Steve Harmon Character Analysis

The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help. That way if you sniffle a little they won’t hear you. If anybody knows that you are crying, they’ll start talking about it and soon it’ll be your turn to get beat up when the lights go out.

STENOGRAPHER: I hope this case lasts two weeks. I can sure use the money.

GUARD1: Six days—maybe seven. It’s a motion case. They go through the motions; then they lock them up.

Most people in our community are decent, hardworking citizens who pursue their own interests legally and without infringing on the rights of others. But there are also monsters in our communities—people who are willing to steal and to kill, people who disregard the rights of others.

[Steve] is writing the word Monster over and over again. A white hand (O’BRIEN’s) takes the pencil from his hand and crosses out all the Monsters.

Miss O’Brien says that Petrocelli is using Bolden’s testimony as part of a trail that will lead to me and James King. I think she is wrong. I think they are bringing out all of these people and letting them look terrible on the stand and sound terrible and then reminding the the jury that they don’t look any different from me and King.

I want to look like a good person. I want to feel like I’m a good person because I believe I am. But being in here with these guys makes it hard to think about yourself being different. We look about the same, and though I’m younger than they are, it’s hard not to notice that we are all pretty young.

STEVE: I thought you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?

O’BRIEN: That’s true, but in reality it depends on how the jury sees the case. If they see it as a contest between the defense and the prosecution as to who’s lying, they’ll vote for the prosecution. The prosecutor walks around looking very important. No one is accusing her of being a bad person. They’re accusing you of being a monster.

Miss O’Brien looked at me—I didn’t see her looking at me but I knew she was. She wanted to know who I was. Who was Steve Harmon? I wanted to open my shirt and tell her to look into my heart and see who I really was, who the real Steve Harmon was.

King curled his lip and narrowed his eyes. What was he going to do, scare me? All of a sudden he looked funny. All the times I had looked at him and wanted to be tough like him, and now I saw him sitting in handcuffs and trying to scare me. How could he scare me? I go to bed every night terrified out of my mind.

Seeing my dad cry like that was just so terrible. What was going on between us, me being his son and him being my dad, is pushed down and something else is moving up in its place. It’s like a man looking down to see his son and seeing a monster instead.

I remembered Miss O’Brien saying that it was her job to make me different in the eyes of the jury, different from Bobo and Osvaldo and King. It was me, I thought as I tried not to throw up, that had wanted to be tough like them.

He said he wasn’t guilty because he hadn’t taken anything out of the store. He didn’t even have a gun, just had his hand in his pocket like he had a gun.

“What they charging you with?” somebody asked.

“Armed robbery, unlawful detention, possession of a deadly weapon, assault, and menacing.”

There was a fight just before lunch and a guy was stabbed in the eye. The guy who was stabbed was screaming, but that didn’t stop the other guy from hitting him more. Violence here is always happening or just about ready to happen. I think these guys like it—they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with.

I think I finally understand why there are so many fights. In here all you have going for you is the little surface stuff, how people look at you and what they say. And if that’s all you have, then you have to protect that. Maybe that’s right.

[O’Brien] said that Bobo’s testimony hurt us a lot and that she had to find a way to separate me from King, but King’s lawyer wanted to make sure the jury connected us because I looked like a pretty decent guy.

There are a lot of things you can do with film, but you don’t have unlimited access to your audience. In other words, keep it simple. You tell the story; you don’t look for the camera technician to tell the story for you. When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy, you can bet he’s worried either about his story or about his ability to tell it.

If you don’t testify, you’ll just make the tie between you and King stronger in the mind of the jury. I think you have to testify. And the way you spend the rest of your youth might well depend on how much the jury believes you.

The prosecutor said I was lying. I wanted to ask her what she expected me to do when telling the truth was going to get me 10 years […]. You get up on the witness stand and the prosecutor talks about looking for truth when they really mean they looking for a way to stick you under the jail.

O’BRIEN: One last question. Were you in any way involved with the crime that we are discussing here? To make it clear—were you, in any way, involved with the holdup and murder that occurred on the 22nd of December?

STEVE: No, I was not.

I think [Steve’s] an outstanding young man. He is talented, bright, and compassionate. He’s very much involved with depicting his neighborhood and environment in a positive manner.

[O’BRIEN’s] lips tense; she is pensive. She gathers her papers and moves away as STEVE, arms still outstretched, turns toward the camera. His image is in black and white, and the grain is nearly broken. It looks like one of the pictures they use for psychological testing, or some strange beast, a monster.