That probably wasn’t an accurate count, but it could have been. The jury comprised any members of the community who wanted to participate. They filled the courtroom and the gallery that morning, sitting wherever they chose, many of them sitting right there on the floor near Donny. The litigants did not have designated spots, but Donny had arrived early enough to grab a chair, on which he set his briefcase while he stood behind it, hands on the frame.

In the Tributary, there were no judges, just more forceful personalities among the chorus of jurors. It was a sharp contrast with the last time Donny had appeared in that courtroom, when the only people there other than the lawyers were three federal appellate judges, two of whom were pretty sympathetic to Donny’s case, despite the black robes and funereal demeanors. It was Donny’s fourth effort to challenge the constitutionality of the suspension of habeas corpus. Others had already litigated the big issues, including the basic questions around the circumstances in which the power could be invoked, and who had the power to invoke it. Donny was then making the argument that five years was too long a period to qualify as an emergency.

He knew it was a loser when the chief judge interrupted him three minutes into his argument, quoting Justice Davidoff’s holding in United States v. Moro that the president has the exclusive power to determine when conditions of domestic insurrection exist, and who qualifies as an insurgent. You could see they wanted Donny to help them find a loophole, and he tried, but in the end they didn’t have the nerve. Members of the federal bench back then served the state, the way priests serve the church, at its mercy almost as much as Donny’s detainee clients, if more pampered, subject only to existential tortures that don’t really earn that name.

The other big difference in those days was the courtroom had a functioning roof. This one was dripping puddles in a half dozen spots, from the storm that had blown in the night before as Donny worked into the wee hours trying to put together the pieces. The dilapidated appearance seemed like it would undermine the credibility of the court. But then he watched as Percy stood there in a shaft of morning light and unspun a millennial saga of arboreal holocaust in a thirty-minute address, and cursed the advantage she had from knowing the quirks of this room down to the way if you stood in the right spot at the right time it would even let a lawyer serve as the sundial of redemption.

She had more than stories. She had facts. The facts they had filled a skyscraper with like you’d fill a silo with grain, woven together in a way that supported her story, visualized in slides she screened on the wall.

She talked about numbers on papers. Big numbers. Money.