An older African American man once said to me, “You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.
Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern. I smiled. “I know.
Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation and deal with the stress of a potential execution; it’s also key to effective advocacy.
Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible. But it also creates genuine connections with clients. And that’s certainly what happened with Walter.
The last thing I was interested in was a fictional story about justice.
I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.
I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors or murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others.
I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children.
But Walter’s case also taught me something else: there is light within this darkness.
Our system traumatizes and victimizes people when we exercise our power to convict and condemn irresponsibly – not just the accused but also their families, their communities, and even the victims of crime.
The drugs became scarce, which prompted state correctional authorities to obtain them illegally, without complying with FDA rules that regulate the interstate sale and transfer of drugs. Drug raids of state correctional facilities were a bizarre consequence of this surreal drug dealing to carry out executions.
The Supreme Court had banned the execution of people with intellectual disability, but states like Alabama refused to assess in any honest way whether the condemned are disabled.
I continue to meet stone catchers along the way who inspire me and make me believe that we can do better than we’ve done for the accused, convicted, and condemned among us – as well as those who are victimized by crime and violence – and that all of us can do better for one another. The work continues.
I love you, too.” There was such tenderness and earnestness in his voice, and just like that, I thought I would start crying. – I was in my office, talking to Jimmy Dill on the night of his execution, and I realized I was thinking about something that had happened nearly forty years earlier.
His struggle to form words and his determination to express gratitude reinforced his humanity for me, and it made thinking about his impending execution unbearable. Why couldn’t they see it, too?
In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.
The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world.
I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human.
For over a century, law enforcement officials in many Southern communities absolutely saw it as part of their duty to investigate and punish black men who had been intimate with white women.
By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of the youngest condemned children – thirteen or fourteen years of age – were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.