The rise of courtroom media has provided the public with hundreds of glimpses into that supremely tragic moment when a felon, sometimes just a teenager, learns he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Then, despite their efforts at bravado, there is no hiding the shock and disbelief. His life is over. The possibility that he blotted from his consciousness has actually become unbearably real.

What happens next, when the convict is borne away to his cell to ponder what Anglo-Irish writer Edward Plunkett called the thoughts of the newly dead? Thanks to criminology, we know that many replay in their minds the moment of their downfall, often obsessively, especially in the aftermath of their arrest. This phenomenon is rooted in human psychology, where life-altering events tend to be revisited repeatedly. They go back to the fatal instant, like a tape on loop, again and again.

Often the mental replays focus on regret and “what-ifs”: “If I’d just left five minutes earlier” or “if I hadn’t listened to Charlie.” Not just criminals but many of us sometimes look back and wonder at the road not taken. The notion that an entire life can be shaped by a single inner decision lies at the core of the plot of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim. The eponymous hero, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna … envisions himself as “always an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” But when terror possesses the captain and several of his officers, who fear the ship is sinking, he too jumps into the lifeboat and abandons the sleeping passengers. 

Beyond the immediate details and the effects of a shipwreck, this novel portrays, in the words of the story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be…” These struggles take the form of an internal debate. To jump off the Patna or stay on the ship? To rob a convenience store or pass it by? These are the dialogs that take place in thought. Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Jim, the decision is reached in an instant. At other times, such as in the historical regicide depicted in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the inner conflict takes shape a long time. 

In Shakespeare’s drama, the idea of the crime is planted in Macbeth’s mind by three witches, a vaguely diabolical agency. They greet him as “Thane of Glamis” (his present title) and prophetically “Thane of Cawdor,” and “king hereafter.”  But are the weirds only the projections of his own evil desires? Since the dialog is entirely internal it is a distinction without a difference. But there is something else inside Macbeth to contend with the witches. It argues with the witches, recalling King Duncan’s fondness for him and the monarch's touching trust in visiting his castle, ironically creating the opportunity for assassination that will make Macbeth  “king hereafter.” His conscience – some would say his guardian angel – rebels against the perfidy.

He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off

The rhetorical question posed by modern courtroom video is whether those bored, fidgeting or sometimes completely impassive figures in orange jumpsuits ever had a conscience or felt the slightest shame at the perfidy they chose to commit; if they are in any way like the literary archetypes or merely inscrutable brutes. Was there a dispute in their minds? After all, Macbeth might have checked his murderous career had not his even more villainous wife Lady Macbeth egged him on. Foul though he was, Macbeth was at all events still man enough to know he was going to hell; man enough to know the dagger was in his mind.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before.

But what of the poor wretches on True Crime? I suspect that many convicts are condemned to remain clueless about why they are in prison for years to come. Just bad luck they would suppose. The worst of fates then, in modern true crime, is to wake up at aged 35 in a prison cell knowing you have been morally asleep since birth and suddenly see the sun for the first time, to finally understand the feelings that beset you in the courtroom on that long ago day when you were sentenced to three consecutive life terms; to realize, as Henry David Thoreau once observed, that “only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

You finally get it, but you get it too late.

To be fair, what we don’t see on courtroom media are those who went the other way. Who in the midst of their seemingly ordinary lives play and replay the moment they could have robbed the bank, spiked the drink or killed in rage – but didn’t. The moment which made them Mike and not Mumbles. Invisible to us are the Jims who went down with the ships, the Macbeths who grasped not the dagger in the dark, the promising young men who at one time or another entertained the thought of killing the CEO of the American health insurance company and just went to a party instead.

There but for the grace of God, we may have gone.

Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie.  

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