Justice For All
Die Blutgefasse Des Menschen (1898), lithograph of the human blood vessels and cardiovascular system.
Luke Stone
As soon as the spreading arrests started – as soon as the sanguivirus spreading retribution bill passed – I knew I was going to get arrested. Wanda knew it too, and so too, I think, did Michael, even though Wanda and I tried to keep all of that from him. Kids have a way of finding things out, and he was a smart kid.
What I didn’t know was when they’d arrest me, or how. Police in some cities made a huge show of arresting super-spreaders; they’d show up at a person’s place of business, or deploy a SWAT team, or make sure the time and location of the arrest was leaked to the local media, just to show the government was, indeed, doing something about the sanguivirus – even if it was only retroactive.
But the Irondale Police Department seemed to favor a more laconic, matter-of-fact approach, at least with me, although it’s also worth remembering I still had friends in the department at that point too. I was in the first round of spreading arrests, I later learned. Go figure. My arrest warrant was probably at the top of the stack for the judge to sign. What better way to tell a city you care about sanguivirus spreading retribution than to arrest its richest resident, the one-time favorite in a gubernatorial race no one’s forgetting in a hurry?
Still, when I watched through my home office’s window as the two officers – a woman and a man – got out of their car and opened the wrought iron gate in front of the house, I knew exactly what they were here for. They opened the gate and crossed through Wanda’s garden, and I was halfway down the stairs into the house’s front hall by the time Wanda opened the door to them.
They didn’t look happy or satisfied with themselves; they looked tired. They looked like they might’ve been serving spreading warrants all afternoon and evening by then and, looking back, I would guess they might have been.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said the woman, “but is Luke Stone present? We have a warrant for his arrest.”
Irondale Police Cpl. Kiara Hayes
“Did you ask to serve this warrant yourself?”
Beckworth actually asked me the question on our way to Stone’s house. I was out of it, not really thinking about much, kind of tuning in and out to some song from the 20s on the radio; songs from back then always make me bittersweetly nostalgic. We’d been serving spreading warrants since I first came on shift – Stone’s was probably our 10th or 12th – and I was tired. I was tired of hearing about how the sanguivirus spreading retribution was a violation of the constitution or the state constitution, or the bill of rights, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen or whatever piece of old paper people wanted to cite. They didn’t ask me when they wrote the law. I’m just the woman who shows up to enforce it, and we can either enforce it the easy way or the hard way.
So Beckworth’s question caught me off guard, not that the guy has a wonderful track record when it comes to social competency. This seemed like a weird question, even for him though.
“No,” I said. “Why? Did you?”
Beckworth actually had the decency to look embarrassed now. “I just…I wasn’t sure, with your mom and…and everything.”
That pissed me off. “Is anyone saying I asked command staff to let me serve this warrant personally? Because I can assure you, that’s not the case.”
“No,” Beckworth said, really looking like he’d wished he hadn’t asked the question now, which was good to see. “No I…I’m sorry. I just was wondering was all. No one was saying that.”
Leave it to Beckworth to assume I’d personally ask my command staff to serve a warrant just to gain some ground in a personal vendetta. To hear any of the old timers in the department tell it, my mom was a hell of a good cop, at a time when there were almost no women on the force. Using the job to get back at someone seemed like a shit way to honor her memory.
And said personal vendetta didn’t exist either. I remember watching, from behind a thick pane of glass, as my mom died when I was a little girl, puking up blood all over her hospital bed and gown, until she just went limp, died from blood loss. The SHERLOCK tool later showed she’d been infected with sanguivirus at a huge protest Stone had put together. She was one of the cops sent to police it, so she was listed as a victim in the case. I wasn’t involved in the case beyond serving the warrant, and, although Stone’s attorneys argued this was a conflict of interest, they didn’t win. I didn’t see him as the man who took my mom from me, even if the rest of the world seemed to love the narrative. Beckworth, apparently, included. She was a cop. She knew the risks she signed up for.
