Part Three- Inciting Incident
The tug-of-war over who had jurisdiction of the trial didn’t interest Brianna one bit, especially once it had been determined that she would be held without bail until trial. All that she cared about was that she continued to receive her medication regimen, and that she had accomplished much, but not all that she had wanted to. Four out of six isn’t bad, she thought as she lay back on her narrow cot in the solitary cell of the holding facility.
Her personal discomfort didn’t start to settle in until the third day of her incarceration, when she had been just over seventy-two hours without contact from another human being beyond a slot being opened in her door and a tray of food being shoved inside for her. As the hand appeared around midday with her tray, her pills in a small white paper bloom cup normally used for holding ketchup in restaurants, she called out to the guard. “Hey! Am I going to gen pop sometime soon? It’s too quiet in here by myself,” she said, hoping not to sound to whiny to the guard on the other side of the solid metal door.
“Tell that to someone who gives a shit,” the guard replied, their shins the only thing still visible through the slot. “If it were up to me, you’d be in gen pop, sure, but over in the men’s facility, where you belong.”
“Excuse me,” Brianna snarled, snatching the tray away from the slot and downing her current regimen dose quickly. “I’m a woman, pal.”
“Sticking feathers in your butt doesn’t make you a chicken,” was the guard’s reply, and the tray slot slapped shut, cutting off any further reply from Brianna. She was incensed, immediately flipping the rest of the tray over, flinging it against the door uselessly. This was no way to treat a person, and she would keep a running tab of every slight and microaggression the guards served up for when she got a chance to speak to her attorney.
That, it turned out, wouldn’t happen for another six days. Curiously, Brianna found herself becoming more and more certain that what she had done was righteous over that time; the solitude did not break her, as she was sure it had broken so many others who had found themselves within facilities like this, under similar circumstances. Trump’s insurrectionist scumbags, for instance, she thought with a smirk. When finally there came a slow, three-bang knock on her cell door on that sixth day, she sat upright on her bunk and squared herself as best she could to the door. It creaked open with a protest of unoiled metal, and she found herself looking at a thicker woman of color in a Department of Corrections officer’s uniform, glowering at her.
“Your lawyer’s here,” the guard said, and a portly, balding fellow of stout stature with horn-rimmed glasses and an expensive-looking suit and briefcase stepped out around her. “You got twenty minutes,” the guard said, stepping away and leaving the door open. Brianna knew this was done to offer a sense of false hope; this wing of the holding facility was on several levels of lockdown, and even if she tried to make some kind of break for it, she would be taken down within a few strides of her solitary cell. The lawyer moved himself over toward her toilet, sitting down on it as if it were a visitor’s chair with a heavy grunt.
“Miss Foster, I’m David Jacobs. Your mother has retained me for your defense,” he began, the briefcase springing open on his lap. He took out a couple of stapled papers from within and handed them over to her, and Brianna quickly scanned the top of the page and the first few lines; it was, at a glance, an order to move Brianna to a different holding facility. “What you have there is a transfer order, signed by a federal judge, to have you moved tomorrow morning to a much more humane facility than this one until your trial date. Jury selection is already underway, I should let you know,” he added.
“Has there been any plea offer,” she replied, setting the papers aside on the bunk beside herself. The lawyer, Jacobs, blinked blankly at her several times, as if she had spoken words from a forgotten language.
“Miss Foster, there isn’t going to be a plea deal offered to you. Surely you understand that, right? You stand accused of shooting and killing four Supreme Court Justices; you are going to stand trial for that.” He rifled through several more papers in his briefcase, handing her another sheet. “The only thing the authorities are willing to possibly negotiate is the weapons charge, since 3D printed weapons aren’t technically among the banned firearms covered in any known laws.” He shook his head, handing her the paper.
“I’m confused,” Brianna said, feeling her chest start to tighten, her breath shortening. “I thought prosecutors had to offer a plea deal. That’s, like, the law, right?” David Jacobs snickered, shaking his head and clapping his briefcase shut. “What’s so funny?”
“You clearly don’t understand what the law actually is, Miss Foster,” he said, rising from his ‘seat’. “Nor how it actually is applied. I’ll speak with you again in a few days, once you’ve been settled into your new accommodations.”
“Wait, Mr. Jacobs,” Brianna said, reaching out and brushing his left arm with a hand that felt suddenly weak to her. “Can you please tell my mother I said thanks? For sending you?” Jacobs nodded and shuffled away, replaced in the doorway by the guard once more. Brianna took up the transfer order papers from her left, looking down at them in order to avoid meeting the guard’s eyes. The door clapped shut with a hollow metallic ‘clang’, and she was once again cut off from the rest of humanity.
