Table Of Content‘In this moving and spellbinding meditation on the mysteries of remorse, Kate
Rossmanith shuttles between courtroom dramas and personal reminiscences as
she traces out the repercussions of the “calamitous mistakes and misfortunes”
that haunt our everyday lives. This is the gift Rossmanith gives her readers:
through her elegant prose and riveting story structure, she opens up an elusive
subject for us to ponder, withholding obvious closure, and yet satisfying us that
she has reached the heart of the matter. Rarely does a book enter a reader’s life
so completely.’
MICHAEL JACKSON, author of
The Varieties of Temporal Experience
To my family
Remorse is memory awake.
Emily Dickinson
Contents
Cover Page
Title page
I Courtroom Appearances
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
II Judgment
8
9
10
11
12
13
III Prison and Parole
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
IV Rehabilitation
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Author’s Note
Sources
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
I
COURTROOM APPEARANCES
1
The first court case I ever observed belonged to a woman guilty of murder. She
had deliberately run over a young man with her car. I had followed news reports
of the trial, for the story seemed so strange, and had seen grainy CCTV footage:
the vehicle lunging at the 21-year-old who darts out of its way; the car reversing
and charging once more, striking him, thrusting him underneath.
Anyone can attend court. You scan the court lists, locate the case you are
looking for. You can also slip into hearings about which you know nothing. The
public is allowed to be there, but it never feels that way, and you keep expecting
someone to ask you to leave. The criminal courts are open secrets. Raw lives,
with all their calamitous mistakes and misfortunes, are laid bare.
The façade of the New South Wales Supreme Court building was what I’d
expected – sandstone arches and high tradition – but its foyer was in want of
repair. The walls had cavities where the plaster had come away, as if bitten into
by an animal, and on the sweeping staircase, a structure fit for the arrival of a
princess, masking tape held a banister knob steady. The security machine at the
courtroom entrance looked like space-age gear in a Victorian relic.
People gathered outside Courtroom 3 for the sentencing proceedings. Mostly
they were dressed in jeans and t-shirts, law students freed from classrooms and
sent to study real life. Among them was a pinched-looking woman in her late
fifties with peroxided hair in the style of a firework that reminded me of David
Bowie. She was the offender’s mother. Her 39-year-old daughter was somewhere
below us in the bowels of this place, waiting to walk up the stairs into court and
natural light.
We filed in. I took a seat at the back and listened to the reverberating
procession as the crowd filled the room.
A student near me didn’t know what this case concerned.
‘What is this case?’ she asked someone next to her.
‘This is a very serious case,’ the onlooker replied. ‘A woman has been
convicted of murder. Today is her sentencing hearing.’
‘Oh.’
‘Go up to someone afterwards and ask about it. Speak to the prosecutor. She’s
lovely. You won’t understand anything today unless you ask.’
The prosecutor did look lovely: a slender brunette with the high-wattage smile
of a party host. During the trial, she had won over the twelve most important
people in the room and they’d returned a finding in her favour. Today the
prosecution and defence would present evidence to the judge that would help
determine the length and nature of the offender’s sentence. The woman would be
sentenced for murder, that was a given, but precisely how many years she would
serve, and what her non-parole period would be, was for the judge to decide. The
sentencing itself wouldn’t happen for another fortnight.
I hadn’t been at the trial. It wasn’t the defendant’s guilt or innocence that
interested me so much as what was to be done with her once her guilt was
established. Even at that early point I knew that jury trials aren’t what the
criminal justice system is about. They are rare in Australia. Mostly people plead
guilty.
A man and a woman shuffled into a row behind the prosecutor. I recognised
them from the news as the victim’s father and mother: him thin and shrunken,
her with the ghostly pallor of a person not quite there. Then the brother arrived. I
heard him before I saw him, the thud thud thud of weighty feet on the old floor.
Tall and wide, he squeezed between his parents. The row was designed for three,
however he had the bulk of two people, and rolled his shoulders to fit.
I waited for the offender to emerge, but she already had. Unaccustomed to the
staging of court proceedings, I’d missed her unceremonious entrance not through
a door but from a staircase below that coughed her up from nowhere. It took me
minutes to register that the lonely figure who’d materialised at a bench to my left
was the woman herself. She could have been a court reporter, anyone, were it not
for her form. She was terribly contracted. Head bowed and sobbing softly,
blonde hair drooped around her face, she wrapped her arms and hands tightly
around her stomach. Dabbing her eyes with a screwed-up tissue, she slid glances
at her mother with the firework hair.
The elderly judge entered, dressed in scarlet, looking like Christmas. He spent
fifteen minutes silently reading the submissions from the lawyers while the rest
of us tried not to fidget. Then the prosecutor made mention of documents or
Description:'A sincere and delicate inquiry that moves with grace between public and private pain.' Helen Garner 'Brave and brilliant... this book will change your life.' Ceridwen Dovey Kate Rossmanith studied people for a living, and thought she understood human nature well. But in the wake of her daughter's b