But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of power and poetic justice as I opened the gate of the Stone house’s front yard, knowing full well there was a warrant for Luke Stone’s arrest in the database. It was far from any sadistic pleasure, any sense of schadenfreude some people speculated I had when I arrested the richest man in Irondale, the guy who ran for governor and who was, by all accounts, the nicest guy in the world – and also, probably responsible for my mom’s death.
Any sense of satisfaction I might have had disappeared when Wanda Stone opened the door. She actually is taller than him, it’s just no one ever photographs them in a way you can tell. She was taller than me too, but her energy didn’t reflect it just then. I’ll never forget her face – gaunt, pale, with dark circles under her haunted fucking eyes. By then, it was just another arrest, just one more name to cross off the list.
Commerce County Magistrate Judge Edwin Toll
Sanguivirus spreading retribution cases aren’t interesting. They were for a brief period of time, when 42 states passed statutes making it a crime to retroactively have knowingly and unlawfully spread the sanguivirus to another person.
Before the sanguivirus, states were prohibited from passing ex post facto laws – criminalizing an act even if it was committed before it was illegal – by clause 1, Article I, Section 10 of the U.S Constitution. Public outrage and pain were so strong in the years after the first wave of the sanguivirus that Congress amended that portion of the Constitution to allow for sanguivirus spreading retribution laws. In doing so, they created a minefield of jurisprudence and, dare I say, eroded the bedrock of our justice system.
There was no good precedent for such a law, and judges everywhere took different approaches, hearing some of the most interesting arguments they would hear in their careers as to whether the government could legally punish people in the future for something that wasn’t, at the time, a crime. What does it mean, for example, to have “knowingly and unlawfully” spread the virus, especially when it wasn’t unlawful to do so in the 20s? What was the intent of the law – was it, perhaps, to prevent another outbreak? There is still no cure, no vaccine for the sanguivirus, and 80% of the people who contract it will suffer no symptoms at all – while the remaining 20% are absolutely guaranteed to die an excruciating, prolonged death, vomiting their own blood; the virus spreads easily, simply by talking in a room with another person. Twenty years of research has shown, time and again, there is no demographic safe from the virus. People of every age group, race, ethnicity and gender face the same odds. A retribution law by a state legislature would appear to be a noble, compassionate gesture, but the law is also, by definition, retributive.
And questions about the due process and civil rights were valid; judges made a variety of decisions. All of those happened before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Taylor v. Idaho, and decided evidence from the federal government’s SHERLOCK system was admissible in court. In their decision, the justices called the system “the most triumphant piece of modern machinery” ever invented, and to be sure the system is all but infallible. It uses data from cell phones, computers, surveillance cameras, drones, and almost any other device possible to recreate a person’s movements, and it has a color-coded system to show when and how a person transmitted the virus to other people. It reaches as far back as the 20s, which means prosecutors have been able to file charges against people who spread the virus during the first sanguivirus pandemic.
The SHERLOCK tool serves essentially the same function as a DNA test in a rape case – it proves an act occurred. With that evidence ruled admissible by the highest court in the land, debate in sanguivirus spreading cases pivoted from being about the constitutionality of the law, to whether a person “knowingly and unlawfully” spread the virus. Prosecutors leaned heavily on the executive orders throughout the years from so many state and local officials requiring people stay home to prevent the spread of the virus. Most of those orders weren’t enforced at the time, but it wasn’t hard to prove the defendants in those cases were out in violation of an order and were thus acting “unlawfully.”
Which is why sanguivirus cases aren’t interesting. They’re exhausting.
I’d been thinking about all this before I stepped up to the Warren Station in my office and slipped on the headphones and mouthpiece before Luke Stone’s initial appearance in court. But as the virtual courtroom came into focus before me, it was actually a quote from former U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren I had in the back of my mind:
“If it is a mistake of the head and not of the heart,” Warren had said, “Don’t worry about it. That’s how we learn.”
The virtual courtroom – necessary, given it was sanguivirus season – then sprang into life all around me with its characteristic pop. It was an exact replica of my courtroom a few floors down; the Warren System even got the slant of afternoon sunlight just right, thrown through a massive, floor-to-ceiling window through which the Irondale skyline was visible.
