Good, cruelty-free food is a right for everybody, whatever their income or status. It was a radical message to many of his Victorian readers. Do we still need to listen to it? In a country of food banks, children going breakfastless to school, and lifestyle diets that separate rather than unite, perhaps we do.

The show starts at 1:15. We all stand as the jury comes in. Symington, lacking the poised, aristocratic demeanor he showed at the trial’s commencement, sits nervously beside John Dowd.

Dowd seems unflustered by the impending climax—though it’s hard to tell for sure, because Dowd resembles nothing so much as an evil Mr. Potatohead, his little eyes gleaming with childish spite. Today he sits beside his client, smirking idiotically as usual. Behind them, Ann Symington sits with a face like an immaculately filled-in grave.

The verdicts are read out. First come the deadlocks. Then an acquittal, more deadlocks and a dismissal. By Count 9, I feel a plunging in my stomach.

When the first guilty verdict is announced, you can feel the euphoria in the courtroom, as though everyone took a simultaneous snort of coke. It’s something you can feel rather than see, because most people maintain their composure.  Symington shows no expression as Dowd drapes a comradely arm around his shoulders. A woman sitting at the back of the courtroom can’t contain herself—she starts to cry with happiness, hugging and kissing her little girl.

There’s more of the same in the street outside. The atmosphere is like a state fair or a rock festival. The crowd is now dense, and it seems evenly divided between reporters and citizens. Middle-aged men with cameras and microphones, generically good-looking TV reporters, kids in tie-dyed shirts. Some carry signs expressing approval of Symington’s downfall. One man’s misery has brought happiness to many.

With one exception. A man in his forties, either five miles high or just out of his mind, walks around screaming, “I love Fife Symington! He’s done more for this state than anybody! Jehovah is on his side!”

If the best Jehovah could do is let his man get nailed on seven counts, Fife might have done better as an atheist.

He might have done better without John Dowd, too. Dowd is a high-priced Washington, DC lawyer with a reputation strong enough to get him a gig defending a governor. But his reputation is as a negotiator. As a criminal defense lawyer, he’s barely competent. Admittedly, the evidence against Symington was overwhelming enough to give Perry Mason a hard time, but Dowd didn’t manage to put any kind of spin on it. The best he could do was to say that it didn’t matter that Symington had given inaccurate statements to the banks, because they hadn’t based their decisions on those statements.

Dowd trots that one out again at the post-conviction press conference. But, first, he says the prosecution had no case, and that it shouldn’t even have gone to court. I ask why it did go to court, he says he doesn’t know. He seems to think that prosecutions just happen, like thunderstorms or drive-by shootings. He says that bankers have privately told him that the information on the loan applications didn’t matter, but they couldn’t admit it in court because it would look bad to their clients.

When I ask him if he’s accusing the bankers of perjury, Dowd resorts to his favorite “Nuh-uh!” defense: “I didn’t say that. You did.”

Well, if the bankers stood there in court and said something they knew wasn’t true, isn’t that perjury?

“I didn’t say that.”

But he did, not 30 seconds ago. This is the hallmark of John Dowd’s style—when the evidence is held in front of his face, he denies it’s there. Symington’s mistake, after getting caught, was to hire a lawyer as arrogant as himself. A strut and a swagger might work when the evidence is circumstantial, but, when the feds have spent years compiling reams of evidence, you have to do more than tell the jury they’re imagining it all. It’s not just dishonesty that brought  Symington  to where he is today—it’s a mixture of stupidity and arrogance, his own and his lawyer’s.

The trial post-mortem goes from strange to bizarre when Dowd declares, “We won.” Perhaps he won; he doesn’t work for minimum wage, and this case is worth millions—and counting. But his client’s looking at federal prison time.