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

5. The Impact

Chapter 5 The Impact We’re about an hour into the interview. Paul has just been talking about the devastating weariness he feels after a client’s execution, mixed with anger and repetitive nightmares in which there’s something he’s got to file, and he’s trying to get to court but can’t make it in time. He says the dreams sometimes recur for several nights in a row before they gradually subside. I ask what doesn’t subside. What stays with him? “There’s a sadness that never goes away,” he says quietly. “I mean, it doesn’t intrude into my consciousness when I’m just sort of living everyday life, but I think at some level beneath all of this there’s an abiding sadness that’s always there.” He can feel it when there’s nothing to distract him from it, when he slows down and stops focusing on the next immediate thing he has to do. At times when he calms down and becomes reflective—like now—he can feel it: an underlying layer of sadness that has come to feel like a permanent part of him. “I don’t have to conjure it up,” he says. “It has almost a physical presence.” It does. It’s an undercurrent that I, too, feel as I sit with him and that I have felt during so many of these interviews. “Can you say what it’s like?” I ask him. “How you feel it physically?” 86 Fighting for Their Lives “I feel it in my stomach. Not nausea, not a knot. It’s just a kind of uneasiness. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to take deep breaths and try to sort of relax, because it’s the opposite of being relaxed. It’s feeling a little shaky, a little unsteady. And sad.” I understand why he might fully notice this feeling only when he’s not distracted by ordinary pressing demands. It makes me wonder if the reverse is also true: if one reason to keep so busy and so engaged with other things might be to keep from settling in to this place of sadness. I don’t think that all his work is simply a way to avoid melancholy. Like everyone I interviewed, Paul always has enough to keep him legitimately, even urgently , busy every day; he doesn’t need to manufacture distractions. But I tentatively suggest that maybe there’s an inherent appeal in getting swept up by the immediate tasks and demands. Maybe at some level he does want to avoid really tuning in to this abiding sadness. He nods. “It’s not a terribly good place to be,” he agrees. I embarked on these interviews wanting to know how capital defenders are affected by their work, how it has gotten inside them and marked them in lasting ways. Everyone has stories—other people’s, if not their own—of capital defenders drinking too much, smashing walls or beer bottles when bad news comes down, staying up until all hours, snapping at colleagues or their families because of the stress. All this creates a certain kind of picture, and if it isn’t a picture of people unaffected by their work, it nevertheless fits a certain familiar image: the driven defense attorney working hard under pressure. Underneath all this, though, is something else. Underneath the outward displays of frustration is, as Paul puts it, an abiding sadness that gets less notice than the stress and overwork. It’s what is always there and what is most tempting to avoid. When Isabel mentions capital defenders’ reputation for heavy drinking, I ask her, “What are people trying not to feel?” She answers immediately: “The grief. It’s impossible to keep up with it,” she says. “You haven’t [dealt with the grief from] one execution, and you get hit with another.” Capital defenders are lawyers, but their work quickly becomes about The Impact 87 much more than the law. It slams them right up against some of the rawest aspects of human experience, forcing them to rise to occasions for which no one could have prepared them. Early in her career, Pamela visited a client whose execution was scheduled for the following morning. “We knew he was going to die,” Pamela remembers. “He said, ‘My execution is at 7:00 in the morning. Will you call...