Sitting just out of a slant of sunlight, in one of the pews further back in the gallery, was the sole occupant of the courtroom, the virtual personality of a man who, while he had not had his day in actual court, had very much experienced his in the court of public opinion. He had not fared well.
Irondale City Councilman Nick Haugen himself.
Irondale City Councilman Nick Haugen
I’d be lying if I said I made sure I was at Luke’s initial appearance just because I wanted to support him. It was one reason, but it wasn’t the main reason. I was pretty sure they were coming for me next – had been for a while – and I wanted to see how the judge treated him.
I think about the day, the organization, the demonstration tying me to Luke Stone for the rest of my life, combined with where we came from, how we grew up – and it’s all a perfect storm whose origins and movements I can track with spot-on clarity, 20 years later.
We didn’t see it that way back then. We were scared and pissed. Really fucking pissed.
I mean think about it. Luke and I grew up rich, white and male in Fenlowe – something I still have to answer for every time election season rolls around, even though I’ve lived in Irondale since college, and both Luke and I have changed our names since then. It’s easy to punch up at a suburb that elitist outside of a city like Irondale. It’s this Nordic utopia on a hill above the rest of the city, literally looking down on it all – and also figuratively. The gunshots of Irondale’s 2022 gang war sounded like firecrackers to us from up there; I remember hearing them from our patio during my sister’s high school graduation party. It didn’t even stop conversation.
But the sanguivirus is the great leveler, right? It doesn’t care who you are or how rich you are or who you know or what your credit score is. It does not care where your dad worked, or what your last name is. If you get it, get sick, and you’re lucky, you’ll die in a hospital bed exhausted and white and bloodless; if you’re unlucky you’ll drown in a gutter somewhere in the liters of blood you puked up while everyone tried to stay away from you.
Even before the first sanguivirus pandemic, Luke and I were members of the Irondale Liberty Bedrock, because so were our dads. We used our real names back then – I wasn’t born Nick Haugen and he wasn’t born Luke Stone; we became those people after the first sanguivirus pandemic.
But back then, what was not to like about the Bedrock? Old-school fiscal conservativism, a healthy dose of skepticism of the government, a distrust of The Media. If you Work Hard, we knew, someone will notice. And if you Work Hard enough, and enough higher ups notice – all of whom also attained their status through simple Hard Work – you could, perhaps, find yourself INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY. It had happened before, often. Why not to Luke and myself?
It’s so fucking stupid to even think about, these days, the simplicity of the model, how surprised we were when the advertising firm we worked for laid us off via email because of the massive economic depression the sanguivirus caused; looking back, you can see it all so clearly now. Maybe all you need to know about Luke and myself back then was that we were so offended we got laid off that way – as if we expected a sudden rush of human warmth from this massive, faceless corporation when it came to us. We were in our late 20s and we’d both piled up some cash for ourselves. That someone would have the audacity to lay us off with a sterile, condescending email…well.
I didn’t know anything about the world then, the way people actually hurt, have been hurting for generations. How deep that hurt actually runs. Money kept me weak.
And yet, it wasn’t about the money. That’s the worst part. We weren’t mad we got laid off because of the money – we didn’t need money. We were mad we got laid off because it was an insult to our pride, and what does that say about us?
We put together an Irondale Liberty Bedrock rally of about 1,500 people, then packed them into a theater designed to hold about 900 people. You have to remember, this was still the early- and mid-20s. Back then, no one, even the epidemiologists, knew quite what to make of the sanguivirus, and a lot of people thought it was a lie. A lot of people lost their jobs over it – many of them far poorer than we were, people who actually felt the effects of a job-loss – and people were upset.
I will say though, our event – which SHERLOCK later showed led to the deaths of 307 people by sanguivirus – didn’t seem to be very well attended by the working-class crowd we thought it would be, the people we always invoked in our political debates about The Government’s Actions.
They were largely people we knew, who still had jobs. And a lot of money. They were just angry the world wasn’t quite how they wanted it to be.