**
To say that the actions of a single unbalanced person had throw the nation into a near-mass-panic would have been an understatement. The bodies of the ostensibly conservative Justices had not even gone cold before chatter started up about who would replace them on the bench. A fifth Justice had been wounded, but two factors had resulted in her only receiving effectively a flesh wound; firstly, Brianna’s 3D printed weapon had not been a high-quality production, quickly losing efficacy with each discharge. Secondly, the Justice had, after dropping herself behind cover, returned fire at the transwoman who had ambushed the Justices at the cathedral, forcing Brianna Foster to flee the building. When she had gotten outside, the very same Marshals she had slipped past initially to sneak into the service gang-tackled her to the pavement.
The public had been not only as polarized as ever about who should take those seats, but they had been willing to resort to physical violence against one another more frequently than in times past. The entire country seemed to be on the verge of a “Bleeding Kansas” situation over the matter. Only when Justice Roberts issued a declaration that the remaining Court unanimously agreed to resume their work as a 5-Justice body until after the 2024 Presidential Election did people seem to calm down. The rhetoric online remained savage, but when had it not been so?
But the election had not gone as so many folks on Twitter and in the mainstream outlets had thought it would; what had begun in 2022’s mid-terms as a ‘Red Wave’ turner into a veritable tsunami, ushering control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives into Republican and Libertarian control. Within weeks of the 47th President’s swearing in, four new candidates for the Court had been named, and every one perceived as just as, if not more, conservative than the ones Brianna Foster had murdered.
But people only paid attention for a few days; sensing the potential powder key they were sitting on, the media swiveled their coverage to the coming trial of the young activist and her plight, speculating on her motives, her methods, and what it might mean for a nation whose most cherished institutions now seemed so vulnerable.
**
“I think it’s your only chance, Miss Foster,” the portly little attorney said, his head bobbing up and down slightly like a basketball on a string. Brianna sat across from him in one of her current holding facility’s more private visitation rooms, set aside for defendants to speak with their legal council. She felt her back teeth grinding together as she looked over his typed out proposal.
“This makes it sound like I’m some sort of deranged maniac,” she protested.
“Miss Foster, I’m going to level with you here,” David Jacobs said, pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes squinted shut. “And I’m going to speak freely, since no recording devices are allowed in here.” He seemed to visibly deflate a little in his chair, and he gave her an exasperated stare. “I personally think what you did goes beyond the pale, and I’m not even 100 percent sure this idea should carry any weight. You know what you did was legally wrong; your ideology tells you that doesn’t matter, because your overall cause makes it okay.”
“I never said that,” Brianna shot back. But Jacobs barely blinked at her retort.
“It’s pretty obvious from all of your social media activity. Which, by the way, you had better hope the prosecutor’s office doesn’t get hold of, because I’ve seen it, and it’s pretty damning.” He pulled out his phone, navigating through it for a minute, before holding the screen out toward her. “You posted this just seven months ago in response to someone calling you Brian, your prior legal and given name at birth; ‘I hope you die of sepsis after someone from my community rightfully stabs you in the gut’.”
“That asshole dead-named me,” Brianna snorted, folding her arms defensively over her chest.
“That’s not cause to wish for someone to die,” Jacobs said with another sigh. “Especially in such an awful way. I mean, do you have any idea how much of an overreaction that is?”
“So you’re okay with people trying to commit genocide against the trans community,” she barked in response, slapping the table between them.
“You see, that? That right there, Miss Foster? That complete leaping of logic and putting words in someone else’s mouth? That’s exactly why this is your only chance,” he said, tapping the proposal papers. “And it’s also why my partner will be representing you at trial, not me.” He started to rise from his seat, and Brianna scoffed aloud.
“You can’t do that,” she said evenly. “My mother hired your firm and specifically requested you, Mr. Jacobs.” He offered her a tired smile.
“And that’s another great thing about this country, Miss Foster- neither you nor your mother can compel me to provide you with my personal service. You can’t make me do, well, anything,” he said with a shrug. “I can’t make you consider that proposal as your defense.” Brianna looked down at the papers he had set before her, pulling them closer. She looked up at the attorney and met his gaze.
“Do you think it could work,” she asked somberly.
“With a D.C. jury pool?” He let out a derisive snicker. “I can almost guarantee it.”
**
And he had been correct, it turned out. A jury of her peers found Brianna Foster, nee Brian Foster, not guilty on all counts by reason of mental disease or defect. Jacobs’s partner had eloquently argued that the young defendant’s brain was awash in hormone drugs and already faced with gender dysphoria, and that the combination of factors had rendered her legally exempt from the concept of premeditation. It wasn’t her fault, he argued, and the D.C. jury pool took this line, bait, hook and sinker.
For Brianna, though she was mildly afraid of what her life was going to be like, being remanded to a state-run psychiatric hospital for no less than 5 years, felt a flush of giddy glee as she was escorted out of the courtroom. For years now the cons had been labelling people in her community weirdos and lunatics. Well, by their own words, I guess it fits, she thought with a triumphant smile. Go ahead, call me crazy; just don’t call me Brian.