The first witness was brought in. He was a lame old man dressed in rags, and he limped toward the witness stand. He walked so slowly that a distance an ordinary person could cover in a little over ten seconds took him nearly a full minute.
"Mr. Jim, sorry for the trouble, but could you repeat your earlier testimony before the court?"
"No problem."
The old man named Jim nodded somewhat excitedly. He looked around and found that he had everyone's attention, so he reached up and straightened his collar.
"Before this happened, I'd already set up a little shelter near the Colins' place. Everyone knows the slums are the only place that won't turn people like us away. My shelter was right next door to the Colins. That night, a second after I heard young Colin say, 'I'm going to kill you,' I heard something fall."
"I felt something was wrong, so I ran out of the shelter I'd built from cardboard boxes. Then it took me less than half a minute to cross the road and reach the bottom of the Colins' building."
"When I got there, I found old Colin lying on his back, sprawled across the roadside garbage bin. A knife was still sticking out of his chest, and bright red blood was spurting out. The whole green bin was stained with blood. Then I caught sight of a boy fleeing in a panic, with his back to me."
Jim finished telling the court what he had seen and heard. After hearing the old man's account, everyone in the courtroom looked at the defendant, Colin, with judgment in their eyes. In the jury box, quite a few people had already decided how they would vote.
In the public gallery, Xia Xiu, who had been watching the