Hello and welcome to Strongest Convictions,
This will likely be short, just 5 chapters or so. I was thinking that Elizabeth's speech at the senate judiciary committee was a bit unrealistic, she would likely still have been investigated. This is just an exploration of what if?
It might be a bit unrealistic its self but I just wanted to explore their relationship from afar and what would happen to Team McCord if this had come to pass.
Please review. This is my first story.
Elizabeth and Henry McCord had firm convictions. They always had. Together the two made one another stronger and held each other accountable. But did they also destroy their own family in the process? Their convictions had set them on this course, and they had ended up in a Senate Investigation. It didn't go as planned. They were both implicated and fell on their own swords to protect the administration.
Did they violate 18 U.S. Ch. 37?
Yes. But with good reason. With the interest of the United States at heart.
The McCord's had convictions. But during the trial Elizabeth wished they hadn't. They lost everything, their jobs, their kids, their family and for what?
Principal? Convictions?
One of them might have been able to avoid prison and stay with the kids if they both didn't have such strong convictions. But in the end Elizabeth got 20 years, and Henry who had lectured the judge, got the book thrown at him. He'd likely never see the light of day.
Elizabeth played the memories of her former life over in her mind the first year of prison. The old Elizabeth began to wither away, the one with convictions gone. In its place was a shell of a woman. She let other inmates take advantage of her, they took her phone time, commissary items and pretty much anything else they could. The old Elizabeth would have stood up for injustice. The new Elizabeth, was dead inside.
She died a little bit evert time Officer Payne, a guard with a strong dislike for her politics, manhandled her as she and her bunk mates moved to and from the yard. It started with a firm grip on her arm and progressed from there. The old Elizabeth should have never allowed it to go any further. And she did protest, but she didn't fight him. It just wasn't worth it.
By the end of her second year incarcerated her kids didn't even recognize her.
Thanks to the Rosenberg's a couple who had violated the espionage act during the cold war Henry and Elizabeth could not have direct contact. That only made it worse. They had agreed during the trial to only allow their children to see them once a year. They had taken care of the kids, set up a trust to care for the farm so the kids would always have a home, and a separate trust for each child. Stevie took charge her siblings and moved them back to the farm to try and avoid media scrutiny after the trial.
Henry McCord hated knowing that Elizabeth was imprisoned the way he was. But in a way he was also somewhat thankful. She wouldn't see him die. Henry's anger, his riotous indignation during the trial had left him with a sentence he couldn't believe. Death by legal injection.
His lawyers said they could fight it, but after recalling the looks of his children during his sentencing, their hopes crushed and family destroyed by the verdict he knew he couldn't give them hope again. Death row was quiet, so he studied and wrote and tried to make sense of the world he thought he knew. Nothing seemed to break him, not even the prison setting a date for his lethal injection. It was rather quick for the Terre Haute, Indiana Federal Penitentiary to set a date only three years in to his sentence, but he hadn't fought and so he prepared for death. The idea of his death didn't break him, he was done fighting. Nothing could break him. Nothing but the news of his wife's suicide.
Let me know what you think please!
