The death penalty is the ultimate
sanction our legal system can provide to those who commit crimes of
violence and cruelty beyond our capacity to bear them. These people
are seen as so beyond redemption that only their legal murder within
our system can exact the appropriate toll. Yet there is a legal
practice of attorneys devoted to post death penalty advocacy fighting
tooth and nail, body and spirit to stave off the executions and keep
these social outcasts alive. Many people ask, “How can anyone seek
to halt these executions?” In answer to this question and many
others like it, Susannah Sheffer has written a heart rending and soul
wrenching account of a series of interviews with twenty attorneys who
have taken on the responsibility of defending these clients and
answering these questions. In Fighting
for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2013, 224 Pages, $27.95) Sheffer
explores through a series of interviews the motivations, costs,
rewards, grief, and loss experienced by twenty representative
attorneys willing to look deep inside themselves to examine why they
do what they do, what it costs them, and how they can keep doing it.
This book
presents a carefully structured and nuanced exploration of the inner
lives of attorneys practicing post conviction capital defense, mostly
in a region called the Death Zone, the line of southern states
between Florida and Texas where the death penalty is most often
exacted. Capital defense attorneys face the ultimate responsibility
in a life and death race, a race they lose much more often than they
win. Their practice is composed of an intense, time sensitive,
complex combination of preparing legal briefs, attacking errors at
trial, and matters of legal procedure within a context of providing
support and succor for men and women facing often imminent execution.
The lawyers are often the last person with the convicted client
before he is taken to the room where the executions take place as
well as the person who faces, sometimes over a period of many years,
the fear, sense of abandonment, and isolation of facing the death
penalty.
The attorneys
interviewed in Fighting
for Their Lives, who are all experienced capital defense
attorneys, were willing to bare their inner selves to explore with
Susannah Sheffer their emotional, physical, and intellectual
experience through the process of losing, and very occasionally
winning their cases. Winning, in these cases, is often defined by
gaining a stay of execution or, even more rare, converting the death
penalty to life without parole. There wasn't any talk of getting
convictions overturned or clients released from prison. The attorneys
explain their motivation as ranging from adhering to the
Constitution, which requires adequate representation, to their
conviction that capital punishment is a barbarous response in a
supposedly civilized society. Along the way they come to see
themselves as more than the advocate for the client, but the
condemned person's only or last real real friend. They often become
attached in ways they find hard to describe as they relate intensley
with the person they have come to know who was capable of such
cruelty and violence. They feel a need to “speak the unspeakable”
about their own experience. They are often motivated by the sense
that those sentenced to death are the most despised in society and
acknowledge the fact that wealthy, white people rarely receive such
punishment. There is also a high stake intensity to the work which
provides an adrenaline rush that supports and drives many of the
lawyers.
The
willingness of these attorneys to explore their inner experience in a
profession more thought of as represented by legal gunslingers
willing to take either side of any issue is a testimony to the skills
and insights of Susannah Sheffer, who deftly questions them, and her
ability to be with the interviewees in a quiet, accepting way while
they work through the conflicting motivations, emotions, and sense of
responsibility they experience. Nevertheless, the book cries out for
more “war stories” about the cases and clients. In order to
respect the privacy of the clients and the persons of the lawyers,
Sheffer has properly hidden their identities most carefully. Perhaps,
to drive home the intellectual and personal effort that often leads
to a deep experience of grief and loss for the attorney and
continuing trauma for the families of both the criminal and the
victim might require a series of memoirs from the lawyers or a fine
novel about post conviction capital defense.
It
seems to have been difficult for Sheffer to draw out the feelings and
thoughts of the attorneys who cooperated in the project. This
reflects both the kind of person who chooses law and the coruscating
nature of this kind of practice. One lawyer explains that capital
defense attorneys are not trained to talk about their work, but
perhaps the entire legal profession falls into the trap of
emphasizing the intellectual nature of legal practice to the
detriment of the personal and moral. Although much of legal practice
includes work counseling and teaching clients how to behave, little
in legal education is oriented to effective ways to relate to
clients, especially as law school focuses on appeal practice. This
book acknowledges the possibility that if attorneys had built into
their culture a structure for support and reflection, the burden
capital defense lawyers (as well as others in criminal and civil
practice) bear might prove not so heavy. Helping a client “preserve”
his humanity as he approaches fulfilling his sentence, by repairing
his relations with his family or coming to peace with himself, but
it's the sort of victory the post conviction capital defense lawyers
must relish. For the lawyer, just showing up and giving a voice to
the client must often suffice.
Susannah Sheffer
Susannah
Sheffer Project Director and Staff Writer for Murder
Victims' Families for Human Rights, a victims' group opposing
capital punishment. She has developed numerous written materials
about victim opposition to the death penalty, including Dignity
Denied: The Experience of Murder Victims’ Family Members Who Oppose
the Death Penalty and
Creating More Victims:
How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind,
both of which were co-authored with Renny Cushing. She is the author
of four books, and in her work with MVFHR she draws upon two decades
of experience interviewing, writing, and editing. She was previously
active in the home schooling movement.
Fighting
for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys
by Susannah Sheffer (Vanderbilt University Press, 2013, 224 pages,
$27.95) is a gently written, piercing exploration of the effects upon
attorneys practicing post conviction capital defense for criminals
facing the death penalty. Her gentle and effective probing elicits
deep and thoughtful responses from those engaged in such practice
while synthesizing and explaining their experiences and motivations.
It's worthwhile reading for those wishing to understand such
practice, putting a human face on both the lawyers and the clients as
they face the ultimate penalty. I read the book as a digital download
which was provided to me by the publisher through Edelweiss.
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