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Stares from around the room cajoled me to begin. Earlier that morning I had laid out a blank slate, with dozens of sheets of paper torn from giant flip charts. The pages were spread neatly across several folding tables, and I squeezed a fistful of markers to keep my hands from shaking. I began to speak. At the end of that day, our budding narrative was strewn all over the room, with more ink than white space on any piece of paper.
After hours of creative discussion and excited conversation, the room was finally quiet. I could hear the florescent lights hum above me. Exhausted, I crawled around on the floor, trying to put into order what amounted to a collective brain dump. Alone in the room, I made additional notes and sorted through all the pages we had filled. Every tattered page contained some kind of list, diagram, or scribbling about how we planned to fight the death penalty. The new narratives we would create from this material were the seeds for change.
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My whirlwind encounter with the death penalty began with a cold call; I was asked to help design and build the country’s first permanent death penalty defense team. I conducted a six-year ethnographic study of how the death penalty operates in practice, seeking to understand its inner workings and strategizing new ways to change the way things are done. All of my theoretical ideas about change were put to a real-world test. The stakes were life and death. I never became comfortable with the task, but I think that’s a good thing.
We pursued a risky strategy using an innovative methodology I developed called narrative construction. We created a narrative to organize the team, to determine the work they would do, and to change the way the death penalty operates. A narrative perspective also helped us understand and make sense of what others did, such as district attorneys. Instead of a typical structure and strategy, our team used narratives to guide our actions and to decide what tactics to pursue in death penalty cases.
Skipping ahead six years, our ragtag team has stopped more than one hundred executions against nearly insurmountable odds. We also expanded the office, covering almost all of Texas. By the time my research engagement ended, we had lost only once. Today Texas sentences very few people to death (figure 1.1). In the years before I got the call, Texas sentenced more than forty people to death each year. In the past two years, only three people have been sentenced to death. Several factors have been at work, but our team has been a major component of this change. We have managed to change the way things work.
Figure 1.1 Death sentences in Texas, 1999–2016
Source: Chart by the author
Seth Rose killed two people in Arkansas, stole their truck and some guns, and drove across Texas, heading for Mexico. He stopped for gas in the Panhandle in the middle of the night, and instead of getting back on the highway, he drove down a farm road into the darkness. Seth pulled up to a random farmhouse, went in with an AK-47, and killed the entire family of five; only one young boy, who played dead, survived. Seth shot the boy as he dove for his bed, blasting his body into the wall. He landed still and lifeless.
Seth got back in the truck and crossed the border into Mexico. Seth cannot really articulate why he went to Mexico, except that he knew that was where people went when they were on the run. Seth was going by a popular narrative. After Seth got to Mexico, he stayed in Juarez and simply drove around for a few hours. Inexplicably, Seth then headed back to Arkansas. As he crossed back into the United States, border agents in El Paso searched the truck and found the guns, and the officers discovered that the truck and guns were registered to the murdered couple in Arkansas.
Seth reached a plea bargain and was sentenced to two consecutive life without parole terms for the Arkansas murders. He later told guards in the Arkansas prison that he was probably also wanted in Texas for killing a family there. They ignored him at first, and if not for Seth’s persistence in confessing, the farmhouse murders would never have been solved.
Texas extradited Seth to face the death penalty. If Seth was sentenced to death there, Texas could kill him. If he got life without parole in Texas, Seth would be sent back to Arkansas to serve his two consecutive life sentences without parole there before serving his life sentence without parole in Texas. This really meant that Texas was hell-bent on killing Seth and was willing to waste a bunch of money trying to do so.
The trial was moved to Lubbock, and I consulted and assisted the defense team. On the first day of trial, the prosecution played the boy’s 9-1-1 call. Through every kind of pain, the eleven-year-old struggled to describe the gruesome scene. His entire family, including the dog, had been killed.
After trial that day, I stayed behind in the empty courtroom with Seth, Seth’s attorney, Andy, and the sheriff’s deputies assigned to guard Seth. Seth sat in a chair we had moved to the center of the courtroom, just in front of the judge’s desk. We needed to cut Seth’s greasy mullet so he would look more presentable to the jury. For security reasons, the guards would not let us use scissors. Andy brought in a pair of electric clippers and a comb, and I commandeered an empty trash bag from under the judge’s desk. Seth’s mullet went halfway down his back. As Andy fumbled with the clippers, I held the plastic trash bag snug around Seth’s neck with my thumbs and fingers stretched while I pulled the opposite side of the bag tight with my teeth. I tried to focus on catching the falling hair, but my mind kept picturing the jury’s faces as they listened to the horrific 9-1-1 call. They exchanged glances between themselves and the floor, but never held eye contact.
“How is it looking?” Seth called back over his shoulder.
“Not good,” I said.
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James Neely murdered Ed Richardson in Midland, Texas. James and his girlfriend Candice only had one intention that night—to leave town. They had received an eviction notice at the apartment building where they were staying. James and Candice walked across the street to a bowling alley that night, and then down the street to a bar, roaming through parking lots, looking to steal a car. At the bar they approached a lady as she was leaving and asked her for a ride. Once in the car, they planned to force her out and take the vehicle. James had a silver butterfly knife in his pocket. Candice did the talking while James waited in front of the car, but the woman got skittish when they seemed unclear on exactly where they wanted to go. She slammed the door and left. James and Candice continued walking down the street. They saw Ed Richardson milling around his truck behind the plumbing store he owned.
“Hey mister,” James called out, “can you give us a ride?” James had his arm around Candice.
“Where do you need to go?” Mr. Richardson was a World War II vet who would do just about anything for anyone. He had a soft spot in his heart for hitchhikers. As a young man in the service, he would hitchhike his way back and forth between Texas and his post in California.
“The Salvation Army,” James said quickly.
The truck only made it 642 feet. James collared Mr. Richardson from behind with his left arm and tried to lift Mr. Richardson out of his seat. Richardson tried to wriggle out of James’s grasp. With his right hand, James began to stab Richardson in the shoulder, neck, and face. Defensive wounds on his hands would show that Mr. Richardson blocked some of the stabs before Candice grabbed his arms and forced them into his lap. James continued to stab. Candice managed to extend her leg over and press the brake pedal, stopping the truck. More stabs landed.