The verdict is freshly pronounced: Guilty. On all counts. And I sit here crying for this elderly woman who is probably guilty in some capacity of the murder of her ex son-in-law. This takes nothing away from the victim, Dan Markel. He was needed on this planet, one of the very best of us. And I still feel overrun, crashed into, stunned to silence at the heartless way he met his end. I can’t process it. But at the same time I have compassion for Donna Adelson; and the people who laughed at her and made fun of how she looked, have fallen off of their self appointed pedestals. Yes, they are content creators, but they are also mean kids; they are spoiled brats on the school ground. They are a mob, lost in the current of riotous judgement where compassion does not exist, where the very possibility of reasonable doubt has been quashed. They allowed themselves to be swept along in mob mentality and it was ugly. It was off balance. It was far away from the scales of justice. It demonstrated callousness in living color. I tried to find one commenter who had anything balanced to say. I found none. Not one.

I can now clearly see how an innocent person can be riotously convicted, too.

I watch True Crime YouTube every day. I follow some of the most heinous crime stories as they play out in the justice system. I don’t always agree with the way these things are handled and I have learned that judges are not ethereal creatures with wings and perfect judgement. Some are just plain corrupt. Not sure I like knowing that, but it feels better knowing the truth, rather than grasping at a dream. Still, some are as close to perfect as it gets, and I’m glad to have seen them in their element.

This judge, presiding over Adelson’s trial, was one of the good ones. But he insisted that Donna, a 75 year old woman, sit in court all day, day after day, not expressing emotion in any way. It had to be excruciating for her. I think the judge overstepped his bounds. If a defendant is stoic, everyone, and I mean everyone, says they have ‘no remorse’. And thus the jury is influenced. And this judge gave the jury little credit to be able to make up their own minds about how a defendant acted or didn’t act. I can understand banning outbursts, but this judge would not allow anyone, not anyone, to express any emotion or reaction of any kind. That’s a clinical level of need to control in my opinion. And in spite of his overbearing control, the jury was influenced. Schrodinger’s cat.

Donna shouted, “OH MY GOD!” when she heard the word ‘guilty’. As I would have done; as you would have; it was clearly involuntary. And the judge jumped on her in the worst moment of her life, ‘admonished her’ as they like to say. Heartless. Heartless and cruel. My heart broke for this woman. This will surely kill her. This was ugly business, and no, not as bad as the gunshots that killed her son-in-law, but is any death better than any other? Aren’t they all heartbreaking? Shouldn’t they all give us pause? Surely I am not the only one who feels this way.

Her defense attorney did a great job in her closing argument. I heard some things I hadn’t heard in court, and I also started thinking she had some very good points. I started to doubt some of the things I had believed in court, prior. I now have reasonable doubt. I now recognize the effort to make a gripping wish without evidence become fact. They were there. They just were. And once you have a train load of mobsters, well all reason is gone.

I think Donna was an overbearing, cocky, horrible mother-in-law, one of those grandmothers who insist on reliving their parenting years through their grandchildren. I do not understand that mentality. The children are the parents’ children. The grandmother doesn’t get to raise them. And Donna had a strange relationship with her son. You know, one where there’s a hint of the son being leaned into as a husband in a way? Mothers and sons, the same old story.

I wouldn’t have liked Donna on the streets, as they say. She was wealthy and thought she had more power than she did, clearly. I can imagine her looking down on other people who were not rich, thinking she was above everyone else around her. I could see that, but that was not the woman at the defendant’s table throughout the trial. She was a broken old woman with gray hair whose loved ones all turned against her, who was globally hated, and who MAY be guilty, but also may not. Still, she deserved a fair trial. And she deserved some semblance of dignity in the process of justice playing out.

Now when I look at trials where there is a wide, gray streak, I’m careful about how I judge. Donna was targeted by law enforcement, the victim of a ‘bump’. A nudge to get the criminals talking to on another for the sake of solving the crime. But Donna was bullied. The LE officer used the F-word over and over as he raised his voice and verbally abused her, and I was pissed. You don’t bully ANY woman, but in particular, an elderly woman. That’s called elder abuse, and that behavior undermined the whole effort to find her armor chink in my opinion. I became furious with this guy and whoever put him up to it. It was just wrong. And it colored my opinion of the case against her. It seemed like they pushed too hard, almost desperately so.

I think Donna was a tug boat. Small but powerful, able to steer the ship. I think she enjoyed being a bully, a quasi thug, until it got real. That’s the thing. People jump on the bullet train and love having the power of the wind blowing back their hair, never bothering to look ahead on the tracks at what will surely derail the train. It feels good to think you’re strong, until the cuffs snap around your wrist. Those chats, those calls, those emails, each one could be a hesitating point, a place to think about what is being done and more importantly, the consequences. But this, what happened here, is herd mentality. And once you encounter it in handcuffs, you are pretty much finished. And if you encounter an angry mob out for revenge, well, ruined lives are always the result.

And this is why I weep. I weep for loss of humanity, desperate for just a tiny bit of compassion, feeling for fairness and balance in the dark, yes, even for a criminal. Watching someone’s life end is terrible, and should never, ever be entertainment.

I believe Donna will find her new center and she will be okay. She will learn that she has no power and she will learn that if you raise your head above the herd, you become a target. She will learn to live among the little people. I hope one day we will learn the whole story of this crime, though the likelihood is small. But if we do get the rest of the story, I think we’ll find out that Donna is less culpable than the mob thinks. Still culpable, just less so.

Hope springs eternal.