Death Row Lessons #1
I didn't know much about the death penalty nor had I ever heard of a mitigation investigation. Joining an attorney and social worker on a post-conviction investigation changed that. I flew away from my calm studio facing a mountain and immersed myself into a world of testimonies, affidavits and compassion.

This story starts with a boy named Shawn born in New York City. His parents were Barbadian/Bajan, young immigrants in a foreign land. The mother left the baby with the father. The father sent the boy back to Barbados. "Child shifting" is not uncommon especially for immigrants trying to get ahead. Yet, Shawn gets passed around more than usual and eventually lands back with this father and a stepmother in NYC. Shawn has trouble in school. By the age of 15, he is kicked out of the house and in his mid 20's Shawn is part of an armed robbery. He is the "undisputed lookout "in the hold up of a rural convenience store. A clerk is killed. Shawn doesn't pull the trigger, but in North Carolina that doesn't matter because the law says he is part of the crime. He ends up on death row in lockdown with one phone call a year (if no one answers the call it is still counted as the one call), visitors only on the other side of glass, no classes, and about one hour outside his cell a day. The actual shooter gets life without parole. Yet, Shawn didn't kill anyone.

Ten years after Shawn's sentencing, I find myself meeting two women, strangers except for e-mails, faxes and calls, in Barbados to look into the social history of his life. According to a Supreme Court case decided in 2003 called Wiggins v Smith a criminal defendant's attorneys' failure to investigate a client's background and to present evidence of a difficult life history during the sentencing means the defendant wasn't fairly assisted. The attorneys didn't do that for Shawn the first time around. We're looking for mitigating factors, reasons Shawn won't be executed. Life without parole vs. death is the goal for now. One hope too, is that we can prove that he is mentally retarded, because you can't execute someone with an IQ below 70 anymore. The catch is the IQ needs to be assessed at that level when the defendant is less than 18 years of age. Barbados didn't do IQ tests when Shawn was small, bouncing around with multiple adults passing through his life.

"Bad news is good news," Stephanie, Shawn's social worker tells me. She explains that her uncle was murdered when she was 5 years old. What left a lingering impression on her was not the murder, but the fact her family didn't want the murderer to get the death penalty. Not yet 30 years old herself, Stephanie held the hand of a man on death row as he awaited the lethal injection and joined his family at a dinner after his death. She goes into the prisons two-three times a week. Her world, not to mention the world of the clients, is as far from mine as I can possibly fathom. I ask her if she continues to feel a sense of what I call "awe" at her freedom when she leaves the prison each time. She says "yes." I wonder out loud if that when that awe stops, it means burn out, something dangerous to both herself and the men and women she visits with behind glass.

Elaine, the attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, North Carolina has been involved in Shawn's life for over seven years. Her husband also works in this death penalty world as the state's capitol defender. My name was passed onto Elaine, as a filmmaker with a bit of cross-cultural experience and what amounts to about two years of fieldwork, photography and video making in the West Indies.

In preparation for five days of investigating and filming in Barbados, I head to the public library and search the internet to learn what I can about the death penalty. The leading states in executions include Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Florida. California, Texas Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio keep the most people on death row. (see Death Penalty Information.). The criminal justice system becomes something starkly different than what my husband and I watch on those dark Alaskan nights when we shift our garage sale easy chairs in front of the monitor, click on the television and watch a crime drama. In one sitting the story progresses, the guilty are caught and the mystery is solved. The reality is nothing so tidy with the death penalty given out wrongly based on everything from sloppy forensics, snitches, deals, the unreliability of eyewitnesses to false confessions and the way juries are selected. The statistics and stories of racial and ethnic bias provoke me to vision the Statue of Liberty lowering her torch in shame. Elaine, patient with my hunger for the story framing Shawn's, tells me if the victim is white, the likelihood of the death penalty vs. life imprisonment conviction go up. It is a need for justice in the form she explains that is much more like revenge.

Each morning Elaine and Stephanie wake up in a place most visitors come to laze on the beach, drink rum and relax and instead pull out the laptop, pick up the phone and start planning the day. I'm awed by their devotion and their excitement as we meet family members and learn more about Shawn's life. No tears are held back when a woman, the mistress to Shawn's grandfather, who raised Shawn from when he was about six months to six or seven years, hands us a pile of images of him as a young child. He holds a puppy, poses in front of a Christmas tree, smiles with family members. He looks just remotely like the current image you can find of Shawn on the North Carolina's Department of Corrections list of 167 offenders on death row. What happened in the years between images? What about his family, many of who live in Barbados, with college degrees, professional jobs, families and lives as far from Shawn's as mine? And why didn't the original attorney's on Shawn's case contact his family here?

(to be continued)

09.22.06 @ 19:30PST Friday, September 22nd

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN MAGAZINE August 9, 2006

This is an unpublished letter to the Sun Magazine. I did get a response, from an administrative assistant, who wrote "Thanks so much for your beautiful letter. Here is the June 2006 issue that you requested. Please don’t worry about the payment. This one's on us. "

I wrote this letter a few days ago and it melted. So I will try to reconstruct it from memory, not on a soggy pad by a fire in the middle of the wilderness, but inside, dry, in town on a computer:

The rain is relentless. Drips are falling onto my words almost faster than I can write. My June copy of The Sun is so wet to read it I peel each page a part from the next and hope I won't tear a page in the process and lose some words. As usual the first section I go to is Readers Write then I read "Where The Water Is" By Jan Shoemaker. I frankly can't tell if my tears are from the honesty of the writing or from smoke in my eyes. I'm taking a turn keeping a fire going with what we could collect, wet wood and dead alder bush branches. Meanwhile, the other women I've come on this adventure with are curled up in their sleeping bags, napping and waiting in a damp tent.

After living in Southeast Alaska for over ten years, I'm working on a quirky documentary film about women, wilderness and food. It is film about connection to place and the choices we make about living deeply where we have roots or where we pick to live and make home. Two of the women in the tent are trying to hunt their first goat, the other has come up to Alaska to help me film. The interview with Barry Lopez couldn't be more relevant. I feel like he is talking to us from a far, though he absolutely couldn't reach us on a cell phone or drop by.

We are camped by a lake in the Tongass National Forest, one of the last remaining intact coastal temperate rainforests in the world, 1800 feet above sea level, miles from town. We traveled in by float plane days ago. Now, there is too much wind and too little visibility for a plane to pick us up. We don't know when a plane will come and we have no idea what are families are thinking. Bushwhacking out is not a safe or sane option in this weather. We're stranded, surrounded by rugged peaks with rocky inclines, crusty snow packs and burgeoning streams. A waterfall near us grows stronger and louder every minute. I don't think any of us has ever been out in the rain this many days in a row. While we can't communicate out, we can listen on the handheld VHF marine radio to the weather updates for more rain, gales and small craft advisories.

I grabbed a copy of The Sun before we left town. This is one of those places, with no phones and no one coming to the door that allows me to appreciate the words I read and see the relevance to both the projects I'm working on and every day life. Another place I recall feeling that deep appreciation was on a 20-something day South Pacific ocean crossing in a small wooden boat. I opened a copy and in the midst of reading, as we bumped over the ocean 1000 miles offshore, I was startled and thankful too not only read, but to see one of my images printed in the magazine.

What I was wondering though, can you send me another copy of the June edition of The Sun? Then my husband can read it and I can file it away with the other Suns I can't quite add to the recycle pile and that I also use when I teach film or photography to kids, letting them study and contemplate the black and white images, and catching them at moments reading the words too.

09.22.06 @ 19:18PST