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

7. The Victories

Chapter 7 The Victories After he’d been a capital defense attorney for several years, Gabe agreed to help a relative who needed a lawyer for a traffic court hearing. He was amazed at how easy it was—not just the work itself but winning the case. “I thought, Wow, this must be what it feels like to do this kind of law on a daily basis,” Gabe says, laughing. “That’s what I had always thought a lawyer would do: You get a case; you fix it. You get clients the result they want.” There are, in fact, areas of legal practice in which attorneys win more often than they lose. Post-conviction capital defenders can become so accustomed to operating within a framework where, as Karen puts it in Chapter 3, “it’s the norm to lose,” that they are sometimes startled into remembering just how atypical that framework is. Winning so easily, Gabe says, was “weird but satisfying.” Tellingly, though, the experience did not make him want to change his practice. “The last thing I want to do is spend my days talking about people running stop signs,” he says, and I am reminded of all the reasons he and others have given about why they chose capital defense in the first place. It doesn’t surprise me that dealing with traffic violations is neither interesting nor high-stakes enough to satisfy Gabe over the long term. Still, I wanted to hear more about how these capital defenders define success. Do they define it in ways that mean they seldom achieve it, or do 138 Fighting for Their Lives they understand the term in such a way that they are able to experience success more frequently? The capital defenders I interviewed are widely recognized and highly regarded within their field. They are invited to speak at conferences and to consult on others’ cases. Several have won awards and honors and have worked on cases that received considerable attention from both the courts and the media. Arguably, they are clearly successful in a professional sense. But this kind of success, however gratifying it might be, is not at the heart of a capital defender’s assessment of what constitutes victory or achievement in the work itself. It was this core inquiry that I wanted to consider. When you do win, in capital defense, you win in the biggest possible way: you save an individual from execution. “I had one case where the client actually got off death row,” Gina tells me. “I got to call the family and say we won, and they were so appreciative. In that particular case, I did save a life.” “What was the impact of that on you?” I ask. “I think for me, it’s kind of the fuel. Even before we got relief in that one case, I knew that relief is a possibility, and I think that’s what drives me.” It would be one thing if they knew at the start that they would never win. But even at the post-conviction stage, saving a client’s life is not impossible ; it’s just extremely rare. As Gina says, it’s that possibility, so slim but so powerful, that keeps defense attorneys in the game. And because they view themselves as trying to prevent an execution, they naturally see overturning a death sentence as the ultimate victory. “Obviously, I like the ultimate winning,” Roger says. “Getting them off death row is about as good as it gets. It doesn’t get any better than that.” To overturn a death sentence and thereby save a life is a victory over many things, including the odds. But some attorneys acknowledge that only a capital defender would truly view a life sentence as a win. “Let’s face it,” Nick says. “Who thinks that sending somebody to jail for life without parole is a win? But we take it as a win.” Phrasing it as he does, Nick introduces a note that I hear repeatedly, The Victories 139 in various ways: success is as much about how they take it, interpret it, and experience it as it is about any kind of objective measure. We’ve seen that, in the context of capital defenders’ work as a whole, even a victory can be emotionally fraught. There is Julian’s story of getting a last-minute stay for a client and...