Mr. Richardson reached into his back pocket and held up his wallet. Mr. Richardson’s carotid artery and jugular vein had been cut. Blood poured out of him. It soaked his clothes and filled a plastic cup in the seat between him and Candice. Candice reached for the keys and yanked and yanked but could not get them out of the ignition. The truck was still in drive.
“Don’t kill me son,” Mr. Richardson murmured. He began to reach to put the truck in park and get the keys out of the ignition, but as he did his hand went limp and dropped into his lap. His blood pressure was so low he could no longer move his limbs. James stood and reached around Mr. Richardson. James dropped the knife to the floorboard as he twisted the ignition switch back and forth until he got the keys to release. James and Candice got out of the truck.
The interior dome light came on.
“There was so much blood,” James would testify. Seeing it made him sick. Candice started down the street and screamed for James to run, but James stood aghast, looking into the open truck door.
While the jury deliberated whether or not to give James the death penalty, I sat with James at the defense table for a long while, trying to have idle conversation, telling him not to drive himself crazy with what more he could have said or done.
“You did just fine, James,” I congratulated him on his testimony from the stand. James did not testify at his first trial. This time, he detailed the night of the crime, took responsibility, and shared his remorse. He cried while he spoke, as men cry, his face suddenly wet, his voice shaky and cracking.
“I just told the truth,” James kept saying.
I tried to change the subject. During court recess earlier that day, I had taken James’s mother and sister to lunch. They asked me to tell him that they were proud of him and wanted me to make sure that he knew that. I told him. When he mentioned the jury, I told him again.
That morning James’s mother and sister, who had travel from out of state to the trial, got the chance to talk with him. Our team had arranged a brief visit in an otherwise empty courtroom. After the jury had been dismissed for lunch, the guard let James’s mother and sister stay behind and visit James. James sat at the defense table, where he usually stayed during any courtroom breaks. His mother and sister sat on the gallery side, but they leaned on the banister separating the gallery and the defense table. James had swiveled around in his chair. At one point, they held hands. The guard leaning against the wall had straightened up and glared at this touching, but said nothing.
The meeting was against protocol, but we had convinced the guard to give us five minutes. Five minutes turned into ten. Toby, the first chair attorney on James’s case, had asked me to stay close by, monitor the conversation, and just be present “in case something goes wrong.” I had no idea what I was supposed to do, not just in case but especially if something went wrong.
“What’s gonna go wrong?” I asked. My eyes slowly landed on each of the three guns I could see in the courtroom, one on the hip of each deputy.
“Just watch closely and take notes of everything that happens,” Toby said.
“Oh,” I sighed in relief. “That’s all I ever do.”
Soon enough, the nearest guard signaled to me that time was up. I caught James’s eye and nodded to him. James stood up and began to back away from the banister. His mother stood too, but then she suddenly lurched forward. She hugged James and pulled him into her chest. The guard took a quick step toward us, then stopped. The guard later confided that he had a brother in prison and could empathize with James’s mother. James’s mother held him tight. When she let go, she was crying. Her body shook as I led her out of the courtroom.
When I got his mother and sister into my car, James’s mother stared straight ahead for a long while. “That’s the first time I have touched my son in twenty years,” she said.
■ ■ ■
“The jury has been out a long time,” James said to me as we continued to wait in the courtroom that evening. “You’ve seen a lot of these, is that good or bad?”
I had no idea. There was just no telling. I told James I would never hazard a guess, and that even contemplating what might be going on in that room would only drive us crazy. I told him I had heard lots of anecdotal evidence, but the stories all contradicted each other. Some people say it is good if the jury is out a long time, some say it is a bad sign. I told him I would not read anything into it. It was not the time to correct James, but despite his crediting me with lots of experience, I had never waited for a jury to make a life or death decision before this. James had done it twice. He just wanted to hear something, anything, that could be interpreted as a good sign. He wanted hope.
Sometimes hope is a cruel thing to give a man.
■ ■ ■
My fight against the death penalty began with a cold call to the antiquated phone in my university office (the phone was original equipment from when the building opened in 1966). The call startled me because I had been in the Management Department at Texas Tech just over a year and that phone had never rung. I did not even know the number. The plastic piece of junk rattled and blared in its faded cradle several times before I even realized the phone was ringing. I also did not immediately speak when I picked up the handset, intending to examine it rather than answer it.
“Hello?” a voice finally scratch-echoed from the tin earpiece as I stared at it.
I slowly pressed it to my ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Hello?” said the caller. “Whom am I speaking to?”
“Hans Hansen,” I said. “Who were you looking for?”
Michael Block and I made plans to meet later that week at a place called The Coffee Haus on University Avenue, right across from the Texas Tech campus. Michael had cold called the Management Department looking for “anyone who knew something about team building.” Research on teams is a distinct and vibrant area of research, but I was not familiar with any of it. Michael said someone suggested he try me.
“It’s the first team of its kind,” Michael said on that phone call. He briefly described a team made up of lawyers who were used to doing their own thing. “They’ve always been lone wolves, but now we have to get them to work together.” I agreed to meet, but I told him up front that I would be directing him to someone else once I got a few more details.
When I walked into the coffee shop, Michael was already there. He brought along Walter Kape, who had been picked to head the new office, which would officially open the following month. We huddled around a bistro table in the tiny storefront. At Michael’s request, I had sent him a paper explaining a little about what I do. It was from a dense academic journal, but it described both ethnography and narrative theory, my methodology and my main theoretical approach. He had shared it with Walter.
“I needed a thesaurus to read it,” said Michael.
“I read the parts that were in English,” joked Walter.
I could hardly blame them. Academic journal articles can be pretty dry—crumbling, actually. Although I was in a business school, I pointed out that I used ethnography because qualitative methods are suited to the kinds of topics I study, such as organizational culture. I held back from sharing that qualitative research was not very popular in business schools where quant jocks often ruled the roost.
A qualitative approach to research posits that the best way to gain knowledge is through firsthand experience of the phenomena. If you want to know what skydiving is like, for example, you go skydiving, whereas researchers using other approaches may send surveys to a hundred skydivers in an attempt to measure their experience. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.
Qualitative researchers studying culture, for example, make firsthand observations of cultural practices, customs, and rituals, and they even participate in the culture to the extent that they can. In the golden days of anthropology, an ethnographer might live in a foreign culture and participate