was retarded but they bought your freestanding innocence claim.'
Terri felt her spirits sag. 'That's only an alternative ruling. The opinion as to innocence also rests on AEDPA.'
'The opinion,' Pell countered, 'is out there. If I don't take this case up to the Supreme Court, in how many other cases will it come back and bite me?'
'A while ago,' Terri said softly, 'you asked me if I'd ever seen an execution. Now I have. You still haven't. So let me ask you this—would you watch the execution of Rennell Price, knowing that otherwise you'd have let him go free?
'This case is about one man who's suffered way too much already. Please, don't sacrifice him to the system. Let Rennell go.'
Pell considered her across the table. 'No one can fault your effort,' he said at last. 'I'll kick it around the office. We don't need to decide today.'
* * *
It seemed a lifetime, Terri thought, since she first had faced Rennell in this same plastic cubicle.
'You mean they're not gonna kill me,' he managed to say, 'like Payton?'
Terri searched for the proper answer. 'We won, for now. The Court stopped your execution.'
Rennell struggled to comprehend this. 'I can just walk out of here, go back to Grandma's house?'
She has no house, Terri thought, and there is no Grandma. 'There's one more court the State can go to,' she said. 'I'm hoping they choose not to—if they do, it may take months. But unless the United States Supreme Court rules against us, you'll be free.'
'Free,' Rennell repeated softly. 'Free.'
'Yes.'
His smile combined incredulity with fear. 'What I do then?' he asked. 'Been here so long I don't know free no more. Don't know how that be without my brother.'
'I know. But you've got me now.'
Rennell averted his eyes, and for a fleeting moment, Terri envisioned him as a bashful child—or, perhaps, a fearful one. 'Maybe I could live with you . . .'
Sometimes lawyers did this, Terri knew, to bridge a client's transition. But she was Elena's mother. 'We'll figure it out,' she temporized. 'We thought you could help us at our office. Keep things neat, like you do in your cell.'
'Mean I'd sleep there, too?'
Terri hesitated. 'There are lots of places.' She stopped herself: even a halfway house for the retarded might shy away from a man once convicted, however wrongly, of a sex crime with a child. 'Not to live, I mean. Just to help you figure out the world again. There are churches, too. People care about what happens to you. I know a minister in San Francisco who may want you to live there.'
The words she could not say, that Elena could never live with him, shadowed her response. Taking his hand, Terri promised, 'I'll always be there, Rennell. I'll make sure you're fine.'
On the Monday after Terri's outing with Elena, the State of California petitioned the United States Supreme Court to review the case of Rennell Price.
PART FOUR
THE HIGH COURT
ONE
LATE MONDAY AFTERNOON, CHRIS, TERRI, AND CARLO MET around the conference table. 'No surprises here,' Chris said, then began reading aloud from the Attorney General's petition to the Supreme Court. 'This decision resonates far beyond the particulars of the case against Rennell Price. It is a comprehensive usurpation by two Ninth Circuit judges of the role of Congress, of the Supreme Court of California, and by extension, of the United States District Court. It conflicts with the decisions of other circuit courts. And it arrogates to these two judges the proper role of this Court to determine the rights available to habeas corpus petitioners far beyond Mr. Price.'
'Yeah,' Carlo remarked to Terri, 'it also undermines the war on terror, promotes the teaching of evolution, and opens the floodgates to gay marriage.'
Terri did not smile. 'Pell is doing what he has to do—make the decision bigger than Rennell. The Supreme Court will take only cases which affect the law as a whole, and he has to persuade four justices that this is one of them.'
Carlo considered this. 'What's been so weird is watching Rennell become an afterthought. This isn't about him anymore.'
'No,' Terri concurred softly. 'It's about all the sand we're throwing into the machinery of death.' To Chris, she said, 'What's Pell's argument on freestanding innocence?'
Frowning, Chris flipped the bound pages. 'This captures the essence,' he told her. 'Based on the last-minute confession of a death row inmate—an all-too-common event—Judges Montgomery and Sanders have abrogated Congress's carefully crafted effort to ensure that, after thorough consideration of a prisoner's constitutional rights, a sentence of death is carried out. The result is a legal mutation: an invitation to serial habeas corpus petitions, wherein piecemeal 'new' evidence of innocence is conjured by desperate prisoners and inventive lawyers, and courts are forced to entertain them one by one. If this opinion stands, the fifteen years so far consumed by Rennell Price is only the beginning, and this decision the beginning of the end of capital punishment as we know it.' Chris looked up. 'That would be a shame.'
Terri slowly shook her head. 'I can never say you didn't warn me.'
