The trial is quick. The jury convicts Ricky of molesting and murdering Jeremy and, with only three hours of deliberation, sentences him to die. When Ricky arrives on death row at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, roughly eighty men are housed in the cells, across tiers of a white octagonal building just yards from the entrance gates. Each tier holds fourteen cells. The cells are concrete, with a small opening on one side that has iron bars over it. All the openings face the same side; the men cannot see one another. What they see is the corridor and the passing guards, the same concrete day after day. They hear the same sounds: the yelling, the snoring, the toilets’ endless flushing. Each man is confined in his six-by-nine cell for twenty-three hours a day. For the remaining hour Ricky is let into a small chained pen where he is permitted to stand and feel the sun on his face. He is permitted the blue sky. Then he is escorted back into his concrete cell, where the temperature in the summer is regularly as high as 120 degrees. The heat, the sameness, the noise—it is the men’s shaving mirrors that save them. If they hold the mirrors out through the iron bars, angled just right, they can see one another. The space is tight and loud and suffocating, but though it is called death row, it is where men live.
In 1995, one man, Thomas Lee Ward, is executed. In 1996, another: Antonio G. James. In 1997, John Ashley Brown Jr. In 1999, Dobie Gillis Williams, who’s widely believed to be innocent and about whom Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the book Dead Man Walking and was played by Susan Sarandon in the film, will write The Death of Innocents. Then, in 2000, the guards come to Feltus Taylor’s cell. Feltus is on Ricky’s tier, and Ricky can hear the guards at Feltus’s grate. Every man on the tier knows whose cell the guards have come to. Every man on the tier knows why the guards have come. It is Feltus’s turn to die. Three years older than Ricky, with a shaved head and a Mr. T smile, Feltus is well liked by both guards and inmates. In the photograph taken of him when he arrived at Angola, a photograph that now hangs in the penitentiary museum alongside the photographs of every man executed there, he is a young man with tautly muscled arms and eyes that roll their whites to the camera’s every shot, as though he will not, even now that he’s caught, submit to the booking frame, to the height-measured wall. But Feltus now? Now Feltus is good-tempered and talkative, open about both his guilt in killing a coworker and also how sorry he is for it. Feltus is proof that people can change.
Then Feltus is dead. At 8:00 a.m. the next morning, the guards make their rounds of the tiers. Ricky—who has shrunken in his jumpsuit, losing weight on death row, his face gaunt and neck corded, his eyes too big in their sockets—will not move from his cot. “He is accepting the execution last night as well as can be expected,” a guard writes.
But by 10:00 a.m. Ricky crackles with anger. The guards are jerking them around, he says. Them free men—on death row, that’s what they call the guards, their defining characteristic not that they’re guards but that they are free—love this shit. When Ricky mouths off like this, other inmates get nervous. On the tiers, unruly inmates are dealt with by piping in tear gas. And the gas doesn’t stay in just one cell. John Thompson, the man in the cell next to Ricky, reaches out to rattle the bars between his cell and Ricky’s to try to get his attention, but Ricky doesn’t respond. “Ricky, please!” Thompson says. “Cool it down. Chill out.”
Ricky won’t listen to Thompson. The guards love execution days, he says. They love picking the inmates off, one by one. They’ll be happy when every man there is dead. This is Feltus’s joke, now said with bitterness: “You know, you might think I’m paranoid,” he used to say, “but I think people are trying to kill me.”
The next time a free man comes around, Ricky shouts, “You should’ve killed me instead.” He’s ready to go. He’s sick of waiting; it should’ve been him. It’s as though he’s suddenly realized that they’re being held there to die. The guard is disturbed enough at the change in Ricky to fill out a request for an evaluation. The phrase the doctors write on his chart, they will write for him again and again: “Mood appropriate to situation.” Just as in Georgia, prison may be the place Ricky’s thought the least strange.
*
While Ricky slides between fury and resignation, spending day after day in his concrete cell not knowing when he’ll be assigned a date to die, on the outside a lawyer fights for him. Clive Stafford Smith is a gangly six feet six with a hawkish nose and blue eyes so piercing he makes sure to take his glasses off before a photo of him is taken, lest, he jokes, the magnification make his stare look insane. Born in 1959, he had just turned six when his own country, Britain, outlawed capital punishment in 1965—just old enough to notice what all the adults were talking of. That early horror at the thought of executions had never left him. He’d received his law degree in the States and devoted his career to fighting the death penalty in the American South. Now, at forty-three, he is an unusual sight in the courtrooms here, with his clipped accent and a manner so decorously proper it can twist past propriety and land on outlandishness. Challenged on a hearsay point by the prosecution, he cites the Roman Empire. Describing an attempted execution by the state, he says, “They were doing something unkind to one of my clients.” Once—the tables turned at a hearing, him on the witness stand for a change—a lawyer asks him, “Now, where are you presently employed?” and Clive begins his answer with “Beside the abuse of the word presently…” until the lawyer has no choice but to cut him off to demonstrate he knows the right word. “Currently.”
His record, too, will make him a rarity. In two decades in the South, and after more than three hundred death penalty cases, Clive will lose only six clients to execution. For his efforts, he has an Order of the British Empire from the queen herself—a medallion he keeps strung around the neck of a plaster cast of Zeus, mounted on the burgundy wall of the home he and his wife, Emily, have made not in the well-heeled Garden District of New Orleans but in the Lower Ninth Ward. It is still years before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the area. The Ninth Ward is no longer the more rural side of the river it began as, no longer the place of backyard farms. Crack cocaine has flooded in, and with it gangs. The streets of the Ninth still lack functioning streetlamps. In a city with a famously high murder rate, the Ninth has the highest. In choosing to live in a place many are left to live in by circumstance, Clive is a man not just dedicated to his work, but defined by it.
And he is determined to save Ricky’s life. He begins to dig and learns that the jurors at the trial took a Bible into the jury room and prayed together before deciding to sentence Ricky to death. That’s unconstitutional, but in Louisiana it’ll be a tough sell for appeal. Instead he has Ricky’s conviction and death sentence overturned on grounds never before raised in the state: Though Ricky is white, he was entitled to have blacks on his jury, and there were none. The state supreme court justices who rule in his favor practically hold their noses as they do so. Fortunately, here, Langley will probably not go free. Ricky is taken off death row and eventually transferred back to the Calcasieu Correctional Center to await retrial.
Some years, the law firm Clive founds will represent half the men on death row in Louisiana. But even then, asked by reporters to speak about his career, it will be Ricky’s story he returns to. There is something unusual about this case for Clive, something that’s just beginning. His father was mentally ill. When he looks at Ricky, he sees his father. Can Clive feel yet, in this moment, how far that vision will drive him?
Because of legal skirmishes, because of fights over motions and venues, because the swift wheels of justice are in fact creaky and slow and no one can identify whether they are justice at all, Ricky’s case will take years to resolve.
Which gives me time to arrive in Louisiana.