by K. Marie Black

Imagine yourself in a 6' x 8' cell. The fluorescent lighting in the cell would send any interior decorator into orbit. The cell contains a bed, a chair, a basin, and a toilet. Very little is on the wall except perhaps pictures of your favorite stars, those offering momentary relief from the daily doldrums. You have lived 99% of your life for the last five or so years (you lost count once you started losing hope) in this cell. You have acquainted yourself with everyday sounds: the loud crash of the bars as they open and close, the rubber squishing of the guards' pseudo wing-tips, the clanking of their keys, your breathing. The other inmates' breathing. Soon, you will be moved from this cell to another one like it, a cell closer to your final destination. Like a caged animal you are awaiting the slaughter. And your hopes for reprieve are running out. When the slaughter comes it will be painful. Tick. It will be ritualized. Tock. It will be detached. Tick. It will also be sanctioned by the majority of the United States' 200 million plus inhabitants and its government.

For many of us, our days play out pretty similarly: we wake, shower, coffee, make-up, kiss, work, sleep, etc. We try to balance time for ourselves with time for others and our responsibilities. We occupy ourselves with the world around us, our place in it, and how we will make that damn student loan payment. We balance our need to be creative with our need to be "responsible citizens." It's very easy to get lost in the mechanics of life without actually living life. Living meaning fully appreciating life: all its ups and downs and roller coaster loop-de-loos. It's the age-old forest for the trees kinda thing.

During my recent tour of the Deep South, I met someone who has transcended this bourgeois search for life's meaning and has found a "higher calling." Ironically, he, along with the organization he works for, is helping people by ensuring that they live to see the next mundane set of life's events unfold. The help he provides allows his clients to live to take life for granted. He is Clive Stafford Smith of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center. Unfortunately, his clients happened to be some of society's worst killers and capital offenders, most of whom the majority of America would like to see fry, or said more politely, would like to apply capital punishment to.

So what's a pedestrian liberal like myself to do when I meet such commitment and dedication that is also so politically riddled? My deal was common enough: I was pro-capital punishment during college because it seemed a legitimate answer to the question, how do we as a society punish most terrible crimes? I even impressed my more conservative family members and told them that they could no longer call me a bleeding heart liberal because I was for the death penalty. But in recent years, I have become less and less sure of my stance, knowing how inequitably punishment is administered in our society's corruption-clogged, politically-oriented courts.

Clive diminished any ambiguity from my mind. He said the question I should be asking, instead of how to punish should be: what does it do for society? "The answer is absolutely nothing." A native of Cambridge, England, Clive came to the U.S. to attend college some 15 years ago. Since then, he has been working tirelessly to defend indigent clients facing the death penalty ("which are the only ones facing the death penalty," says Clive). A good part of his work has taken place at the frustrating appellate level, where he has faced odds that would make the rest of us want to take a nap. But he has persevered, and he and his team at LCAC are even on a winning streak at the pre-conviction level.

I spoke to Clive recently, and, in his decidedly dry British manner, he made me feel like a bone-headed American. He also gave me some much-needed facts surrounding death row inmates. Clive gave me insight into current southern American culture, how and why it uses the death penalty more than any other of the American states.

ADA: How did you get your start?

CSS: It was at the tender age of seven. I was reading about how the British were beating up on the French. Then, in walked Joan of Arc. I remember seeing a picture of her being burned at the stake, and I remember thinking, "She looks a lot like my sister." This really disturbed me. Then, at seventeen, I did a thesis on the death penalty, in which I discovered that the U.S. had the death penalty, which really shocked me.

ADA: I know that you went to school in the States (first to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then on to Columbia Law School). Did you go here because you wanted to fight against the death penalty?

CSS: In part, but I was also offered a scholarship. I had an interesting time at school. One summer I spent at Team Defense in Atlanta. I spent the summer talking with death row inmates. When I got out of school, I decided that I wanted to defend these inmates.

ADA: What are names of some other organizations like LCAC around the country?

CSS: Not too many, unfortunately. LCAC is mostly privately funded, except for the funds we get for being appointed by the court. The other organizations like ours include: the Southern Center for Human Rights; Team Defense, both in Atlanta; the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama; and LCAC. Other organizations doing work like ours include the California Appellate Project, or CAP, but they receive the majority of their funds from the state.

