Innocent Not Guilty

I finished reading Monster, by Walter Dean Myers, this morning before I dragged myself out of bed. It's the story of a 16-year-old kid accused of taking part in the murder of a drugstore owner. Myers tells the story from the point of view of Steve Harmon, the accused boy, but Steve manages to distance himself from his own story by presenting most of it in the form of a movie screenplay. "I think to get used to [prison] I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else," he writes in the beginning, "I wish I could make sense of it. Maybe I could make my own movie" (4).

It's innovative storytelling; it allows Steve to describe the action in terms of impersonal camera angles and abbreviated courtroom scenes. He reserves his own feelings for handwritten notes in between scenes, but even in these moments he seems unsure of his emotions, his expectations, and even the degree of his involvement in the crime for which he stands accused. Steve is a classic example of an unreliable narrator; his own involvement in the story gets in the way of his ability to tell us the whole truth. Because the prosecution rules that anything Steve might have done to assist in the robbery of the drugstore qualifies him for felony murder, he deliberately fudges some of the facts of that day, and is forced to wrestle with his conscience over innocence, guilt, and all of the ambiguous territory in between. Meanwhile, the stories of other inmates parallel Steve's struggle. One man, a failed jewelry store robber who managed to lock himself into the store he was robbing, claims total innocence:

He waited for two hours while people came and tried to get into the store before he called the police. He said he wasn't guilty because he hadn't taken anything out of the store. He didn't even have a gun, just his hand in his pocket like he had a gun. (142)

If a person intends to commit a crime, or assist in a crime, but they are unable to pull it off as expected, are they still guilty of the crime? I run into this ambiguity all the time as a teacher. Say a student looks at a text message during a major test. The message may have nothing to do with the test he or she is taking- in fact, I've read the kind of texts that get sent, and it's not likely that the message has anything important to say at all- but I can't be sure of that. Using a cell phone in any class is a violation of a campus-wide rule, but in the context of a test, whether intentional or not, the violation becomes not only improper use of an electronic device but cheating on top of it, and punishable by a grade of zero.

The student will likely protest, and say that I can't prove that they were cheating- they may have been just checking the time on their phone- but like almost everything in this world, the act of cheating cannot be clearly defined in terms of "black and white," you did or you didn't; there may be varying degrees of the crime, but there is a single consequence (Unfair? Clearly, but also rather effective). Likewise, in Steve's case, while he may not have wittingly involved himself in the murder of the shopkeeper, it seems likely to all of the adults around him that he was, to some degree, involved in the robbery that ultimately ended a man's life. And if the prosecution can convince the jury of that, Steve stands to spend much of the rest of his life behind bars.

Monster ends on an ambiguous note- it isn't all wrapped up in a pretty bow, and even Steve seems unsure of who he is, of his innocence or guilt (there's a reason why defendants are pronounced either "guilty" or "not guilty"- who of us is really innocent?). "I want to know who I am," he says, "I want to look at myself a thousand times to look for one true image" (281). For those of you looking for a quick read among the summer reading options, Monster certainly qualifies- but be prepared for the questions it leaves you with to haunt you long after you've closed the book.