Lunchtime Adventures

I couldn’t find anywhere to sit at lunch. The weather was gorgeous. All the benches and usual haunts outside were crowded. So I wandered into the downtown courthouse. It’s air-conditioned in there, was my thinking.

The courthouse lobbies are like a peaceful, empty airport. A few people are scattered here and there, waiting to be called into courtrooms. Occasionally, lawyers and judges in flowing robes walk by.

I found a spot to read. A guy asked me to keep an ear out, in case they called for him. “Ron,” I think he said his name was. He was going to go to the bathroom.

As he was coming back, he got a phone call and talked on his cell phone about a particular case.

I listened in. I really couldn’t help it. He was sitting right behind me, and except for his voice, the place was very quiet.

Ron told a story…

A mentally challenged man was living in some kind of home. He flirted with people much younger than him, as he considered them peers, because he was developmentally delayed. The authorities decided this meant he was a pedophile.

A doctor was called, and this developmentally delayed man was given a “penis test” – where he’s shown images of children, men, and women, with a device measuring how erect his penis gets.

The result was that he responded mostly to adult women (90%) with a small reaction to one of the adult men (20%).

As part of the court case, the lawyers got a hold of the doctor who administered the test on the developmentally delayed man. It turned out this doctor had, since the original test, written a paper declaring that such tests should not be used on the developmentally delayed. It’s not an effective measure, with them.

“So,” Ron said, “for his whole life, this mentally challenged man has been accused of being a pedophile, despite there being no real evidence.”

It all came to a head somehow, when this developmentally delayed man was involved with a woman who had children. When she found out about his pedophile past, she dumped him immediately.

“That’s when we got involved,” Ron said into the phone. “We looked into it, and saw there was no truth to any of the allegations.”

The woman had also lived in a home before, and she had records of her own that were suspect. She had bitten a foster parent, once.

“But they didn’t write it up properly,” Ron said. “She was being restrained, when she bit the woman. It was self-defense. The way they wrote it up, it just says she bit the woman. It makes it sound like she was sitting at the dinner table, then suddenly jumped up and bit her on the cheek!”

Ron laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Then whoever Ron was talking to started talking, and he was quiet for a bit. Then Ron complained about how he had to sit there all day and wait to be called on, to testify as a witness.

“They should have TVs out here, or something,” he said.

When I left, Ron was dozing in his chair, still waiting to be called as a witness.