An Indecent Proposal
Things got odd in Courtroom 1003 the other day.
A prosecutor was instructed to propose to a victim on behalf of a defendant, who was accused of stalking. A judge arranged this unorthodox proposal because the defendant requested it. Not surprisingly, the woman did not want to marry the man who she accused of creepily pursuing her for over a year, and the ring was returned.
We should back up here.
The alleged stalker is a graduate student at Penn, whom we'll call Jared. The complainant is a Penn student we'll call Amy.* There are not many students in their respective programs, so Amy would sometimes see Jared around campus. A short, thin guy, he was usually alone or talking to professors. To be nice, Amy introduced herself one day in a break room. A few weeks later, she ran into him again at a campus symposium. She said hello and Jared asked her to coffee. She postponed, he persisted and eventually, they met twice for quick coffees in between classes. Amy testified that she never let their conversations steer into personal matters (she has a long-term boyfriend) and viewed the meetings as just two colleagues shooting the breeze over school matters. Then, Jared began a yearlong campaign of bizarre e-mails and letters.
First he sent her a rambling e-mail titled "Gravity." It was a nonsensical jumble of mathematical formulas and confusing digressions concerning gravitational attraction, the elastic pressures applied to springs and the fortunes of "happy oil prospectors." It ended with another invitation for coffee.
Amy didn't respond.
Next, he sent a poem about mashed dumplings, dragons and frolicking girls.
Amy politely, but sternly, reminded him via-e-mail that she had a boyfriend. Jared told her he loved her and showed up in her office, angrily demanding a dinner date.
"This is enough now," she screamed.
Jared waited for her in a stairwell, Amy would later tell authorities, then blocked the doorway and tried to kiss her as she left her office.
"What the hell are you doing?" Amy screamed.
Next, Jared began dropping frightening note cards in her campus mailbox ("I'm not going anywhere, Honey. I got ya."), contacted her classmates, left white roses in her classrooms and dug up the dirt in front of her office, planting roses there, too.
Amy and her boyfriend were in a grocery store one day when they spotted Jared in a nearby aisle. They waited for him to check out, but soon he came running behind them in the street.
"Where is the dry cleaners?" he asked them.
Amy filed a private criminal complaint, not wanting Jared to go to jail, but to get help and finally leave her alone.
At the bail hearing, Jared lunged at her, screaming, "I love you! Marry me!"
Jared served as his own attorney at trial (a court evaluation found him marginally competent). He shaved his head and had dark circles under his eyes. Assistant District Attorney Guy D'Andrea handled the case for Amy. Promising she would be safe in the courtroom, he had a court sheriff sit next to her. Amy calmly testified for three hours. Then, Jared stood to cross-examine her.
"Your honor, may I approach the witness?" he began, pulling a ring box out of his suit pocket.
A sound of shock rose from the courtroom.
"Absolutely not," said Municipal Court Judge Marsha Neifield.
The court had assigned a shadow attorney to assist Jared.
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"What are you doing?" asked the attorney.
Jared put his ring away and continued his questioning, referring to himself in the third person.
Wasn't Jared charming when you had coffee? he asked.
Isn't Jared handsome? he inquired.
Jared soon turned to the incident in the grocery store. Unwittingly, he had stumbled upon a potential problem in the case. Amy's boyfriend had not been properly identified as a potential witness during the discovery period, and hadn't been sequestered during Amy's testimony. This was potential cause for a mistrial.
The lawyers conferred with the judge and Amy, and a solution was hashed out. The criminal charges would be put on "status," meaning Jared walks free, but if he so much as contacts Amy, the commonwealth will haul him into court and possibly have him jailed for contempt. Jared agreed to the deal on the condition that he be allowed to ask Amy one final question. Absolutely not, said the judge. Could the prosecutor ask for him? Jared wanted to know.
The case is still pending, so Judge Neifield could not comment on what occurred next. But it was a sticky situation, and there was a clear way out of it. Prosecutor D'Andrea was instructed to take Amy into a side chamber and propose to her.
"I'm sorry," said the young prosecutor, showing her the ring, "I'm also supposed to say, 'I love you and if you say yes, I will take care of you for the rest of my life.'"
"No," Amy replied.
With that, the case was put on hold to see if Jared will finally leave Amy alone.
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