David Kessler - Mercy

It’s hard to sit still when your client is scheduled to die in fifteen hours.

Alex Sedaka felt gripped by that all-too-familiar urge to stand and pace up and down like a caged lion. But he knew he couldn’t do so. It would be undignified — and hardly befitting the governor’s office. So instead, he sat there tensely in the brown leather-upholstered mahogany armchair, as his client’s life hung in the balance.

“I know he had a fair trial, sir. That’s why I can’t get the courts to reconsider the case. But justice isn’t a game. It’s a search for the truth — at least it should be.”

Alex felt the gaze of suspicious eyes upon him, his shoulders hunched against the strain of the task that awaited him. Since hitting fifty, he had become somewhat self-conscious about his appearance, despite the fact that tennis and rock climbing had kept him lean and fit, as well as tanned.

But it was not the ravages of time that had aged him: it was his work. Three decades of professional cynicism, defending scum and lowlifes, had worn away the youthful charm from the face that Melody had fallen in love with — or given it character, as she liked to say. Only this very morning, he had stared at his wedding picture with a mixture of joy and pain and had been surprised at how much he had changed.

But right now he was self-conscious, not about his looks, but rather about what he was going to say next. He had held the freedom of other men in his hands on numerous occasions. But this was the first time he had been entrusted with another man’s life .

As if on cue, the governor’s voice came back at him with quiet cynicism.

“It’s not my duty to second-guess the courts now, is it?”

At the back of Alex’s mind, a question was nagging away at him. Do I plead for justice or mercy? Do I place the emphasis on the lingering doubts or argue about the ethics of “a life for a life?” And he had to think on his feet.

“No, sir, of course it’s not your duty to second-guess the courts. But sometimes an unusual case can slip through the net. And you have the power to make a difference.”

He monitored the governor’s face for a reaction to the obsequious flattery. The face remained neutral. Alex took it as the green light to continue.

“The courts are bound by a rigid code of rules. But sometimes the rulebook goes out the window. Every case is different and this case is a perfect example. The whole trial took place in atmosphere of anger and vengeance. All those comparisons with Carrie- ”

“Carrie?”

“The book by Stephen King … about the girl with psychic powers who was bullied in high school.”

“Oh, right,” the governor replied suppressing a smile. “I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie.”

Alex squirmed.

“Well anyway … The press kept making comparisons. They just didn’t let up.”

The governor scratched his head, looking puzzled. He had rejected Alex’s written request for clemency a few days ago, but agreed to this eleventh-hour, face-to-face meeting at his San Francisco office, the location chosen by mutual agreement over LA, San Diego, Fresno and Riverside because of its proximity to San Quentin.

“I don’t mean to sound like I’m making fun of you — ‘cause I ain’t — but you’re contradicting yourself now. You said before that Burrow got a fair trial.”

“Yes, sir, in the courtroom . But what about the media circus beforehand? It poisoned the atmosphere. By the time the trial opened, people had already made up their minds. Folks were baying for blood. But vengeance isn’t the same as justice.”

He had used the term “folks” deliberately, hoping that it would click with the governor’s populist vocabulary. But the governor was one step ahead of him.

“Are we talking justice for the murderer here or justice for the victim?”

Over the past few days, back at the office, Alex had practiced pitching various arguments, with Juanita and Nat at the plate, striking the kind of counter-arguments that he would inevitably face. But the more he had practiced, the more banal it had all sounded. There was nothing more to add to the fossilized debate. All he could offer was a mind-numbing replay.

However, he had a few things going for him. Perhaps the strongest of these was that the incumbent governor — Charles Dusenbury — was himself an opponent of the death penalty. Not many politicians would stick their necks out by going on record with such a politically unpopular sentiment. “Chuck” Dusenbury was one of the few. Even with public opinion divided on capital punishment, supporters of the death penalty were more likely to be one-issue voters on the subject.

But this didn’t matter to Dusenbury. He was a lame duck, serving out his final term of office. His public position was that he had no plans to extend his political career at either the state or federal level and wanted to retire to a lakeside log cabin and spend his golden years playing golf and catching fish. This might have been good ol’ hometown politicking. Some people — “the media cynics,” Dusenbury called them — suspected that he still harbored aspirations to catch bigger fish than you can find in a lake. You could never tell with Dusenbury.

Alex took a deep breath and tried a different line of attack.

“Okay, there’s something else that I’d urge you to consider: there’s still reasonable doubt.”

“You mean the fact that they never found the body?”

“Exactly.”

“So why didn’t you argue lack of corpus delicti before the courts?”

The governor was teasing him — his smile said it all.

“Corpus delicti means the ‘body of the crime’, sir, not the ‘body of the victim.’ You know that.”

“Of course I know it,” the governor snapped. “So why are you feeding me this line of bullshit?”

Alex recoiled from the anger. But he gathered his wits and recovered his nerve quickly.

“Because even if there’s corpus delecti in the formal sense, it’s still possible that the alleged victim is alive. Can you send a man to the death chamber with these lingering doubts still hovering over the case?”

“Well let’s see now. They found breast tissue from the victim in a plastic bag at the back of the freezer at Clayton Burrow’s home. They found the victim’s blood-stained, semen-stained panties, hidden beneath the floorboards in Clayton Burrow’s bedroom. They also found a blood-stained knife with a perfect set of Clayton Burrow’s fingerprints in the same place. They used DNA to establish that the blood belonged to Dorothy Olsen and the semen came from Clayton Burrow. I don’t know what you call that, but I call it corpus delecti!”

“Don’t you think it was just a little bit too convenient? The cops finding all that under his bed after an anonymous tip-off?”

“You think they planted it? How would they get such evidence in the first place?”

“I don’t know. From the body?”

“Which they never found!”

“But why would he keep all that stuff?”

“‘Cause he’s a sex killer and he wanted to keep a trophy — that’s why! Like countless sex killers before and since!”

“But would he be stupid enough to keep it under the floorboards of his own room?”

“Sure he would! He’s a peanut-brained redneck!”

Alex shifted uncomfortably. He was flogging a dead horse. Time for another shift in his arguments.

“Well what about her trust fund? Eighty-six thousand dollars that she just liquidated a few days before she vanished?”

“The defense already tried that smokescreen at the trial. It was her money. She’d just turned eighteen and she wanted to get her hands on it.”