Not Guilty, Your Honour

"My mom, I don't know why she was carrying a knife. She pulled it out and - this is the truth - she, she stabbed my daddy right here. And blood came out. I love him with all my heart and my mom, too, but I wonder why she did that."

The five-year-old child will spend quite a lot of time mulling over in her mind 'why she did that'. She will have a lifetime of flash-backs to that time when she sat in the back of the vehicle her father was driving, her grandfather beside him, and she and her mother in the back seat. She will recall all the loud arguments her mother and her father had. She will remember seeing her mother weep.

Not only after the death of her father, but long before that. When they fought. When her father hit her mother. When her mother taunted and alternately pleaded with her father. She will remember all that, and a lot more. She will recall her father's smiles and his paternal treatment of her. Puzzling that he treated her mother so differently, hitting her, making her cry.

In time she will understand, but yet not quite understand. With luck, she will grow up unlike her mother. Unwilling to accept a squalid relationship of dependence and bitter grief. Perhaps what she has experienced as a little girl, always on emotional tenterhooks, hoping her parents would be quiet and get along, and everything would turn out fine, but that not happening, will make her stronger herself.

It would be a fine outcome if she would learn to adopt standards of acceptable behaviour and relationships that her mother did not, in her fawning, character-destructive, grievance-prone dependence on her wastrel, promiscuous father. In any event, the trial is now concluded.

Melissa Lewis, who informed anyone who would listen, including the jury sitting in judgement on her that despite everything she still loved Jermaine Gillespie has been exonerated.

She has made a shrine in her heart for the man with whom she spent too many tumultuous, emotional years of blame and begging. No humiliation was ever quite sufficient to convince her to leave him and his miserable abuse of her. Of course she abused herself in fact, by remaining with him. And she abused her child by ensuring her little girl was witness to all the tawdry misery.

But the jury has spoken. The battered, self-pitying, brutalized woman who still loved the man she stabbed in the back of the neck as he was driving her, her father and her daughter to some destination will not be held criminally responsible for the murder she quite clearly committed.

"Melissa was found not guilty on all charges. She was cleared of second-degree murder. She was cleared of manslaughter. She was freed tonight and walked out of the courthouse with her family." Lawyer, Howard Goldkind