Someone’s life is at stake, Armen had said. Get involved. I put the note back in my pocket and slip my car key in the door. There’s going to be an investigation, but it’ll have to be my own. Because I’m involved, starting now.
Empty coffee cups dot the surface of Armen’s conference table, along with sheaves of curly faxes, photocopied cases, and trial transcripts from the Hightower record. We worked straight through dinner and into the night, reading cases and talking through the opinion. Then Armen began to tap out an outline on his laptop and I picked up the habeas petition to check our facts. It says that Thomas Hightower was seventeen when he cut school to go drinking with a fast crowd, which got him drunk and dared him to kiss the prettiest girl in school. Hightower went to her farm, where he found Sherri Gilpin in the shed. He asked her out, and she laughed at him.,, Allegedly. In a drunken rage, Hightower slapped her and she fell off balance, cracking her skull against a tractor. He tried to give her CPR, at which point her little sister Sally came in and began to cry. Hightower says he panicked. He couldn’t leave witnesses; it would have killed his mother. So he throttled the child, then, full of shame, he got back into his car and drove himself into a tree.
Enter the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which saved his life, reserving for itself the honor of putting him on trial. For death. Hightower couldn’t afford a lawyer, not that one in the small coal-mining town would represent him anyway. The county judge appointed a kid barely out of night law school to the case, and the jury convicted Hightower of capital murder. During the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides life or death, Hightower’s lawyer argued from the wrong death penalty statute, one that had been ruled unconstitutional three years earlier by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Somehow he had missed that. The obsolete death statute, the only one presented to this predominantly white jury, said nothing about the fact that a jury could consider Hightower’s youth, his diminished capacity because of alcohol, his lack of a prior criminal record, and the remorse that he demonstrated by his suicide attempt as “mitigating circumstances” in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. The jury took only fifteen minutes to reach its decision. Death. I set the papers down and look out the huge windows that make up the fourth wall of the office. It’s the dead of night. Orangey streetlamps stretch toward the Delaware River in ribbons. White lights dot the suspension cables on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Traffic signals blink on and off: red, yellow, green. The lights remind me of jewels, twinkling in the black night. I watch them shimmer outside the window and turn the legal issues over in my mind. The question is whether Hightower’s lawyer was so ineffective that the trial was unfair. Strictly as a legal matter, Hightower probably deserves a new trial; what he deserves as a matter of justice is another matter. This is why I practiced commercial litigation. It has nothing to do with life or death; the questions are black and white, and the right answer is always green. “Well,” Armen says to himself. “Well, well, well.” He stops typing and reads the last page of his draft. The office is quiet now that Bernice has stopped snoring. I feel like we’re the only people awake, high in the night sky over the twinkly city. “Well what?”
“I think we’re going to save this kid’s life. What do you think?” The question takes me aback. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way.” “I do.” He smiles wearily, wrinkling the crows’ feet that make him look older than he is. “I wouldn’t stop if I didn’t think so.” “Was that your goal?” “It had to be. His lawyer was incompetent. Anybody else would have gotten him life in prison, instead he’s scheduled to die. They set him up.” He leans back in the chair. Fatigue has stripped something from him: his defenses, maybe, or the professional distance between us. He seems open to me in a way he hasn’t before. “I didn’t think of it as saving his life. I thought of it as a legal issue.” “I know that, Grace. That’s why I wanted you on this case. You narrowed your focus to the legalities, divorced yourself from the morality of the thing.” It stings. “Do you fault me? It’s a legal question, not a moral one.” “Really? Who said?” “Holmes.” “Fxxx Holmes,” he says, stretching luxuriously in a blue oxford shirt. His shirtsleeves are bunched at his elbows; his tie is loose. He’s so close I can pick up a trace of his aftershave.
“It’s both those things, Grace, law and morality. You can’t separate law from justice. You shouldn’t want to.” “But then it’s your view of justice, and that varies from judge to judge.” “I can live with that, it’s in my job description. Judges are supposed to judge. When I read the Eighth Amendment, I think the framers were telling us that government should not torture and kill. That’s the ultimate evil, isn’t it, and it’s impossible to check.” His face darkens. “I don’t understand,” I say, but I do in part. Armen’s culture is written all over his olive-skinned features, as well as his chambers: the framed documents in a squiggly alphabet on the walls, the picture of Mount Ararat over his desk chair, the oddly ornate lamp bases and brocaded pillows.
“It started piecemeal with the Armenians,” he says, leaning forward. “Our right to speak our own language was taken away. Then our right to worship as Christians. By 1915, they had taken our lives. We were starved, hanged, tortured. Beaten to death, most of us, with that.” He points at a rough-hewn wooden cudgel mounted over the bookshelf. “I didn’t know.” “Not many do. Half my people were killed. Half a million of us, wiped out by the Turkish government. All my family, except for my mother.” A flicker of pain furrows his brow. “I’m sorry.” He shakes it off. “The point is, government cannot kill its own citizens, not with my help.
I know Hightower did a terrible thing. He killed, but I won’t kill him to prove it’s wrong. He should be locked up forever so he never hurts another child. He will be, if I have any say in it.” He seems to catch himself in mid-lecture; then his expression softens. “So thank you, for getting involved.” “Did I have a choice?” “No.” He relaxes in the leather chair. “You are involved, you know,” he says quietly. I see the city lights glowing softly behind him and feel, more than I can understand, that we aren’t talking about the case anymore. “I don’t know—” “Yes, you do. I’m involved too, Grace. Very involved, as a matter of fact.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I feel my heart start to pound softly. “We can’t do anything about it.” “Yes, we can. Give me your hand.” He holds out his hand to me. I look at it, suspended between us, at once a question and an answer. This situation is supposed to be black and white, but it doesn’t feel that way inside. “Stop thinking. Take it.” So I do, and it feels strong and warm. He pulls me in to him, as naturally as if we’ve done this a million times before, and in a second I feel myself in his arms and his kiss, gentle on my mouth.
Suddenly I hear a noise outside the office and push myself away from his chest. “Did you hear that?” “What?” “There was a noise. Maybe the door?” ...
~~~