So, by SHERLOCK’s count, Luke and I killed 307 people by planning that rally. The thing you have to remember, as well, is most of those deaths weren’t people who attended the rally themselves – the virus is so contagious it kills people who are second and third degrees away from a direct exposure. The prosecutor’s office went back and listed all 307 people as victims in Luke’s case.
Twenty years later, I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that I killed 307 people when I was a dumbass upstart kid. I’d thought about it for a long time, and I thought about it more once the Irondale News published a story linking Luke and me to all those deaths, citing linked SHERLOCK data. The name change didn’t matter; we’d been found out.
The cops investigated and they arrested Luke about two weeks afterward.
Luke and I hadn’t spoken in 10 years. I showed up at his initial appearance because I knew there was an arrest warrant with my name on it, waiting for a signature from a magistrate. I just wanted to see how the legal system treated him first.
Commerce County Prosecutor Intern Courtney Silver
I still remember Luke Stone’s arraignment. It lasted probably all of two minutes, which is pretty typical. The critics call it assembly line justice and they’re right; it is an assembly line and, back then, as a 27-year-old intern, I was the gatekeeper of the assembly line, a defendant’s first interaction with the judicial branch of government.
This point in time was also probably the only time a judge took either the prosecution or defense at face-value – my job was to tell the judge why a person deserved a high bond and should remain in jail. At the time, the only real evidence in the case had come from the police, so it was pretty damning and one-sided. I’d pick the best few lines out of the affidavit of probable cause, and ask for the highest bond I thought I could get (and no, the Commerce County Prosecutor’s Office wouldn’t tell you on the record that was our policy, but it absolutely was).
I did that about 60 times a day for 60 different defendants each weekday afternoon. You see why they gave this job to the interns.
You also see why it’s significant I remember Luke Stone’s arraignment – especially since it was a murder by spreading the sanguivirus case. Our prosecutor got reelected on the strength of those cases; someone published a map of judicial districts a few years back showing how many sanguivirus spreading cases prosecutors had filed in each district, and I swear we had some of the highest numbers. People loved it. Everyone knew someone who had died from the sanguivirus.
It’s not like the defendant’s case was especially graphic or violent either. I remember getting up there in other cases and having to say something like “the defendant penetrated the anus of a 7-year-old girl with his penis until he ejaculated, then forced his penis into her mouth while he slapped her across the face and told her she was, quote, ‘doing it wrong’” and “the defendant repeatedly hit his pregnant girlfriend with dumbbells in the face, chest, shoulders, arms and stomach until she lost consciousness from blood loss.”
Still, ever since the Irondale News story had come out about the defendant’s ties 20 years ago to a massive sanguivirus spreading case – and the Irondale Liberty Bedrock – they’d been joking in the office about putting him away for life. There was a running pool going on about how long he’d get in prison – or if he’d get the death penalty. Criminal justice reform had been one of his major platforms when he ran for governor – he wanted to drop possession of a controlled substance from a felony to a misdemeanor; he wanted to get rid of cash bail; he wanted to cut funding to the police and reinvest it elsewhere. He was a prosecutor’s worst nightmare, the complete opposite of the person he had been 20 years ago and everyone in the office – including me – couldn’t wait to see his mug shot plastered across every news site in the state.
I saw the virtual personality of just about every prosecutor I worked for sitting in the pews – as well as the personalities representing every news organization I recognized locally, and a few I didn’t – as I got up to ask for a $20 million bond for the richest man in Irondale. And I didn’t talk for long, but it was still a trip to say “307 people died because of this defendant’s actions” in open court.
I got the $20 million bond. I don’t even think his defense attorney said anything; I’m pretty sure she deferred to the court, which is what you do when the facts are really against you.
I will admit I wondered about what good I was doing as they walked the defendant away from the defense table in handcuffs and I pulled the next file folder from the stack to remind myself of the next defendant’s name. We say it often during sentencing hearings, but no amount of punishment, nothing we can do in court, can bring a person back from the dead. There were 307 people dead because of the defendant – 307 families grieving because of his arrogance. And I’d never say it out loud to anyone in that office, but I don’t know what justice looks like in this situation.
