I got a call. Not a call I could ignore. Much as I would have liked to.
It was Laura Cochrane. She was the Assistant Coroner. In charge of the actual work. I was surprised. Not badly so. An old friend, Laura. An expert witness, long ago. The Johnson case. Mississippi. Dog days. Death. The death penalty.
I didn’t believe in it. I don’t believe in it. So sue me. The State, in all its majesty, killing people. It isn’t right. The ritual. The hood. The rope. The rifle. The cigarette. The straps. The hood. The chair. The gurney. The arms spread wide and strapped to it. The last meal. Billy Ray Rector, saving his dessert for ‘after the execution.’ The needle. The countdown. Finality. Who’s to pull the switch?
It doesn’t make a difference how you do it. Not a damn. The result is the same.
And everyone has their excuse. ‘It’s just my job.’ ‘I had to do it.’ ‘If not me to pull the switch, then someone else will do it.’ Who? No matter. Someone. Who tells them that? Who tells each cog and wheel and joint and bearing that together make the big machine that says ‘Not me’? It wasn’t me made the decision, it was him, or her, or them, and yes, the system, them, the people, all of them.
The State. The will. The people. Jesus, what was that? Nobody with a gram of blame, of responsibility. We’d rather drink ourselves oblivious than think, Oh yes, that’s me, I’ll be there too, I’ll be as nothing, as the man on the gurney there, like him, dust and ashes, it won’t make a damn bit of difference, me or him, whatever we were blamed for, tried to do or failed, we’ll both be dead as doornails.
I felt fairly strongly about it.
Laura was in private practice then. She’d volunteered, like the rest of us. She’d done her best. Come up with a theory. We’d pinned our hopes on it. Our client, Johnson, a sad and schizophrenic man, had been there. We couldn’t deny it. He’d confessed. He’d stabbed the knife into the bodies of the man, his wife, the children. But, our psychologist had testified, he didn’t mean to do what he’d so manifestly done. And even if he had, Laura had concluded, the bodies had been corpses long before he’d come into the room. Done in already by the depredations of his friend. All Gavin’s fault, it was, that nasty young and angry Gavin, who’d told him that he had to cut them all.
You’ve got to do it, Gavin said. You’ve got to do something too.
She’d testified. She’d done her best. If the victims had been already dead, how could Johnson be a murderer?
She’d tried. It hadn’t worked. I couldn’t criticize. She’d done what she could do.
There’s something about being at trial. In the trenches. Even more so when a life is at stake. The bonds you form last a lifetime. Sometimes more. I still went every year to Miklos Kariakin’s grave. To say hello, and thanks. For all he taught me as a young and eager lawyer. For the all-nighters we pulled together, early in my career, in the defense of the indefensible. The bullshit sessions over bourbon and potato chips in cheap hotels in faraway places. Shreveport. Texarkana. Mobile. My death penalty education. My introduction to the life of hard-ass no-holds-barred trial work.
Sifting every piece of paper. Covering every angle. Being way over-prepared, for every witness and contingency. Litigation is the art of over-preparation. The art of never having to say later, Damn, I should have asked him that. So that the one time in a thousand that an otherwise random comment of Officer Brunson, in his statement made in 1987, contradicted what he said on the stand today, fourteen years later, you had it there. It was in your head. It was on a piece of paper. And you knew just where that piece of paper was.
So, Laura and I had bonds that never would break. But she also had a job to do. Cutting up my wife, for one. So first, I was surprised, to get a call from Laura. I didn’t want my friends involved in all of this. Still less exploring my late wife’s anatomy.
But then, in some strange way, it seemed inevitable.
Whatever was the fate the Gods decreed, I’d live with it.
It would be a couple more days, Laura told me, sympathy in her voice.
They had to run some tests.
She was sorry. So sorry.
From her, I accepted it. She was an empathetic soul. She wasn’t just mouthing the words.
It was a consolation. Of a sort.