Fighting for Their Lives

Susannah Sheffer

Description

How do attorneys who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time. What it is like for these capital defenders in their last visits or phone calls with clients who are about to be taken to the execution chamber? Or the next mornings, in their lives with their families, in their dreams and flashbacks and moments alone in the car? What is it like to do this work year after year? (These attorneys had, on average, spent nineteen years doing capital defense.)

Through vivid interviews amplified by the author's responses and commentary, these attorneys reveal aspects of their internal experience that they have never talked about until now. How do capital defenders manage the weight of the responsibility they carry? To what extent do they experience symptoms of trauma in the aftermath of losing a client to execution or as a result of the cumulative effects of engaging in capital defense work? What motivates them, and what do they draw upon, in order to keep engaging in such emotionally demanding work? Have they considered practicing other types of law? What can we learn from capital defenders not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance?

Sujets

• Human Rights
• Trial Practice
• Mental Health
• Droit et juridique
• Criminology
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780826519122
• Langue: English

Extrait

Fighting for Their Lives
Fighting for Their Lives
Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys
Susannah Sheffer
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
2013 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2013
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2012032701
LC classification number KF9227.C2S54 2013
Dewey class number 345.73 0773-dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1910-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1911-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1912-2 (e-book)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. The Challenges of Capital Defense
2. The Motivations
3. The Responsibility
4. The Fighting
5. The Impact
6. Not Talking
7. The Victories
8. The Relationship
9. Getting Out
10. Staying In
Epilogue
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without quite knowing what it might be like to do so, twenty attorneys gave me their time, their trust, and their best effort at self-examination. My gratitude to them is profound and my respect beyond measure.
Margaret Vandiver and Dick Burr each offered crucial early support for the project and a nourishing belief in my ability to carry it out. I am inspired by the standard Margaret sets as an interviewer and thinker and by the compassion Dick brings to everything he does, including his reading of my earlier work. I marvel at the path from that reading to this writing.
In my travels, Bobby and Leslee Paul were ideal hosts in Atlanta, rivaled only by Jennifer and Walter Long in Austin.
In the later stages of work, Robin Maher at the American Bar Association s Death Penalty Representation Project graciously answered my factual and historical questions. Susan Bandes offered helpful comments and the pleasure of shared fascinations. Michael Ames at Vanderbilt University Press is the kind of editor writers dream of finding: thoughtful, responsive, and an advocate for a book s heart and soul.
Conversations form the core of this book, and many conversations have enriched its development. Throughout, I have been grateful for the chance to discuss psychology, trauma, and the human condition with Edith Ackermann, Marilyn Armour, Peter Bergson, Amos Blanton, Charlie and Judy Brice, Gene and Sue Burkart, Bobby Dellelo, David Elvin, Rita Falbel, Pat Farenga, Joy Gaines-Friedler, Francine Goldenhar, Dan Grego, Dwight Harrison, Ron Honberg, Roget Lockard, Diane Neal, Peg Padnos, Virginia Raymond, Lowell Rubin, Sajay Samuel, Mali Sastri, David Schwartz, James Staub, and my colleagues at North Star.
Ira Sharkey taught me a whole lot of what I know about creating a space in which to explore emotional experience, and his insight and sensibility are woven into these pages.
My colleagues at Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, individually and collectively, have provided intellectual and emotional sustenance, sharp insight, and bizarre inside jokes. For over a decade I have learned from Renny Cushing and Kate Lowenstein about the impact of violent loss, how to write and talk about it with care, and how to keep working for a better world. Priscilla Caputo, my reliable optimist, has been thoughtful and supportive of every challenge, from the mundane to the profound.
My friends Natalie Rusk, Victoria Olsen, Michael Nicholas, Jeri Bayer, Jen Konieczny, Carrie Kline, and my cousin Elinor Brook have heard so much about this project that they must feel vicariously a part of it. No brief acknowledgment can convey how each of these people has enriched my life and work. Likewise, my parents Ethel and Isaiah Sheffer, who have taught me so much through their own lives and work, were enthusiastic about the project from the start and have readily supplied ideas, support, and inspiration.
The book is far better than it would have been if Amanda Bergson-Shilcock had not read and commented on every line (except this one). A long time ago, I was the one mentoring Amanda; now she is my prose s toughest critic and fiercest champion, and my dear friend.