ADA: Is it true that a good portion of your funding comes from abroad?

CSS: Yes, we do receive some contributions from England.

ADA: What are some of the images of death row inmates that linger in your mind?

CSS: Well, just this past Saturday, I was at the Spiritual Seminar [the only day of the year where death row inmates are allowed to visit with their families] and I was sitting with two of the inmates, both of which are mentally retarded. One of them had no family visiting him and he was just sitting there looking extremely pathetic.

ADA: You mentioned the mentally retarded. Are there a lot of mentally retarded inmates on death row?

CSS: Yes, one third of death row inmates are mentally retarded.

ADA: I'm getting a Darwinian feel from this...like capital punishment is a legalized way of getting rid of people that, as a society, are too difficult for us to deal with, who just so happened to have been convicted of killing someone?

CSS: Yes, it's hard not to see it as a big eugenics experiment. In the cases of mental retardation where the inmate did kill another person, usually s/he was one of two killers involved, and the one who is not retarded made a deal with the prosecution to get leniency during sentencing.

ADA: The system looks pretty transparent to me, how is it allowed to continue?

CSS: Because the prosecutors, judges, and juries never meet the inmates. They see them as crazed killers, not as human beings. Also, [on a political level] there is a tremendous crime problem in America owing to drugs, guns, and a lack of education for the poor. So, politicians can take one of two tacts on approaching these problems: they can encourage us to dig down deep and control drugs and guns, and educate the poor [in other words, actually govern the people]; or they can go the easy way and call for the Death Penalty. By not addressing the real issues [and by putting a deadly Band-Aid over the problem], the politicians are setting the stage for a society that will be increasingly dangerous. But as politicians, they don't concern themselves with problems that will worsen in twenty years time. I have a huge moral dilemma with the idea of killing a person, after a lifetime of mistreating them, either by not educating them or allowing their parents to beat them, etc, as the answer to America's crime problem.

ADA: Why did you pick the South to work in? The death penalty is used in most of the states?

CSS: 38 to be exact. I chose the South for two reasons. One, because the South, Texas especially, kills the most people. And also, the South has the fewest resources in terms of financial resources as well as qualified, willing people to help represent indigents. It's interesting though, because now that New York has reinstituted the death penalty [as of Fall 1995], many of Northern lawyers who once came to the South to help the accused now go to New York where they can make more money. When New York didn't have the death penalty, those lawyers, out of some paternalistic sense, would come down here and help.

ADA: Help out those ass-backwards Southerners?

CSS: Right. I mean to the limousine liberal up in New York it looks pretty bad when 93% of people from Georgia are pro-death penalty. It's basically blood lust.

ADA: What are your ideas about why the death penalty is used?

CSS: First, you've got the crime problem I mentioned, which scares people into thinking that the death penalty is the only way to protect them from crime. Secondly, [on a conceptual level] I think it's a substitute for societal constraints that are no longer in place. Constraints such as slavery and, after abolition, what effectively was legalized lynching. There's no doubt that the death penalty is racially motivated: 40% of the prisoners on death row are black, and the percentage is about 75% in Mississippi, however blacks represent only 12% of the overall population. What's even more startling is that if the crime was committed by a black against a white, the black person is four times more likely to get the death penalty than if the same crime were committed by a white against a black.

ADA: What's the most interesting observation you've ever heard from someone from another country say about our use of the death penalty?

CSS: I have a colleague from England who has done a lot of research on the problems with the British justice system and who has written several books on the subject. He came over and after just ten days here said, "I thought we had problems...now I don't." I guess the U.S. has just ruined his life's work. [Chuckles heartily.]

ADA: Any insights from folks state-side?

CSS: Americans are great sloganeers. I like some of the slogans I've read like, "Fry eggs, not people!"

ADA: You meet with death row inmates all the time. You see what are mostly bad times for these folks, several of whom you've seen die (three, in fact, two by electrocution, one by the gas chamber). Your salary is a living wage, but not what you could be making doing other kinds of law. It begs the question: why do you continue to do what you do?

CSS: I have gotten these cards from an inmate saying, "Thanks for saving my life." When you think about how you are spending your life, those little cards make it quite worth it.