divide my life into boxes, too. I had different sets of friends who did not know each other, and all of them knew a different side of me. I’m sympathetic to people whose lives are segmented by Chinese walls. I understand this judge. He reminded me of who I used to be unhappy being. I stood behind him, hoping he might not notice me, but as his car arrived, he did. A tiny man, he hugged me, and his arms didn’t get past my shoulders. He said, I saw Sister Helen Prejean give a speech last week. I have never been so moved in my life. What an amazing woman. He got in his car, waved, and drove away.
Sister Helen gave a speech at the law school where I teach a few years before. People were sitting in the aisles. She talked for more than an hour without a single note. She combines humility and moral authority in a way I’d never seen. Like the Houston Oilers head coach Bum Phillips used to say about Earl Campbell, she might not be in a class of her own, but it doesn’t take long to call the roll. Afterward, several of us went out for a few drinks. It was the first time I went drinking with a nun. She said, You know, support for the death penalty is a mile wide, but just an inch deep. I believe that.
I said, Well, Sister, I believe you can drown in an inch of water. She cackled like a barnyard hen.
Three months later, I got a postcard in the mail. The Supreme Court had refused to hear our appeal.
QUAKER WAS DOUR the day I went to tell him. Like nearly everyone, he had gotten his hopes up. I tried, but my efforts to squash his spirits had not entirely succeeded. The problem is, if you have an ember of hope, a desperate observer will perceive it and stoke it and fan it and cling to it no matter what you say. This is not simply human nature. It is the will to live. I talked legalese so I would not have to have an actual conversation. I said that our claims had been defaulted in state court and that we had not been able to exhaust them; I said that the state court ruled against us on independent and adequate state-law grounds, so the federal court lacked jurisdiction to address the merits; I said that the Supreme Court was not interested in the manner in which the procedural barriers interfered with his substantive rights. I paused. Quaker shook his head, like he was getting out of a pool. He said, I would never ever have killed my family.
The only thing worse than being gutless is feeling guilty about it. I could barely look at the guy.
Quaker had claimed to be innocent from the time I first met him. I had not paid much attention. It’s hard to prove that someone is innocent. Where were you at eight o’clock on a Thursday night ten years ago? I had pinned my hopes on getting a judge interested in how unfairly Quaker had been treated. I had a good reason for telling Jerome that we were not going to waste time and money on innocence. I thought that even though I could not prove that he didn’t do it, I could prove he would never have been convicted if he’d had a competent lawyer. But I hadn’t been able to solve the procedural maze that prevented us from raising that argument. So now I had nothing left.
Well, almost nothing. When there’s one arrow still left in the quiver, I believe I should fire it, even though it’s too dull to do any damage. They can execute my clients, but I can make their job harder. Some lawyers call this throwing sand in the gears. I call it doing my job. My goal is to save my clients’ lives. If I fail, I don’t want it to be because there was gas left in the tank. It helps that I also didn’t think Quaker should be executed, even if he did kill his wife and kids. I’m not sure why I thought that. You can’t get any lower than people who hurt children. But we don’t always choose what we think.
I said, I can file another appeal in state court claiming that you are innocent, but it will be impossible to prove. We’ll lose, but we can give it a shot.
He said, Don’t even bother, man. I asked him what he meant. He said, I ain’t ever gonna get out of here until I’m dead, right? So I’m just ready to be done with it. I told him that if he was asking me to waive his appeal, I couldn’t do that without having a psychologist examine him. I was bluffing. He didn’t have any appeals left. He said, You have a family, right? I waited. He said, Would you want to be alive if they were all dead and everybody thought you killed them?
