Stopping State-Administered Murders

Just out of college, I applied for a job helping legal teams defend people facing the death penalty. This was back before I had the hardware to do a quick web search and discover that Scharlette Holdman, the woman who I was told would interview me, was the mastermind behind the blueprint used in capital defense since 1976 (and ever since).

I soon learned that Scharlette was more than a celebrity in this field. She was a legal pioneer who never spent a day in law school and a human rights zealot whose love for the oppressed, loathing for oppressors, storytelling mastery, personal sacrifice, endless work, sheer will, and utter genius all combined to make her the unstoppable force of the nationwide capital defense movement.

Unbeknownst to most of her colleagues, Scharlette had a life outside her work. Here she was a single mom, a religious avoider of shoes, an uncoachably inept assembler of tamales, and an eloquent orator with ready access to a bus-station bathroom of a potty mouth. And she was a word nerd. (We bonded in our shared horror over the rampant misuse of the word "impact" as a verb.)

I could fill chapters with the wisdom she dispensed in meetings, rental cars, trailer parks, prison visiting rooms, and each of the many offices from which she saved lives over the decades. I learned more from her than from anyone outside my immediate family. Working with and learning from Scharlette Holdman was one of the defining privileges of my life. (Scharlette left us in 2017. As I manage the decisions of the day, I still often ask myself what she'd do, and I try to imagine the irreverent, pants-peeing gags she'd share as she did what was right.)

My role in our work was to find and share the facts that equipped mental health and other experts to assess the development and functioning of our clients. When I used to tell others about my job, they often echoed back that I humanized our clients. If anyone was humanized by this experience, I was.

For twenty years, I built relationships with brave, resilient clients and the people who could help us understand them -- their families, friends, partners, neighbors, bosses, co-workers, classmates, first-grade teachers, and others. I visited mobile home parks; frozen, backwood hollers of Appalachia; one-room, plywood homes teetering along the steep dirt hillsides outside Tijuana; sweltering fields and ramshackle housing of migrant farmworkers; communities clinging to life in the toxic shadows of Superfund sites; tiny, arid blips on the maps of Northern Mexico; and systemically harmed urban neighborhoods around our nation.

Clients and their families described traumas that illustrated the devastating interplay between our society's most appalling failures: racism; poverty; neglect; abuse; malnourishment; profit-driven environmental assaults; inadequate access to housing, employment, education, and physical and mental health resources; and more.

Coming from the places and people our society attempts to ignore, these stories are the truest testament I know to strength and courage. It's an honor to gather and share them with dignity and accuracy.

But easy it ain't. The work to slow the state's murder machine unfolds in a bleak emotional landscape. Hope is precious here. And fragile. Without a supportive team, nothing happens.

Which is why any description of this field is incomplete until it recognizes the colleagues who help one another move mountains. I was able to contribute to this movement only because of the support of supremely talented teammates committed to justice and to one another.

In Scharlette's corner of the capital defense community, humor in particular sustained us. (Here’s a sample in which Scharlette describes to the crew at This American Life a strategic effort to force an executioner/psychologist to play tic-tac-toe with a chicken.)

The laughs, the support, and the love my dear friends and I shared not only helped us save clients’ lives; they helped us find direction in our own.

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