Fighting for Their Lives
Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
How do attorneys who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work? Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time. What it is like for these capital defenders in their last visits or phone calls with clients who are about to be taken to the execution chamber? Or the next mornings, in their lives with their families, in their dreams and flashbacks and moments alone in the car? What is it like to do this work year after year? (These attorneys had, on average, spent nineteen years doing capital defense.)
Through vivid interviews amplified by the author's responses and commentary, these attorneys reveal aspects of their internal experience that they have never talked about until now. How do capital defenders manage the weight of the responsibility they carry? To what extent do they experience symptoms of trauma in the aftermath of losing a client to execution or as a result of the cumulative effects of engaging in capital defense work? What motivates them, and what do they draw upon, in order to keep engaging in such emotionally demanding work? Have they considered practicing other types of law? What can we learn from capital defenders not only about the deep and long-term effects of the death penalty but also about broader human questions of hope, effectiveness, success, failure, strength, fragility, and perseverance?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sheffer (In a Dark Time: A Prisoner's Struggle for Healing and Change) takes readers beyond the courtroom and execution chambers to explore how capital defense attorneys cope when they can't save a client. Whereas a doctor might take comfort in knowing that it's up to biology whether a person lives or dies, that an individual's fate lies in the hands of a human construct, the justice system, can make a lost case and thus a lost life all the more difficult for these lawyers to accept. "Post-conviction defense attorneys enter the case to provide a final firewall of protection... to determine if the defendant received a constitutionally fair trial," often "under the pressure of a looming execution date." Most of the leading practitioners she interviewed for the book have lost multiple clients, but even though they realize, "intellectually, that the execution is not fault," emotional acceptance is elusive. The book is unexpectedly moving, as when an inmate consoles an attorney who has run out of options, and the author is especially adept at uncovering the ethical and professional nuances of these cases. Sheffer's sobering and intimate study will appeal to legal professionals as well as human rights advocates.