To describe Walter Long as a consultant to the project would vastly underestimate how vital his involvement has been from the beginning. I would not have thought it, felt it, or undertaken it if not for Walter s own interest in this territory. There would be no book without his openness and his readiness to think with me about every detail.
My husband Aaron Falbel, another astute early reader of the manuscript, finds ways to make me collapse with laughter at least once a day, understands my need to hit the road periodically for projects like this one, and is always, always the reason I look forward to coming home.
CHAPTER 1
The Challenges of Capital Defense
THE FIRST TIME one of his clients was executed, Adam had been working on the case only six weeks. By the time he was asked to help, almost all the available strategies had been exhausted and the execution date was looming. For those six weeks he lived on three hours of sleep a night and thought of almost nothing but the legal petition he was preparing. The only way I can describe it, he says, is that I would get up in the morning and there was an elephant on my chest.
Adam knew the odds were against him; he d known that from the moment he agreed to take the case so late in the game. But he still remembers the night of the execution, the strange desolation of being on the phone with the colleague who had begged him to take the case in the first place and just crying together. He remembers telling himself, I had done everything I could do. I couldn t give another ounce of effort.
By the time Adam tells me this story, he has been a capital defense attorney for over two decades. He has learned and relearned how to give every ounce of effort for a client facing execution-and how to remind himself that he s done as much as is humanly possible.
It s persuasive, and I don t doubt him, but still I ask, Do you ever not feel that? Do you ever have questions about whether there was something else you could have done?
Adam nods: oh yeah . He begins describing a morning not long after he had lost his third client in three years to execution. Sitting in his kitchen drinking coffee, he happened to hear a radio news story about a boy who had wandered away from his family on a hiking trail. It was late fall, the nights were getting colder, and the search team understood that they didn t have much time.
Adam looks at me to see if I can guess where this story s going. I can already picture the exhaustion and fear in the rescuers faces by the third night, when, as Adam tells it, they finally found the boy s body in a cove several yards from the main trail.
Alone in his kitchen, getting ready to go to work, Adam was overtaken by sobs. I listen to the rescue guy explain that he thought they had looked everywhere, Adam recalls, the memory thickening his voice. And out loud in the kitchen I say to myself, what was wrong with him?
Never mind the many possible ways to see this story. That morning, for Adam, it had its own cruel logic: if the rescuer had the power to save the boy, then it must have been the rescuer s incapacity that failed him. Adam doesn t need to make any transition as he switches back to talking about the death penalty; the analogy is palpable.
I mean, you know, intellectually, that the execution is not your fault. But your job is to save this person s life! And you didn t do it . He pauses and looks at me. No matter how much you tell yourself that you ve done everything you could do, your job was to save his life and you didn t.
In the landscape of the death penalty, capital defense attorneys stand in a very particular spot. Like those who testify at legislative hearings, hold vigils, or organize conferences promoting death penalty abolition, these attorneys are working in opposition to capital punishment. But although many may call for an end to the death penalty, only the capital defenders are specifically charged with the task of stopping, and have the legal tools that might be able to stop, each particular impending execution, over and over again.
An individual execution may be cited as significant because of the particular issues it represents, or it may pass largely unnoticed by the wider community. For capital defenders, however, the political utility of focusing or not focusing on any one execution is not foremost in their minds. However sympathetic or unsympathetic the client, however illustrative or not illustrative of some problem within the death penalty process, each one demands an all-out effort. Each one not only represents but actually is a life or death matter, and the battle must be fought right now, no waiting for a better time.
While the death penalty debate rages on, with arguments mounted pro and con, within the prison cell a person s life is in the balance. This need is urgent, specific, compelling: this individual will either die tonight or he won t. The capital defenders are not just watching to see what will happen; they are the ones who might actually be able to change the outcome. If you are a capital defender with a client under death warrant, that piece of paper means a date has been set for the taking of that individual s life, and if there s any way to stop that from happening, you re the one who must find it.
If the execution happens anyway, what does that mean to the attorney who tried so hard to prevent it? Because a capital defender stands in a unique relationship to an execution, the event demands a personal reckoning that it does not demand of anyone else. Your job was to save his life . Strip away the legal la