, but the officials did nothing. I have to wonder whether anything like that went on when I was there. As I said, I was oblivious to a lot of things, and also pretty naive. It could easily have happened, and I might never have been aware.

A lawsuit was filed a few years ago. I don’t know its status today.