Return to Death Row

Last time I did a capital defence internship I was dealing with appeals, so cases where the person we were defending had already been found guilty and put on death row. This time I’m working on pre-trial cases, and I’m learning a lot more about how the US justice system really works. For example, I hadn’t realised quite how much getting the death penalty is affected by politics and sheer luck. Not only does the DA (district attorney/ prosecutor) decide in each case whether or not to ask for the death penalty, but they also decide whether to offer the defendant a plea bargain, and if so what sentence to offer in return for a guilty plea. DAs don’t have to offer pleas at all and some rarely do as they’re more interested in chalking up lots of executions. (To give you an example, one DA was so keen to get death sentences in his county he’d give out golden lapel pins in the shape of a noose to assistant DAs on his team if they got someone executed. When you consider that most of those assistant DAs would love to take over the head DA’s job or become a judge one day, and that DAs and judges are elected, not appointed, you can see how those lapel pins could seem worth working for.) As a result, who gets the death penalty can become a bit of a lottery. If you’re charged with murder in a county with a particularly ruthless DA you’re looking at getting executed, whereas if you’d happened to kill the same person in exactly the same way in the next county along the DA there would be quite happy to offer you a plea, usually to life without parole. In the US life without parole means what it says on the tin – you’re never getting out of jail. Some would say life in jail must be worse than getting the death penalty, but when it comes down to it you’d be hard pushed to find anyone on death row who’d agree with that.

What this means in day to day life as a capital defender is that your first concern is making sure your client doesn’t get killed. In some cases, like the one I’ve been working on recently, that is pretty much all you’ve got to work on anyway – the client was caught on CCTV walking into a gas station, robbing the cashier and then shooting both her and some poor guy drinking his coffee in the café area. At first I thought this would be a fairly unrewarding case – I mean I’m against the death penalty but this guy killed two people in cold blood, so I didn’t expect to feel too sorry for him. But then I met him and his family, looked into his case and started to feel a bit differently. He’s younger than I expected – he was 19 at the time of the crime and is 21 now, and surprisingly he’s a really nice kid, not the smartass, nasty thug I expected. He’s polite, softly spoken, and pretty clueless about the gangs his older cousins are allegedly involved in (although he’d never tell you that). He was brought up in the projects by his grandma who, ironically, was a tireless campaigner for cleaning up the neighbourhood she and her grandkids lived in. She and her neighbours would go out at 3am taking the licence plates of cars driving through the area to buy drugs, and handing out polite letters to the drivers telling them their licence numbers were being given to the police and asking them not to come back. Seriously. She was on committees, organised rallies and activities to keep local kids off the streets, and was given numerous awards for her efforts. Our client used to go with her handing out newsletters and flyers. He wasn’t even a bad kid on paper – he had no prior record of violence or felonies. None of that makes what he did ok, but it does give the situation a whole new dimension of tragedy.

From the information we’ve gathered so far we’re still not sure why he did what he did, or even if he actually knew what he was doing. That’s what our job is at this stage – to try and find an explanation for what happened to present to the jury. Hopefully that explanation will save his life, even if it is spent entirely inside a prison cell. (Some people have asked why taxpayers should pay for a convicted murderer to live in jail, especially when they’re so young and are going to be there for a very long time. In fact it’s cheaper to pay for that than for a capital trial, costly appeals process (which can easily last 10 years or more) and then an execution). I can’t say much about what we’re looking into, but now we’ve started investigating we’ve found several factors that make him seem much less of a monster and will hopefully convince the jury not to kill him.