The Wednesday before last, while afternoon temperatures reached the mid-80s seven time zones away in Rwanda, 12 New Hampshire jurors and four alternates walked on snow-covered sidewalks to the U.S. District Courthouse in Concord, where they would hear the case of Rwandan-born Beatrice Munyenyezi.
Arriving individually, the 16 New Englanders shuffled through a security checkpoint and ascended to the granite building’s third floor. That floor’s main hallway is decorated in epic American style, including the famous scene of General George Washington crossing the Delaware and words penned in 1776 by Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense.” Nearby, there is also a somber painting of Abraham Lincoln.
As the jurors filed from a back hallway into Courtroom Number 5, there were hints of the cultural collision that soon would unfold before them. An enlargement on a poster board included the French text of Munyenyezi’s Rwandan identification card from two decades ago. An enlarged satellite photo taken during the 1994 genocide showed an aerial view of the main street in the southern city of Butare. And a bright shirt piled atop a box of documents burst with the blue, red, green and yellow colors of the ruling party that orchestrated the violence.
The jurors were likely the only people in the crowded, cavernous room who did not know the incredible story that had been told in the very same courtroom during a first trial 12 months before. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Capin had opened the government’s case with an emotional account of a Rwandan woman named Esperance, who had seen friends and family murdered during the genocide. Munyenyezi, Capin had said, had played an “active and enthusiastic” role in such atrocities. Witnesses flown from Rwanda testified that Munyenyezi shot a nun in the head, fed men hungry from hours of raping women, and more.
But Munyenyezi’s attorneys had countered with contradictory accounts that those witnesses had presented at prior genocide trials in Rwanda and at an international court. Courtroom interpretations between Kinyarwandan, a Rwandan dialect, and English had confounded things, and the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. Judge Steven McAuliffe had declared a mistrial. (In a court order months later, he wrote that primary witnesses’ credibility had been “effectively impeached.”)
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