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looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk
about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to
think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too.”
I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—
what you’re going to do when you get out of here.”
“Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall
to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are
supposed to die on God’s schedule.”
Before the service began, I thought about all the time I had spent with Walter after he got
out. Then the choir sang, and the preacher gave a rousing sermon. He spoke about Walter
being pulled away from his family in the prime of his life by lies and bigotry. I told the
congregation that Walter had become like a brother to me, that he was brave to trust his life
to someone who was as young as I was then. I explained that we all owed Walter something
because he had been threatened and terrorized, wrongly accused and wrongly condemned,
but he never gave up. He survived the humiliation of his trial and the charges against him. He
survived a guilty verdict, death row, and the wrongful condemnation of an entire state. While
he did not survive without injury or trauma, he came out with his dignity. I told people that
Walter had overcome what fear, ignorance, and bigotry had done to him. He had stood strong
in the face of injustice, and his exonerated witness might just make the rest of us a little safer,
slightly more protected from the abuse of power and the false accusations that had almost
killed him. I suggested to his friends and family that Walter’s strength, resistance, and
perseverance were a triumph worth celebrating, an accomplishment to be remembered.
I felt the need to explain to people what Walter had taught me. Walter made me
understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people
better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent. A system that denies the
poor the legal help they need, that makes wealth and status more important than culpability,
must be changed. Walter’s case taught me that fear and anger are a threat to justice; they can
infect a community, a state, or a nation and make us blind, irrational, and dangerous. I
reflected on how mass imprisonment has littered the national landscape with carceral
monuments of reckless and excessive punishment and ravaged communities with our hopeless
willingness to condemn and discard the most vulnerable among us. I told the congregation
that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve
to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is,
Do we deserve to kill?
Finally and most important, I told those gathered in the church that Walter had taught me
that mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most
empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The
people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients
of our compassion. Walter genuinely forgave the people who unfairly accused him, the people
who convicted him, and the people who had judged him unworthy of mercy. And in the end,
it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a life worth celebrating, a life
that rediscovered the love and freedom that all humans desire, a life that overcame death and
condemnation until it was time to die on God’s schedule.
After the service, I didn’t stay long. I walked outside and looked down the road and