*
Months later, when Adam has stayed behind in Jersey with our dog and I have moved to the city that grows so bone-chillingly cold, I am thriving. All around me the books I borrowed from my father’s bookcase have to come to life. My torts professor is a skinny woman, nervous as a rabbit, with a disconcerting habit of using her two toddlers as the examples in hypotheticals. “Now imagine,” she says, “that my daughter Marguerite is crossing the street one day, and an hour before a gasoline truck has leaked all over the road. In the explosion, she loses her foot.” In torts—which are really a measure of how you judge the harm a person does to another, how you assign fault, how you understand cause—someone is always catching fire, losing a limb, or being maimed. In my favorite case, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., a man leaps for a departing train, dropping a package onto the train tracks. The package contains fireworks. They explode. At the other end of the platform, a scale falls on a woman. It’s a chain of events, and really a question of how to tell the story. A question of cause. The day we learn that Marguerite, the professor’s daughter, really doesn’t have a foot—that the limb she keeps losing in these stories is already gone—we sit in awkward shock. “It’s OK to laugh!” the professor says. “It’s funny!” Property class becomes not about rules to be memorized, but the question of what can be owned; constitutional law about the commitments we’ve made, what binds us together as a country.
My classmates and I love ideas. At night we argue over beers in our dorm rooms, or glasses of red wine in bars. Sometimes we tape sheets of white paper end to end and draw maps of our belief systems, trying to plot out our ideals as if they were logic trees. Consistency is what we prize, and coherency, and reason, and to be true to our ideals so that they fit together into the neat puzzle of us. I want to be driven only by my ideals. That’s why I’m here. In my law school application I wrote about standing on the tarmac as a child and knowing instantly that I did not believe in the death penalty. Why wasn’t taking a human life considered cruel and unusual? I wanted to come to law school, I wrote, to understand.
When it’s time for me to apply for summer jobs, death penalty defense firms are where I apply. I find two firms that specialize only in death penalty cases and are looking for law students to work for them for the summer. One’s in California, and while the summer that the lawyer from that firm describes to me sounds great—I’d love to live in San Francisco—the office has only one case. “You’ll get to sit in on brainstorming meetings,” he says on the phone.
The lawyer from the Louisiana firm sounds strapped and harried. “Let me ask you a question, try something out,” he says. In Jefferson Parish, a parish formed by white flight out of New Orleans, prosecutors have begun showing up for the sentencing hearings of young black men facing the death penalty wearing ties printed with nooses. I’m shocked at the story—in 2003, nooses? I stammer out that it’s got to be prejudicial but admit I don’t know any rule that would cover it.
He laughs, the sound sharp as a bark. “Neither do we. I’ll let you know what we come up with. But we’ve got more work than we can handle. We’ll have plenty of work for you.”
By the time the follow-up interview call comes around, two weeks later, I’m certain I want to work for the Louisiana firm. I take the call in my dorm room, a single room in a converted hotel where the back of the door still has checkout instructions, the heavy paisley drapes are foil-backed, and my bathroom has a rack meant for a flurry of small towels. I’d chosen to live in the dorms hoping to make friends, but the dorm I picked was a mistake—I accidentally chose the one for grade-gunners. My classmates don’t cook in the communal kitchen or hang out in common areas. There’s no friendly gossip or late-night study breaks. On move-in day I’d been wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt, wrestling a giant cardboard box of clothing into the elevator, when a man had passed by me wheeling a clothing rack. His hair was parted to knifepoint precision, and he wore a blue oxford shirt and khakis that had clearly been freshly pressed. The bar contained five more identical pairs of khakis and twice as many identical blue oxford shirts. As I held the elevator door open, he wheeled in a pressing machine.
But I’ve made other friends here, idealists like me. They’re the reason I worry about what I’ll be asked during the job interview. Because after a year of law school and our late-night debate sessions, I am starting to understand that I really don’t believe my opposition to the death penalty—or anyone’s support of it—comes down to reason. It’s still that simple, basic conviction I’ve always had: that everyone is a person, no matter what they’ve done, and taking a human life is wrong.
But on the phone, the lawyer never asks why I oppose it. “Tell me,” she says, her voice low, at once formal and somehow intimate, a practiced tone designed to elicit confession, “how do you feel about defending the guilty?”
“I have no illusions that all my clients will be innocent,” I say. My words sound awkward even to me, but I’m a little irked at the question. I want to talk about reasoning, not feelings. I’m glad to know that there will be female lawyers at the firm—unlike most other public interest law, the death penalty world is heavily male—but her words strike me as condescending. Does she really think I’m that naive?
“How about defending people accused of murder?”
“I believe everyone deserves a lawyer,” I say. It’s a death penalty firm. Of course some clients will be accused murderers.
“You may have to meet with them. You may have to sit with them.”
I change tactics: “My father’s a criminal defense attorney. I grew up around his clients.” When I was a young teenager I spent one of my parents’ office Christmas parties hovering around a tall, slim man whose teeth flashed whenever his face stretched into a wide smile. All evening I offered him cheese cubes from a tray, a fresh napkin to replace the one he was holding, anything to get him to shine that smile on me. Later I realized that he was a client my father had told me about, a hit man for the Korean mafia. After the party he entered the Witness Protection Program. My father has always defended the bad guys. He has told me more than once that his job is to be amoral, never to think about what the people he defends did—“if,” he always adds, a defense attorney to his core, “they did it.”
The lawyer continues. “Some of them may be charged with other crimes in addition to murder.”