increasingly personal.
“Man, all these guys talk about how you’re working on their case. You must not ever get
any peace,” he told me once.
“Well, everybody needs help, so we’re trying.”
He gave me an odd look that I hadn’t seen before. I think he wasn’t sure whether he could
give me advice—he hadn’t done that yet. Finally, he seemed to say what he was thinking.
“Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself
if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern.
I smiled. “I know.”
“I mean, you gotta help me. You shouldn’t hold nothing back on my case,” he said with a
smile. “I expect you to fight all comers to get me out of here. Take ’em all down, if
necessary.”
“Stand up to giants, slay wild beasts, wrestle alligators ...,” I joked.
“Yeah, and get somebody ready to take over the battle in case they chop your head off,
’cause I’m still going to need help if they take you out.”
The more time I spent with Walter, the more I was persuaded that he was a kind, decent
man with a generous nature. He freely acknowledged that he’d made poor decisions,
particularly where women were concerned. By all accounts—from friends, family, and
associates like Sam Crook—Walter generally tried to do the right thing. I never regarded our
time together as wasted or unproductive.
In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of
clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation and deal with the
stress of a potential execution; it’s also key to effective advocacy. A client’s life often depends
on his lawyer’s ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions
or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone’s background that no one has
previously discovered—things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important—
requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse,
neglect, or abandonment won’t happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and
multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the
client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes
effective work possible. But it also creates genuine connections with clients. And that’s
certainly what happened with Walter.
Shortly after my first trip to see Walter’s family, I received a call from a young man named
Darnell Houston who told me that he could prove that Walter was innocent. His voice shook
with nerves but he was determined to speak to me. He didn’t want to talk on the phone, so I
drove down to meet with him one afternoon. He lived in a rural part of Monroe County on
farmland that his family had worked since the time of slavery. Darnell was a sincere young
man, and I could tell he’d been debating for a while whether to contact me.
When I arrived at his home, he walked out to greet me. He was a young black man in his
twenties who had joined the “Jheri curl” craze. I had already noticed that the popular process
of chemically treating black hair to make it looser and easier to style had come to
Monroeville; I’d seen several black men, young and old, sporting the look with pride. The
cheerful bounce of Darnell’s hair contrasted with his worried demeanor. As soon as we sat