Bradbury Collection

Convicted (Bradbury week 10)

465 words

The innocent man stood in the courtroom and tried to explain his situation. Larry Carson had been walking down the street late at night on his way home from his girlfriend’s home, when he was picked up by a police officer for a burglary that had happened nearby.

The prosecutor had never lost a case, and hoped to be promoted to judge by impressing people with his zero losses. The prosecutor made up lies to get convictions. He said that Larry was seen coming out of the business that was robbed with a gun in his hand, and refused to look at video surveillance evidence to make sure it was in fact Larry, and not someone else. Larry couldn’t afford a good lawyer, and his public defender seemed to think he committed the crime and advised him to plead guilty.

Unknown to the prosecutor, Larry and some of the people he prosecuted were innocent. Larry got sent to prison, where he learned six months later that the prosecutor who had fought to have him sent to prison was also sent to prison, a different one in another part of the state.

Years later, when he got out of prison, Larry was approached by a time traveler who wanted to help him. The man from the future was his distant descendant. The time traveler knew of Larry’s circumstances, and offered to help him get revenge on the prosecutor.

They used his Time Machine to go back to about two months after Larry was sentenced, during the summer. The prosecutor was on vacation in another county to the south, where he was enjoying the beach. The time traveler used his advanced technology to make it look as if the prosecutor was in the surveillance footage of a robbery at a bank in that town that day. Multiple cameras recorded his face and obese figure, and his license plate was on the footage outside of the bank, fleeing the scene.

The time traveler manipulated the brains of the witnesses so they remembered the prosecutor and not the actual robbers. The time traveler also manipulated the prosecutor into driving into the region of town where the police were looking for him. He was apprehended and taken to jail.

When he was in the courtroom the next day for his arraignment, he was met by a prosecutor who also had a 100% conviction rate. The prosecutor in the other county had no problems getting a conviction, and he was sent to prison for 5 years.

Larry went back to his own time and got dropped off at his home. He went to the library and looked at the microfilm reels and got the newspaper from the day after the prosecutor was sentenced. What he did wasn’t revenge, it was justice.

The End