Wow, this was a hard read. Not the writing or the language, but the subject matter: death row inmates. The protagonist is a woman, referred to only as “the lady”, who researches and defends people on death row, not to exonerate them but to try to save them from the ultimate punishment. These are not nice people. They are vile, violent, sick, repellent, dangerous, hateful, ugly, nasty, dreadful people. They are mentally and/or emotionally ill. They could be called evil if you believe in that sort of thing. They have committed hideous crimes. If you were a loved one of one of their victims you would likely want to see them dead, if even with your own bare hands. And yet.....
These are people, human beings. They were born naked infants just like the rest of us. What led them to the acts for which they have been condemned to die? That is the question that drives “the lady.” She starts with the assumption, the belief, that something in their past, made them into what they are, or at least the part of them for which they are to be punished. Maybe the father or mother, maybe a grandfather or an uncle, or a neighbor, maybe a complete stranger. Someone. Someone else who can be blamed. Not to entirely shift the blame, and punishment, onto someone else, but to lighten the weight of responsibility on the inmate. To create an opening for understanding and sympathy for the person whose hands have committed the depraved act.
Her task is not pleasant. It takes her deep into the ominous prison, in a private room with the inmate in an ancient wooden cage, for conversations in which she patiently waits for crumbs of memories--names, places, events. It takes her to places of the inmates’ childhood, lonely and sometimes dangerous places, to interview people who may have known. As I said, it’s a hard book to read. No bedtime story.
The author, Rene Denfeld, based her writing on more than a decade of work with violent offenders, including some on death row. According to her Wikipedia page, “...her life and writing revolves around preventing and healing trauma.” She seems to believe that even the worst of us has value and deserves a chance at redemption. WWJD?
Coincidentally, the New York Times Magazine, in its annual issue of short tributes to important people who died in the previous year, included Scharlette Holdman, a woman sometimes credited with developing the field of “death penalty mitigation.” Her clients included Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Jared Loughner, the shooter in Tucson who killed six and wounded others including U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, and her last, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Over a fifty-plus year career she held to the belief that her clients were not monsters, just “terribly flawed human beings.”
On reflection, I am reminded of the enduring “nature versus nurture” debate. These defenders of the accused tilt heavily toward the nurture side, believing that the inmates were not born as felons, but that circumstances in their lives molded them badly. It’s an optimistic viewpoint in that it argues that if society could be improved, innocent babies would no longer be transformed into the types of flawed humans who commit horrible crimes.
I am reminded also of Anthony Burgess, a lion of twentieth century literature and a personal favorite of mine, who argued that we have the ability to choose good or evil, that we can recognize an opportunity to do good or to do evil, and choose evil. “If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism, lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”
Perhaps society, with its boundless capacity for good and for evil, is the clock winder.
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