THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 3
psychotherapist Tim Tate, who helped
found the North Face’s “wellness initia-
tive” and has counselled its sponsored
athletes (“The Altitude Sickness,” March
2nd). North Face’s president, Arne Arens,
says that his company tries to make
climbers’ endeavors “as safe as possible.”
Through my recent research into the
effects of corporate sponsorship on ex-
treme-sport athletes, I have found that
sponsor contracts often encourage ath-
letes to take dangerous risks in exchange
for financial rewards, because the grant-
ing of bonuses is tied to media popular-
ity. Young, inexperienced athletes are
particularly susceptible to the pressure
to engage in “adventure pornography”
on social media. Many sponsors—in-
cluding the North Face—also don’t pro-
vide athletes with health or life insur-
ance, leaving them especially vulnerable
when the worst occurs. Both Arens and
Tate are thus players in a cynical game,
in which sponsors contractually incen-
tivize athletes to court disaster.
Horst Eidenmueller
Professor of Commercial Law
University of Oxford
Oxford, EnglandPaumgarten’s insights into the allure of
mountaineering align with my own ex-
periences of hiking, climbing, and ski-
ing in the mountains of Washington
State. In the past thirty years, I’ve had
three close calls: during a rockfall, in
which I was nearly decapitated; while
skiing over an ice cliff with a forty-foot
drop onto bare rock; and while punch-
ing through a snow-and-ice cornice,
two thousand feet above the Stuart Gla-
cier. None of these experiences deterred
me, however, because everyone who en-
gages in risky sports makes peace with
the possibility of death.
Ira Shelton
Edmonds, Wash.SEEKING JUSTICE
Reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s heart-
breaking account of Eric Smokes and
David Warren’s efforts to overturn their
murder convictions brings to mind two
concepts that I encounter often as an
attorney working on wrongful convic-
tions (“Burden of Proof,” March 2nd).
As agents of the justice system, we must
always “get proximate” to our cases—a
phrase coined by Bryan Stevenson, of
“Just Mercy” fame, to describe the con-
scious act of becoming close to people
and their experiences. To understand
why two men would relive the trauma
of their wrongful convictions and de-
cades in prison, one needs to under-
stand what they went through. Unfor-
tunately, prosecutors and judges rarely
spend time in prison speaking to peo-
ple who have been robbed of their free-
dom. Perhaps if they had with Smokes
and Warren, they would not have made
or considered disingenuous arguments
about the men’s supposed financial in-
centive to seek exoneration. Nor would
they have believed, based on the fact
that Smokes and Warren accepted re-
sponsibility before the parole board,
that the men’s guilt was indisputable;
maintaining innocence before the board
would have almost certainly resulted in
a denial of parole.
We must also be cognizant of how
institutional bias affects our justice sys-
tem. It will always be challenging for
conviction-review units in district at-
torneys’ offices to find, and speak pub-
licly about, wrongdoing, but that does
not mean that they lack the power or
the motivation to try. Sadly, for Smokes
and Warren, it seems that the review
process was as flawed as the convic-
tions themselves.
Elizabeth Sack Felber
Legal Aid Society
New York City
1
EXTREME RISK
Nick Paumgarten, in his piece about the
thrills and grief associated with moun-
tain climbing, features the work of the
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