I quit law school and got into programming after that internship and I’m glad I did. I do best with straight answers. Data, input, facts. Black and white.
Lorelei Nagy, attorney at law
Our firm agreed – long before Luke was arrested – to represent him in court. He reached out to one of our partners just after the Irondale News story came out; he’d gone to school with our treasurer, actually.
Initially, I thought I was going to have a hard time with sanguivirus spreading cases. The virus killed both my dad and my brother, and while I’ve defended murderers and rapists before, this felt more personal somehow. More intimate. The Virus Recreation Unit never found the spreader brought the virus to my family, but in truth I never reported their deaths to the unit either. Not because I didn’t think the unit could find whoever it was, but because I know what the judicial process is like. I’ve cross-examined enough victims, continued enough trials, filed enough motions to know what I was in for if I wanted to go to court.
Plus, I didn’t see the point. The sanguivirus spreading retribution laws were just that – retribution. In Irondale, when judges hand down a punishment for someone, they’re (ostensibly) considering four factors, in descending order: public safety, how to keep the defendant from committing crime again, how to use the sentence to send a message to keep others in the community from committing the same crime, and retribution. Retribution is, ideally, the least important factor – and the only one our state legislature seemed to consider when writing this law. This was legislation passed in rage.
Prosecutors love it.
And for me, Luke’s case is a good example of the myriad gray areas you fall into when you pass legislation in rage.
I couldn’t sleep the other night, thinking about this, and how I failed on maybe the biggest case of my life, so I broke all my rules and pulled the transcripts – all 14,007 pages – from Luke’s case out of the box in the basement. I was never much good at self-care.
I was still grappling with all this at his initial appearance in court, just after he was arrested, but I was able to put it aside for the hearing. You have to humanize your client from the beginning. The system doesn’t see them as a person; your job is to make them one.
I mean, here’s what I said:
In his late 20s, after getting laid off from his job because of the Sanguivirus Depression, Luke tells me he organized a gathering of people for Irondale Liberty Bedrock. He made sure each and every person who attended knew about their Sanguivirus risk at the time, and still chose to attend. He also tells me the venue used was large enough to allow enough space between people to comply with orders from Irondale’s mayor.
Your honor, Luke has lived in Irondale for more than 20 years, many of those years after this incident. He ran for governor and very nearly won. He has managed numerous high-profile fundraising campaigns for local charities, hospitals and homeless shelters, and is the primary backer behind One Foot Forward, Irondale’s go-to domestic violence shelter and coalition. He’s been married to his wife for 15 years, and he has a 12-year-old son who attends school in the Irondale Public School District. His ties to the community are deep, and he’s not a flight risk. We would ask for a return on recognizance.
Luke was, of course, a flight risk – even with the travel restrictions put in place after the first pandemic, he probably had the means and the money to leave – but I’m still glad I asked the judge to allow him to return on his own recognizance. If a judge grants this, it means a person can leave jail for free and they’re trusted to show up at their next court date without having to go back to jail or post bail. Luke deserved that, at least.
He didn’t get it; the prosecutor intern got her $20 million bond instead.
The thing is – and I thought about this a lot on the night I couldn’t sleep, sitting on the old work bench in the basement – people change. Luke had changed.
And so, we in the justice system are left with the task of figuring out what price a person should pay for their actions before they changed. If it sounds impossible, it’s because it is. How are you supposed to determine how responsible a person is? What’s the calculus? Yes 307 people died because they attended Luke’s event – and no, it turned out he didn’t check with them to make sure they knew about the risk of sanguivirus, nor was there any room at all for people to stay away from each other – but how do you factor in the 20 years of his life he spent helping people after that? The Irondale Liberty Bedrock got exposed for the extremist group it was not long after Luke organized the event; he left the organization just before then, and started trying to affect social change in other ways.