FROM THE TIME I was in eighth grade until I was a senior in college, I was never full. I would eat hamburgers and ice cream for breakfast. In high school, we would go off campus for lunch to all-you- can-eat pizza buffets, and I would eat fifteen or twenty slices of pizza, along with half a dozen pieces of fried chicken. Other days I would eat four double-meat hamburgers from Burger King, with two orders of fries and an order of onion rings, or eight chili dogs from James Coney Island. After school and before dinner, I would eat half a dozen tacos. In college we would eat on weekends at an all-you-can-eat steak place next door to Houston’s most famous strip club, and I would eat six or seven steaks, a baked potato, a salad, and a loaf of bread. Sundays my housemate and I would go to a pizza restaurant and order four large pizzas, two for him and two for me. During summer vacation, my brothers and I would stay up until dawn talking; I would sit down with a half-gallon tub of Blue Bell ice cream in my lap and a spoon. I was five foot ten and weighed 165 pounds.
When I was growing up, my parents kept a kosher home. For the eight days of Passover, there was no bread in the house. During my junior year of high school I got hungry in the middle of the afternoon on the third day of Passover. I drove to Jack-in-the-Box and ordered a triple-meat hamburger and four tacos. My plan was to eat the food on the way home. There would be no evidence of my infraction. I finished the tacos and started on the burger. Three blocks from my house, a car ran a red light. I slammed on the brakes. Lettuce, pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, and taco sauce went everywhere. I pulled over and picked pieces of shredded lettuce from the car’s carpet. When my mother asked me where I had been, I said the library.
That night at dinner I said I was not very hungry. I had not not been hungry in many years. Guilty people, I have noticed, say and do inexplicable things.
On the drive home from the prison, I called the office and told Jerome he had been right. I asked him to write up the best argument we had for proving that Quaker was innocent.
TWO DAYS AFTER MY VISIT with Quaker, I received two letters from the prison. One was from Ezekiel Green. As I had promised Katya, I had written to thank him for seeing me. And as usual, Katya had been right. Green apologized for losing his temper. He said his medication wasn’t right and he was always on edge. He asked me to come see him again.
The other letter was from Quaker. He wrote, I know this is hard for guys who do what you do, but it’s what I want. I hear from the guys here that you represented Van Orman. Van Orman is a cool dude, real mellow. Congratulations on that, but I don’t want to be like him, you understand? I hope you won’t be mad.
I did understand. Van Orman was sent to death row for stabbing a pizza delivery man to death. Police caught him because he bought beer at a neighborhood bar with a $10 bill wet with fresh blood. An execution date was set. A judge appointed us to represent Van Orman at a trial where the sole issue would be whether he is mentally retarded. He is. He can’t count change, tie his shoelaces, or boil a pot of water. He could not read a street map if his life depended on it. Van Orman is big and gentle and so obviously retarded that even the district attorney simply went through the motions in saying that he wasn’t, and when the judge agreed with us, the district attorney didn’t appeal.
But that’s not what Quaker was referring to.
In the course of our investigation, we also learned that Van Orman didn’t commit the murder. He was at the scene, but he didn’t stab the driver, and he didn’t have any clue that it was going to happen until it was all over. He thought he and two buddies were going to eat pizza and watch a baseball game. Then the doorbell rang, and one of the other guys stabbed the driver and brought the pizza and the driver’s wallet inside. Massive Van Orman helped his friend put the dead driver back in his car. At the trial, we introduced evidence that Van Orman is innocent. One of the bailiffs came up to me after the proceedings were over and shook my hand and said he believed that the judge should order Van Orman released from prison. But that’s not what the trial was about; it was about whether he’s mentally retarded, and we proved that Van Orman is. So he got moved off of death row.
That’s why Quaker congratulated me, and this is why he said he doesn’t want to be like him: In place of the death sentence, Van Orman will spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
But I’m a death-penalty lawyer and Van Orman won’t get executed, so I count it as a victory. One of my clients committed suicide a week before his execution. That’s a victory. Another died of AIDS. A victory.
My client Randy Baze is not on death row anymore, either. He was seventeen when he and two buddies hijacked a car, killing its owner. I was in the middle of losing one appeal after another in his case when the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the states can execute people who were younger than eighteen when they committed murder. After the Court ruled in our favor, Baze tried to stay on death row anyway. He didn’t want
