A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel

Author:Hilary Mantel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

The debate about capital punishment, she realized, is inseparable from the debate about race, and about poverty. You don’t find wealthy people on death row. In her neighborhood, they told her that “capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment.”

She admits to a certain ignorance about how her own country worked. “When I first started visiting the condemned in 1982, I presumed the guilt of everyone on death row.” The death of an innocent person would be a fluke, she thought. In Dead Man Walking she examined cases where the executed men were guilty beyond doubt of the crimes for which they were killed by the state, but here she deals with two cases where she is sure the men on trial were innocent. They both believed that they had only to tell their story, and the truth would set them free. Her book is a detailed history of how wrong they were. When Sister Helen scrutinized the process of cases that interested her, and looked afresh at the initial trial process in each, she began to realize that “the courts are a system of gates that shut like one-way turnstiles. Once you come out, you can’t go back.”

It is vital to get effective legal representation at the earliest stages, and this is what poor people cannot get. The poor are defended by “overworked, underfunded and inept attorneys,” yet federal appeal courts routinely deny appeals based on “ineffectiveness of counsel”—any lawyer not actually a corpse seems to be good enough. In the case of Dobie Williams, his counsel failed to conduct proper forensic tests, challenge the all-white jury, or properly frame pleas in mitigation of sentence. In addition, mistakes of fact made at the initial hearings can rarely be retrieved. The “raw stuff” of the crime—police reports, eyewitness statements, physical evidence—is dealt with at first hearing. Even if the appeal courts can be persuaded to re-examine it, there are the practical difficulties of disappeared witnesses, and missing and deteriorated forensic specimens. The prosecution has first sight of the evidence, and prosecutors routinely, she believes, withhold from the defense what is not helpful to their case, walking a fine line between carelessness and misconduct.

The defects of the system are well illustrated by the second case she follows, which is that of Joseph O’Dell, a white man from Virginia. He was convicted of the rape and murder of a white secretary, who was bludgeoned to death after leaving a nightclub in February 1985. As in the case of Dobie Williams, the prosecution overlooked obvious suspects and wove a “preposterous and convoluted” story to implicate the accused, who had been seen at the same nightclub on the evening in question. O’Dell’s landlady, who was also his girlfriend, had found some bloody clothes in a bag in her garage the next day, led there by an “intuition” after reading a report of the murder. The police found a blood type “similar” to that of the victim and arrested O’Dell. They found semen “consistent” with O’Dell’s on the victim’s body.

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