He cried in my office three times. The last time – right before the guilty verdict – he told me everything in his life since leaving the Bedrock – all the charities and the food drives, even his bid for governor – he’d done because he wanted to make up for the rally. Everything.
He said the same thing, on the record, just before his execution.
Luke’s case was, probably, the biggest failure of my career. I always thought I’d say it about a case in which someone was innocent, but no. Justice was not served in Luke’s case; the coronavirus spreading retribution statutes did nothing to facilitate it. I think it’s impossible to say what justice would have been, for the 307 families touched by his actions, and for himself. Our system isn’t set up in such a way to deliver justice in this situation. I think it’s a job for a higher power.
But it still keeps me up at night.
Irondale Police Cpl. Kiara Hayes
Victimhood is a strange thing.
I deal with a lot of victims, usually before they even really understand they’re victims – you have the 7-year-old girl whose step-dad has been “playing doctor” with her; I’ve talked to women who were violently raped who are questioning whether they could have done something different, whether the whole thing was a misunderstanding and it was their fault; I’ve talked with gang members who had the shit beat out of them – who could barely speak because their lips were so swollen and they were missing so many teeth – who swore up and down they didn’t see the face of their attacker, didn’t know he was or how they’d been hurt.
None of those people knew or fully understood what they’d been through when I spoke to them. That’s fine, that’s human, that’s why I’m supposed to be there – I’m your go-to. I’m supposed to respond in a time of crisis, when shit’s really hitting the fan and you don’t know what the fuck is going on. I get paid to keep those situations safe, and I try to.
But almost none of those people keep in touch with me. I see them on the worst day of their lives and I never hear from them again. That’s also fine and that’s also human – I don’t need a play-by-play of their healing process. You’re supposed to step up then shut up, as a cop.
What I will say is nothing about it prepared me to be a peripheral victim on a case myself.
And yeah, I’m in a different situation than a lot of victims because my mom died when I was 12 years old, and I’m 32 now. Her death hurt me in more ways than any therapist I’ve ever had cares to listen to. It killed my relationship with my dad – I moved in with my grandparents when I was 15 years old – and their deaths recently almost ended my career. I wouldn’t say my whole life has been ugly since she died – I’ve had some good memories, and I’ve found a sense of purpose working for the Irondale Police Department, doing what she did every day.
After I tried to kill myself for the first time (again, when I was 15) they set me up with a music therapist, and she was actually pretty cool. The first therapist I actually connected with. I was really into guitar back then, but I was self-taught – I was listening to a bunch of punk and metal, watching videos, slowing them down, trying to learn that way – so I didn’t know much about music theory. One of the first things the therapist taught me was about major and minor keys, and how songs written in major keys tend to sound happier, while songs written in minor keys tend to sound darker and sadder. That doesn’t diminish their beauty, the therapist told me; it just means the songs sound different.
I’d say my mom’s death just changed the key of my life, moved it from a major key to a minor one, and I was still able to find beauty within it at times.
The justice system – prosecutors in particular – don’t get that. Our system doesn’t understand the nuances of victimhood. In a prosecutor’s mind, the best way to serve a victim is to secure the harshest sentence possible for the person who hurt them. Prosecutors fetishize and objectify victims, and use them for political gain. You put a victim in front of a crowd of reporters right after their attacker gets 40 years in prison and you’re getting reelected. I’ve seen it happen, in cases I worked on. That’s what a win looks like for a prosecutor.
But it’s not always what a win looks like for the victim.
I didn’t realize this in any concise way until I was in the virtual courtroom on the final day of Luke Stone’s death penalty trial and the jury decided to put him to death. I didn’t feel happy, or vindicated, or any sense of peace.
What I felt, mostly, was really fucking tired.
Ethan Szarleta isn’t a starving artist, but he does need food badly. He lives in Boise, but grew up north of Denver, was doomed to be a writer from a young age and has been on the losing end of that tumultuous relationship ever since. While he wants to examine the American criminal justice system through the lens of science fiction and horror, he understands other people do that as well, and is ready to quit writing about it at a moment’s notice if the concept becomes too popular.