Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys

3. The Responsibility

Chapter 3 The Responsibility “To what extent does it feel like, ‘It’s on me to stop this execution’?” Pamela answers immediately, “Oh, yeah. It is.” It’s a telling choice of words: not it does feel that way, but oh yes, it is that way. “I think you have to feel that,” Pamela continues. “You have to think that with every client, it’s on you. If I don’t feel like it’s on me, then there’s nothing I can do, and then I don’t. You know, I’m always looking for a way out! So I have to feel like, This is my game, this is my story, this is my problem.” I ask if she felt that early on, with her first capital case, and she says she did, if only because when she first started practicing capital defense, there were so many execution warrants that “you were immediately assigned a case and told to get to work.” There was no one else to whom you could shift the responsibility even if you wanted to. But even now, a couple of decades later, Pamela says that she doesn’t fundamentally want to shift the responsibility. That sense of “it’s on me” keeps her motivated, “keeps the fire going.” I ask, “Is there a down side to thinking ‘it’s on me’?” “Oh, of course. It’s not healthy, is it? But I guess part of where that comes from is listening to the jurors, listening to the judges—‘It’s nobody ’s fault.’ You know, it goes back to the concentration camps and the idea that nobody’s in charge, nobody takes responsibility.” 34 Fighting for Their Lives Earlier in our interview, Pamela talked about having been drawn since childhood to literature about the Holocaust and other writing describing the horrors of war. She makes the connection for herself as she speaks: “I think that’s probably—I’ve never thought about this before, but that’s probably where this feeling comes from, because that’s where I started in this whole, you know, thinking about the horrors of the world. ‘It’s nobody’s fault.’ It has to be somebody’s fault. It has to be my fault, it has to be your fault—” “Meaning, you want to step up in some way?” “Yes. It is my fault. That doesn’t make it nobody else’s fault, but I’ve got to take personal responsibility for it.” “What’s the ‘it’ in that?” “For what we’re doing as a society. For allowing this man to die. For allowing this to continue, for allowing this horror to continue, on all these levels.” Pamela’s insistence on claiming her share of the societal “fault” for the death penalty echoes Eric’s comment about having a “social responsibility ” to defend clients on death row. Eric cited that feeling as motivation for getting into death penalty work in the first place. In Pamela’s comments we begin to see the distinct shape that responsibility assumes once a capital defender is actually representing a client who has been sentenced to death and is facing execution. The question is no longer only, “To what extent do I, as a citizen, feel a share of responsibility for what my society does?” Agreeing to represent a client in a capital case means not only feeling but also very explicitly accepting a distinct kind of responsibility toward a particular human being. The urgency (a life is at stake) and the personal specificity (I am the one who has signed up for this task) come together into something both galvanizing and terrifying. It might keep the fire going, but it can also keep you up at night. Because Pamela was immediately handed a case at the death warrant stage, and because she was surrounded by other attorneys who had already lost clients, the possibility of an execution felt very real to her almost as soon as she started work. But in the early stretch of the modern death The Responsibility 35 penalty era, most attorneys had not yet personally experienced the loss of a client to execution, nor did they have close colleagues who had experienced that loss. Paul recalls, When I started, people weren’t being executed. As time passed, it got more and more real, and within five years I’d had four clients executed, so it...