Cabin Seagull

I attended my first book club meeting today. The book was the Jodi Picoult mystery, “Perfect Match”.  This novel is about sexual abuse from pedophile priests. It would be a major understatement to say that this subject matter was uncomfortable. Still, with the resignation this week of Cardinal McCarrick, it is a timely topic. For me, this story dredged up memories of my term as a juror, in a statutory rape case. It has been five and a half years. The jury unanimously acquitted the defendant, even though he confessed. I still believe what the prosecutor said that something happened, but “something” is a long way from beyond a reasonable doubt. In the book, the protagonist is a woman district attorney, who specializes in prosecuting child molestation cases. The fervor that this character brings to her work belies the ambivalence that me and the other eleven jurors felt towards the state’s case, but then we were in the real world.