"He Was Despised ..."

I went to visit someone on death row today. It was the perfect sort of New England day for such a trip. The skies were gray and the weather cold. Snow covered the fields around the complex. I went after attending the sentencing of another client, this man sentenced to 50 years imprisonment for murder. It was a somber sort of drive on a somber sort of day. I was sorrowful and morose.

The facility housing death row is all institutional gray and dull tones. Through a metal detector, belongings locked away, I wait in a room bereft of hope for an escort. We take an elevator to another floor, and walk a long, long corridor, the floor scuffed with what looks like despair. And then we are in the visiting area. I am shown into a fish bowl. One wall a window, two walls flat gray, the final wall cinderblock.

The convicted man is ushered in. I listen. I talk. I come to understand a little more about a horrible crime and a man convicted of the crime. And then the interview ends. He is taken from the fish bowl, and I am alone. I jot some notes, and then the silence impresses me. I realize how rare it is to sit in a room hearing and doing nothing. Without knowing it, I sigh, and I am startled to hear myself.

I wonder what it is like to live in such a place and to face the prospect of death. The hand that feeds me is the hand that will kill me. What is that like?

And then I find myself humming. It takes me a moment to recognize the tune. The piece is from Handel's Messiah. "He was despised, despised and rejected..." I like the sound the humming makes. So I try to whistle it, too. It is hard to get each note right.

Why this tune of all tunes? I am not religious. I have not listened to the Messiah for years. And it strikes me. The simple poetry is about this man who may become a client. He is despised, and he is rejected. He is acquainted with grief and is a man of sorrows. I am humming for him.

It is humbling and a thing of beauty, a privilege really, to sit in such a place with a condemned man and reason together about what can be done to save a life. The skies seem less gray when I leave. My heart is not light, but there is no dread either. I am plotting for a fight, and that is what I like most about the law; raw combat, mind against mind.

The day turned out far better than I could have imagined. No, I am no messiah. But criminal defense lawyers have been given the great gift to fight for hope in the darkest of places. What an odd place to find something like peace. Is this grace?

Comments

[Katharine Weber]

This is really moving, Norm.