we’d scream like we’d been electrocuted. People torture others because it’s fun, or because they don’t have anything else to do, or because they’re on death row, and they’re angry and cold, and they aim to inflict as much pain as they can on the outside world before they get removed from it.
Two years earlier, a chaplain on death row started reading scripture to my clients. They began asking me to waive their appeals. The chaplain told them if they repented, Jesus would forgive them, but if they fought, they would burn in hell. In his universe, pursuing legal appeals was a form of fighting. By appealing, they were refusing to take responsibility for what they had done. Two times is a coincidence, three makes a conspiracy. After my fourth client wrote instructing me to waive his appeals, I drove to the chaplain’s small house in Huntsville and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting for him to get home. I’m not a Christian, and if I were, I wouldn’t be a good one. My capacity for turning the other cheek is shallow. I introduced myself and told him that if he spent another nanosecond with any of my clients, he’d learn for himself the ins and outs of litigation. He looked at me with what I first thought was incomprehension but later decided might have been sorrow, like I didn’t know salvation when it was sharing my clothes.
Then again, even though I didn’t want my clients surrendering their appeals, I had to admire the guy. He had gotten through to these men in a way no one had before. Sure, he had probably threatened them with eternal damnation, but still. I do believe he really did care about them. Almost all my clients should have been taken out of their homes when they were children. They weren’t. Nobody had any interest in them until, as a result of nobody’s having any interest in them, they became menaces, at which point society did become interested, if only to kill them. The chaplain had found a pressure point that could have saved lives, if someone had cared enough to find it sooner.
But there are a resolute handful who spurn saving. They make shanks from their dinner trays and they spit on the guards. They save their feces to use as projectiles. They make a game of breaking rules. Their objective is to die without breaking themselves. When Breaker Morant was marched before the firing squad, he told the bishop who had come to pray for him that he was a pagan, and he screamed at his executioners, Shoot straight, ya bloody bastards. Green was less literate, but just as incorrigible. The chaplain I threatened would never had gotten through to him.
Kassie had shown a picture of Green to Sandra Blue, the Quakers’ neighbor. Blue told Kassie she had never seen him before, but Kassie wasn’t sure. She decided to bluff. She paid Green a visit and told him that the Quakers’ neighbor had recognized him. He squinted at her and shook his head. He told Kassie that if I didn’t come up to see him, he was taking his secrets to the grave. Before she left he said, Sit there a few more minutes for me will you, and he dropped his hand into his lap.
She said, I swear, it’s the last time I go talk to him. But you need to go see him. The scumbag knows something. I’m sure of it.
Jerome had gone back to Bud Lomax’s house with a video camera. He sat in his car drinking coffee from six in the morning until he heard the TV through an open window at a quarter past ten. He knocked, and Lomax came to the door in his underwear. I watched the video. Lomax was unshaved but coherent. He was also believable. He looked at the camera and said, I don’t believe that Henry Quaker killed my sister. I lied on him at his trial. I did it because that detective threatened me. He told me I had enough drugs in my house to spend the rest of my life in prison. I didn’t want to spend no time in prison. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.
Gary had filed a motion requesting that we be allowed to retest some of the evidence in the case. When the court said we could, the prosecutor and I agreed that Melissa Harmon would take the samples to the lab. She called. She said, Two of the blood drops are too degraded to be useful. I’m waiting on results for the other four. Kimberly Crist thinks there is no doubt whatsover that the blood was dripping from a person or from an object that was moving from the woman toward the children.
Crist was the chief scientist at the lab. I did not welcome her opinion, especially the
I said, If the blood belongs to one or both of the kids, she did it. If it belongs to her, the likely scenario is that she was shot first, and the killer went into the other room and then shot the kids. I’m not giving up on murder- suicide until we know whose DNA is in the blood.
Melissa said, The problem with your theory is that she couldn’t have shot herself without a gun, but there was no gun.
I said, Maybe there was. There had to be. Why else test her hands?
I’m not sure.
I said, Would you be willing to talk to Wyatt?
Wyatt was the investigating detective. She said, Sure. Why not? It’s your money.
I told the others about the call. Then I asked Gary to set up a trip to the prison for me to see Green and Quaker. I sat up and said, I’m walking next door to Treebeard’s. Anyone want anything to eat? Gary said he’d go for me. I said, No, I want to go. I need to walk. I’ll be back in ten minutes with shrimp etouffee and butter cake for everyone.
I stood at the counter while the servers filled quart containers with etouffee, gumbo, and rice. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. It was Judge Truesdale. She looked at my eye.
Good God, what on earth happened to you? She touched my right cheek.
You should see the other guy, I said.
The server handed me my food. She said, I’m eating over there by myself. Sit with me for a minute. I followed her to her table. She said, This is off the record, okay?
I am pretty sure that off-the-record conversations with a judge who is presiding in a case that I have pending in her courtroom is not okay.
I said, Sure.
She said, Signing a death warrant makes things real to me. When the jury comes back and I announce a death sentence, I feel like a spectator. But when I sign the warrant… Her voice trailed off. She said, Quaker’s jury was out for a long time. We thought they were going to acquit him.
I said, Why are you telling me this, Judge?
She said, I’m not exactly sure.
Then she said, In a hundred years, people are going to look back, and they are going to wonder what on earth we were doing. She drank some tea.
I said, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.
She said, Take care of that eye.
RICHARD FEYNMAN KEPT a list of the things he didn’t know. I’ve often wondered how much you have to know to know what you don’t know. I could make a list of things I want to know but don’t, but it would depress me. I myself don’t understand just about everything, a detail of which I’m reminded whenever I go to death row, especially when I go on Fridays. I was there to see Green, and to say hello to Quaker.
I pulled into the Exxon a couple of miles down the road from the prison. Inside, changing $10 bills for fists full of quarters, were three twenty-something-year-old women from France. A tall redhead, Monique, recognized me, said hello, and introduced me to her friends. They were in Texas to visit murderers. Monique was there to visit her husband, a Honduran who, along with three other drug dealers, had raped and murdered two high-school students who made a disastrously wrong turn down a dead-end street on the day that the older girl got her driver’s license. The Honduran testified at his trial and said the murder was a mistake. He probably meant to say unplanned, in that it is hard to characterize as a mistake a murder that is accomplished by stabbing the victims thirteen times. I was less unforgiving before I became a dad. Monique met the guy after he arrived on death row. A year, four visits, and sixteen letters later, they got married by proxy. She had never touched him, and wouldn’t, until he was dead.
I know two dozen murderers whose European wives fly over to see them three or four times a year, staying at cheap hotels near the prison and surviving on fast food and vending machines. The prison doesn’t allow visitors to bring in reading material, so the women sit and twiddle their thumbs for an hour waiting for guards to bring out their spouses, then hold a grimy phone to their ears and talk to their mates through the Plexiglas for four hours more. They do not want to be U.S. citizens, so it might not be love, but it isn’t expediency, either.
Monique asked me who I was going to see. I told her, and she told me that Green’s wife was with him at that
