Lest those of you who read the last episode of this newsletter get the impression that people who work to end the death penalty are a miserable, traumatized mob, I want to write this week about the other reality of our work: How exceedingly fortunate we are to do it.
We do soul-stirring work and, what’s more, we get to belong to a truly magnificent, motley crew.
Let me introduce you to a few of them…
The lawyer
Denny LeBoeuf is a long-serving member of the league of overworked and oft-reviled capital defense attorneys. She’s been representing people convicted of crimes that could put them on death row for over 35 years.
These days, Denny heads up the American Civil Liberty Union’s John Adams Project, which provides representation for capital defendants detained at Guantánamo. Denny regularly travels to the prison to visit a man she represents, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man whose name might well set your emotions churning, a man who the US government waterboarded at least 183 times, a man the government would like to eradicate.
Denny has worked on his case for long years and continues to do so at a time in her life when she’d no doubt like to put her feet up and lounge beside Bayou St. John with her dog, Bailey.
Sister Helen Prejean with capital defense attorney, Denny LeBoeuf
The mitigator
Mitigation experts, such as the unique, wonderful, and much-missed Scharlette Holdman, work alongside defense attorneys.
It is the job of mitigation experts to unearth the full story of how this person came to a place where they committed this terrible act. It’s frequently a tale of terrible abuse, mental illness, extreme poverty or a combination of the three. It is the evidence turned up by mitigation experts that often determines whether a defendant, no matter what the crime, will get life or death.
Here’s a snippet from The Marshall Project’s obituary for Scharlette:
In another case, while trying to show a court that a mentally ill man was not “competent” to be executed, she encountered a state-hired psychiatrist who said the man had beaten her at tic-tac-toe, thus proving his mental acuity. Holdman remembered that as a child she’d seen a chicken at a fair that could play tic-tac-toe, and she tried to get such a chicken admitted as a witness. The judge “felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the court,” Holdman later told This American Life. “I thought that the dignity of the court was degraded by executing a mentally retarded, mentally ill person.”
Your life will be greatly enriched if you take 10 minutes to listen to This American Life’s Poultry Slam episode featuring Scharlette. It not only gives you a taste of this one-of-a-kind woman, but also of the lengths mitigation experts will go to help their clients, and of the crazily dysfunctional nature of so many US courts.
Mitigator extraordinaire, Scharlette Holdman.
The Movers and Shakers
Working in parallel with the lawyers and mitigators are activists and organizers, educators and strategic thinkers, people who shake up the public and the policy makers and move the tide of public opinion and legislation towards life over death.
People like my friend, Sophie Cull.
If you point to a Louisiana-based criminal justice project—whether practical and down to earth or highly innovative—there’s a good chance Sophie has had a part in it, helping with strategy or funding or connecting people. Sophie’s husband, by the way, is also a part of the motley crew, a lawyer whose work for civil rights has helped put a dent in the huge numbers of people who have been warehoused in Louisiana prisons. We call this pair the Louisiana Justice Power Couple (but don’t let them know we do.)
Sophie has been writing a book with and about her dear friend, Calvin Duncan a man who stands out among Louisiana’s gaggle of movers and shakers.
Calvin spent 28 years in Angola Prison for a crime he didn’t commit. During that time, he learned how to be an inmate counsel and transformed himself into someone widely recognized as one of the most innovative criminal legal advocates in Louisiana.
Calvin Duncan, who turned himself into a jailhouse lawyer while incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit.
Since his release, Calvin has earned his law degree. At the same time he has helped Louisiana get rid of its non-unanimous juries law, created a place to go for others recently released from prison, and lent his thinking and labor to numerous criminal justice projects in the state.
One such project is The Visiting Room Project, to which both Calvin and Sophie have contributed. This audio-visual program lets you take time to sit with some of the men sentenced to life in Louisiana’s prisons (women’s stories will be coming to the project soon). Some of the men who tell their stories have since been released and now travel the country bearing witness to the humanity of those we as a society lock away for good.
If you listen to just one story from The Visiting Room Project, start with Daryl Waters.
And then there’s Manuel
Manuel Ortiz has been on death row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, going on 30 years. Sister Helen Prejean has been visiting him for most of those 30 years. I’ve been visiting him for the past 22.
Manuel did not commit the crime that sent him to death row. The man who was responsible for the murders of Manuel’s wife, Tracie Williams, and her friend Cheryl Mallory, was Carlos Saavedra.
As he was dying, Saavedra confessed to his wife that he had set Manuel up for the murders after a business deal between the two had gone sour.
Although an appeals court eventually heard evidence of this confession, by that time Manuel had been languishing on death row for a decade. The courts, ever loath to overturn a jury verdict or, indeed, to hear evidence of innocence, decided to leave Manuel where he was.
Our friend Manuel is one of the people who makes our work both a heartbreak and a delight. He has a strength, dignity and integrity that has often led Helen and me to liken him to Nelson Mandela, a man whose similar qualities influenced so many incarcerated alongside him on Robben Island.
Manuel is respected by his tier mates as well as prison officers and wardens. He has been called upon by prison staff to occupy tiers with folk suffering extreme mental illness, because his presence has a calming effect.
Manuel is warm and funny, engaged and full of compassion, despite the torture that is Angola’s death row. It’s a torture that he only very rarely allows us to glimpse, most of the time keeping silent about it to protect us from how hard it is to endure each day.
The only time Manuel gets a break from that torture is our monthly visits with him, when he is brought out from the deafening, sweltering tier and into the air-conditioned visitors’ side of death row.
Together with our friend Ellen Williams, Helen, Manuel and I sit around a table and share a lunch of catfish or shrimp or chicken tenders cooked by some of the men in general population. We discuss US politics and world affairs, the progression of his case, the book Helen is writing in consultation with him, and—the highlight of any visit—classic movies.
Manuel’s knowledge of classic moves is encyclopedic. A few years ago, he started what we call Manuel’s Movie Club.
Each month, he selects a movie from the upcoming Turner Classic Movie schedule and emails us the title and the screening time. Helen and Ellen and I all watch it at home at the same time as Manuel watches it from his cell. He stands the whole time, with his head against the bars, peering at the screen across the corridor.
Afterwards, we email our reactions to him and then, on our next visit, dissect it in detail. Manuel gleefully acts out his favorite parts and tells us tidbits about the lives of the actors and directors.
It is one of the great joys in our lives, and one of the very few in his.
Rose Vines, Sister Helen Prejean, Manuel Ortiz, and Ellen Williams visiting on death row at Angola prison, Louisiana.