The Autobiography of an Execution

WHEN LINCOLN WAS NEARLY TWO, I was making coffee in the kitchen one morning while Katya was getting him dressed. She called down to me to turn on the Today show. There on TV, talking to Katie Couric, was Lana Norris, the mother of Clay Peterson. Clay Peterson was dead. He had been murdered during a robbery of a convenience store by my client Johnny Martinez. Martinez had stabbed him eight times. The murder was caught on the store’s security camera, so Clay Peterson’s mother had watched a video of her son bleeding to death. She told me she had watched it at least a hundred times. It made her feel like she was close to her son, with him, as he lay dying. Norris was on TV because it was sweeps week on television, and she was a curiosity. A deeply religious person whose son had been saving money to study for the ministry when his life was cut short, Norris had met with Martinez for nearly four hours a week before his scheduled execution. After the meeting, Ms. Norris wrote a letter to the governor of Texas urging that Martinez’s life be spared.

Martinez’s own mother was a heroin addict who sold her kids’ possessions to support her drug habit. His neighbor made him masturbate while he filmed it. I think the video is still on the Internet. No court of law ever took Johnny away from his mother, but she couldn’t have been more absent. Martinez was raised by his grandmother. Lana Norris told me at the prison after her meeting with Johnny ended that she did not want Martinez’s grandmother to lose a child and be forced to go through what she had gone through herself. She told Katie Couric the same thing.

The governor in Texas cannot grant a reprieve unless the parole board authorizes him to. By a vote of 8–7, the board voted against commuting Martinez’s sentence from death to life in prison. One of the board members who voted in the minority called me to tell me the result of the vote before it was announced. He told me not to tell anyone that he had called. It was a breach of protocol. I could hear him softly crying.

Two hours before the execution I sat with Martinez in the holding cell. When the parole board member had called me the day before, he said, I just want to tell you that I do not think Mr. Martinez should die. I’ve been reading these petitions for ten years, hundreds of cases, and this is the first time I’ve voted to spare a life. I am impressed with who Mr. Martinez has become. I wish I could have convinced one more person. I really do. I’m sorry, sir. I repeated this conversation to Martinez. He nodded twice and stifled a sob. He said, It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel better that not everybody wants to kill me.

I was going to be witnessing the execution with his brother and sister. He did not want his mother there, but he asked me to be sure to tell her that he loved her. He knew his brother would not convey the message. The guard said it was time to go. Johnny’s hands were cuffed together and then shackled to a leather belt around his waist. He tried to lift his hand to shake mine. I hugged him and told him that I wished I had done more. He said, You did everything. You were the only one. Now go right home when you leave this hell and hug your son, okay? Hug Lincoln until he falls asleep tonight, will you? I had never told Martinez my son’s name. I’m not sure how he learned.

I said I would, but when I got home from watching Martinez die, Lincoln was already sleeping. I carried him from his bed into Katya’s and my bedroom and hugged him until I fell asleep myself. I thought that was close enough.

I WRITE DOWN MY DREAMS because they scare me. They scare me because I understand them.

The night Martinez got executed, I dreamed Lincoln and I were in a hotel room, waiting for room service. He opened the window. It was cold outside. I said, Close it, Lincoln. He ignored me and climbed out onto the ledge. He threatened to jump. Go ahead, I said. He looked at me, wounded. On the television the hotel safety video was playing on a loop, warning people not to use the elevators in case of a fire. I put my hand on the small of Lincoln’s back, meaning to hook my fingers through his belt, but before I could, he jumped. I heard only silence as he fell. Then a splash. He had fallen into the hotel pool. By the time I got downstairs, Lincoln was clinging to the side, and Katya was already there. I woke up, covered with sweat.

It was nearly 3:00 a.m. I started to shiver violently and could not go back to sleep. I put on a sweatshirt and checked to make sure Lincoln was fine. I kissed Katya on the cheek, went into the kitchen, and poured myself a drink. The dog thought it was time to go out. She followed me downstairs. But when she looked outside and saw it was still dark, she climbed back up the stairs and hopped into bed. I carried my drink into our library and, one by one, deleted all the Martinez files from my computer.

It is easier to forget failure if you don’t have the icons to remind you.

IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, Freud sides with those who maintain conscience is silent in our dreams…. Ethical indifference reigns supreme. He was wrong, at least about me. In my dreams my conscience shouts until it wakes me and makes me too afraid to go back to bed. If you don’t want to be confronted with an aerial map of all the corners you’ve cut that day, you shouldn’t go to sleep.

Katya and I had invited three couples over for dinner later that week. Two of my clients had been executed in the past ten days. She asked if I wanted to cancel. I said no. Cooking relaxes me. I pan-roasted a loin of venison with lots of thyme and garlic, and I deep-fried cauliflower dipped in beer batter. Over cocktails we were talking about the JonBenet Ramsay murder. Like everyone else, I suspected the mother. Our friend Sharon disagreed. She believed the intruder theory. She and her husband Tom are oncologists. We compared the futility of our work. Sharon said, My goal is to save my patients’ lives. Barring that, my goal is to extend their lives as long as I can. If I can’t do that either, at least I can struggle with them for as long as they have.

I said, Exactly. Me too.

Except my clients killed somebody. She asked me why I keep doing it. I paused to consider the answer. Katya said, Because he’s wracked with guilt when he even contemplates stopping, and he thinks doing anything else would be unfulfilling and self-indulgent. She took a sip of wine and looked at me. I rested my hand on her thigh. She said, Right?

Your characteristics can explain your actions, but if there’s a persuasive explanation for the source of your characteristics, I’ve never heard it. I once fired a lawyer who left the office every day at five. He told me he was guarding against burnout. I understand people who say they need to take care of themselves. What I don’t understand is why they say it. The day I fired him, I stayed up all night working on a clemency petition for a death- row inmate I didn’t represent.

When my clients ask me what I intend to do next, I don’t tell them that I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to figure it out, because tonight I have plans. Tonight I’m picking up a pizza and going home to play Scrabble and watch SpongeBob with my wife and son. When you’re careening toward death, you don’t want the only person who can pull the brake to look at his watch and decide it’s time for lunch.

Here’s what Sharon’s and Tom’s patients have in common with my clients: no one wants her life to depend on a stranger who might have something else, or something better, to do. I understand my clients, and I understand how the patient’s reaction burdens the stranger.

A WEEK LATER Katya and I were having martinis at the Downing Street pub. I was smoking a Cuban cigar I had brought back with me from Mexico. Katya was eating olives. She said, Do you think Quaker did it? I told her I didn’t have a clue. She said, Why would he?

I said, Same answer.

She said, I think you think he’s innocent, and you don’t want to say it out loud.

I said, You think you know me, don’t you?

I know a lot of lawyers who want to represent a death-row inmate who’s actually innocent. Prove he’s innocent, get him out, be a hero, go on TV, be adored, feel good about yourself. I understand the impulse, but I counsel them against it.

I said, You know, K, when Jeremy Winston got executed on Halloween, he was truly remorseful. I could tell that when I first met him. At some level, he felt like he deserved to die. That’s why he didn’t care when I told him we weren’t going to win. He didn’t want to win.

Winston had broken through a first-floor window and stolen Lucy Romer from her bed in the middle of the night on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Lucy’s mother found her empty bed at eight the next morning. There was blood on the window frame and glass on the bed. Police found Lucy later that afternoon. She had been vaginally and anally raped. She had been smothered. Her skull was crushed, probably from being run over. She was five years old.