John Katzenbach: Just Cause

Cowart stared down the narrow, high corridors. The cell tiers were on the left, rising up three stories, with stairs at either end. The wall facing the cells contained three rows of dirty windows that swung open to let in the air. There was an empty space between the catwalk outside the bank of cells and the windows. He realized the men could lie locked in each small cell and stare out across and through to the sky, a distance of perhaps thirty feet that might as well have been a. million miles. It made him shudder.

'There's Robert Earl over there,' the sergeant said. Cowart spun about and saw the sergeant pointing toward a small barred cage in a far corner of the terminal area. There were four men inside, sitting on an iron bench, staring out at him. Three men wore blue jumpsuits, like the trustee. One man wore bright orange. He was partially obscured by the bodies of the other men.

'You don't want to wear the orange,' the sergeant said quietly. 'That means the clock's ticking down on your life.'

Cowart started toward the cage but was stopped by the sergeant's sudden grip on his shoulder. He could feel the strength in the man's fingertips.

'Wrong way. Interview room's over here. When someone comes to visit, we search the men and make a list of everything they have – papers, law books, whatever. Then they go into isolation, over there. We bring him to you. Then, when it's all said and done, we reverse the process. Takes goddamn forever, but security, you know. We do like to have our security.'

Cowart nodded and was steered into an interview room. It was a plain white office with a single steel table in the center and a pair of old, scarred brown chairs. A mirror was on one wall. An ashtray in the center. Nothing else.

He pointed at the mirror. 'Two-way?' he asked.

'Sure is, replied the sergeant. 'That a problem?'

'Nope. Hey, you sure this is the executive suite?' He turned toward the sergeant and smiled. 'Us city boys are accustomed to a bit more in the way of creature comforts.'

Sergeant Rogers laughed. 'Why, that's what I would have guessed. Sorry, this is it.'

'It'll do,' Cowart said. 'Thanks.'

He took a seat and waited for Ferguson.

His first impression of the prisoner was a young man in his mid-twenties, just shorter than six feet, with a boyish slight build, but possessing a deceptive, wiry strength that passed through his handshake. Robert Earl Ferguson had rolled his sleeves up, displaying knotted arm muscles. He was thin, with narrow hips and shoulders like a distance runner, with an athlete's easy grace in the manner he walked. His hair was short, his skin dark. His eyes were alert, quick, penetrating; Matthew Cowart had the sensation that he was measured by the prisoner in a moment's time, assessed, read, and stored away.

'Thank you for coming,' the prisoner said.

'It wasn't a big deal.'

'It will be,' Ferguson replied confidently. He was carrying a stack of legal papers, which he arranged on the table in front of him. Cowart saw the prisoner glance over at Sergeant Rogers, who nodded, turned, and exited through the door, slamming it shut with a crash.

Cowart sat, took out a notepad and pen, and arranged a tape recorder in the center of the table. 'You mind?' he asked.

'No,' Ferguson responded. 'It makes sense.'

'Why did you write me?' Cowart asked. 'Just curious, you know. Like, how did you get my name?'

The prisoner smiled and rocked back in his seat. He seemed oddly relaxed for what should have been a critical moment.

'Last year you won a Florida Bar Association award for a series of editorials about the death penalty. Your name was in the Tallahassee paper. It was passed on to me by another man on the Row. It didn't hurt that you work for the biggest and most influential paper in the state.'

'Why did you wait to contact me?'

'Well, to be honest, I thought the appeals court was going to throw out my conviction. When they didn't, I hired a new lawyer – well, hired isn't quite right -I got a new lawyer and started being more aggressive about my situation. You see, Mr. Cowart, even when I got convicted and sentenced to die, I still really didn't think it was happening to me. I felt like it was all a dream or something. I was going to wake up any moment and be back at school. Or maybe like someone was just going to come along and say, 'Hey, hold everything. There's been a terrible mistake made here… ' and so I wasn't really thinking right. I didn't realize that you have to fight hard to save your life. You can't trust the system to do it for you.'

There's the first quote of my story, Cowart thought.

The prisoner leaned forward, placing his hands on the table, then, just as rapidly, leaned back, so that he could use his hands to gesture in short, precise movements, using motion to underscore his words. He had a soft yet sturdy voice, one that seemed to carry the weight of words easily. He hunched his shoulders forward as he spoke, as if being pushed by the force of his beliefs. The effect was immediate, it narrowed the small room down to the simple space between the reporter and the prisoner, filling the arena with a sort of superheated strength.

'I thought just being innocent was going to be enough, you see. I thought that's the way it all worked. I thought I didn't have to do anything. Then, when I got here, I got some education. Real education.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, the men on Death Row have a kind of informal way of passing information about lawyers, appeals, clemency, you name it. You see, over there… ' he gestured toward the main prison buildings, 'the convicts think of what they're gonna do when they get out. Or maybe they think about escaping. They think about how they're going to do their time, and they think about making a life inside. They have the luxury to dream about something, a future, even if it's a future behind bars. They can always dream about freedom. And they have the greatest gift of all, the gift of uncertainty. They don't know what life will hold for them.

'Not us. We know how we're gonna end up. We know that there will come a day when the state will send two thousand five hundred electric volts into r brain. We know we've got five, maybe ten years.

It's like having a terrible weight around your neck all the time, that you're struggling to hold up. Every minute goes by, you think, Did I waste that time? Every night comes, you think, There's another day gone. Every day arrives, you realize another night lost. That weight around your neck is the accumulation of all those moments that just passed. All those hopes just fading away. So, our concerns aren't the same.'

They were both quiet for an instant. Cowart could hear his own breath easing in and out, almost as if he'd just run up a flight of stairs. 'You sound like a philosopher.'

'All the men on Death Row are. Even the crazy ones who scream and howl all the time. Or the retards who barely know what is happening to them. But they know the weight. Those of us with a little formal education just sound better. But we're all the same.' 'You've changed here?' 'Who wouldn't?' Cowart nodded.

'When my initial appeal failed, some of the others, some of the men who've been on the Row five, eight, maybe ten years, started to talk to me about making a future for myself. I'm a young man,Mr. Cowart, and I don't want it to end here. So I got a better lawyer, and I wrote you a letter. I need your help.'

'We'll get to that in a minute.' Cowart was uncertain precisely what role to play in the interview. He knew he wanted to maintain some sort of professional distance, but he didn't know how great. He had spent some time trying to think of how he would act in front of the prisoner, but had been unsuccessful. He felt a little foolish, sitting across from a man convicted of murder, in the midst of a prison holding men who'd committed the most unthinkable acts, and trying to act tough.